Lullabies for Little Criminals (2006)
by Heather O’Neill
Quercus, 373pp
A Short Review
In Lullabies for Little Criminals, Canadian author Heather O’Neill introduces to Baby, a twelve year old girl whom lives with her drug-addict father Jules, as they move between apartments, hotel rooms and rehabs in Montreal. As Baby’s relationship with her father fractures and he falls ill she is moved to children’s homes and juvenile detention centres, where she falls into a life of petty crime, then drug addiction and finally prostitution as she befriends and lives with a pimp named Alphonse. The world that Baby inhabits is a difficult one, full of the downtrodden, the drug addicted, the mentally ill and the sexually perverse. Though O’Neill’s story is a powerfully downbeat one that sometimes sucker punches you, there remains a magic to this story, full of magical imagery:
“[The apartment] had the same smell of wet clothes and pot that our last apartment had. It smelled as if a florist shop had caught on fire and all the flowers were burning.” (P.2)
Because of this, at times, O’Neill’s debut novel can seemingly become swollen and obtuse, a tad unrealistic. It seems to take away from the horror of Baby’s situation. However, Baby is our narrator, at some point after the events of this novel has taken place, so a certain allowance can be made here. Might this not be how Baby is choosing to remember events? To sugar-coat some of the nastier moments with a touch of light?
The main problem I have with O’Neill’s novel is the final chapter. After Alphone’s death from heroin, thereby freeing Baby from her duty as a child prostitute, she is reunited with her father, leaves Montreal with him to have a tearful reunion with long forgotten family members and a happily-ever-after (we presume) finale. This all seems to happen in the one day. I wonder if O’Neill has been hampered by the publishing need of giving this bleak tale a huge ray of sun at the end, for the fear that her novel would be otherwise unsuccessful. It does not seem that Baby would ever be able to escape the life into which she has sunk and drowned. In her short essay at the end of the Quercus edition of this novel, O’Neill talks about having a junkie friend when she was twelve and of living in the area of Montreal that this novel is set in – this is what provides the book with its sense of authenticity. The rest of it reads like an imagining of what could have happened to her if she had stayed.
Lullabies for Little Criminals was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction in 2008, coming after a string of Canadian awards, including winning Canada Reads in 2007. It deserves much of the praise showered upon it, and is a fine debut novel, that marks O’Neill out as a writer to watch if she can escape the downtrodden streets of Montreal where Baby should still be walking.
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