I don’t know if Jonathan Baumbach is a good person. I do know that his character in “The Squid and the Whale” is one of the most convincing, horrifying, and fully realized portrayals of a kind of dad that I have ever seen. He confirms everything I would have thought about every contemporary writer who has more talent than success (at least in their own minds).
I also never knew if he was any good as a writer. His kind of work is the kind that is destined to fade away, and there are lots of writers working today whose work will also face the same kind of future.
Recently though, I found an imprint who started republishing his work and because they work with Scribd, I have access to it.
This book. This book is so good. It’s a hilarious kind of “novel” and though it’s fiction and a novel it feels much more like something else altogether. The premise here is a new father, an intellectual and storyteller, who is constantly distracted by his son who he refers to as “The Baby” as a hilarious and increasingly absurd set of interactions. He’s trying to write serious essays while the baby comes to interrupt him. So he allows himself to “listen” to the babble the baby chortles out and creates hilarious stories out of the nonsensical language of the baby. The stories play upon conventional storytelling tropes and become more and more absurd. And they are all hilarious. This is a really really funny and charming book, where an intelligent narrator gives over to his love for the ridiculous little creature who lives in his house.
(Photo: https://pen.org/pen-ten-jonathan-baumbach/)