|
So much sometimes turns on the little, unnoticed events in our lives, and often the greatest dramas are played out among ordinary, "normal" people. But what is "normal" anyway, in a world where premature babies are put on exhibition at a fair alongside fire-breathers, fan dancers, and recreations of "The Streets of Paris?" Author Carrie Brown takes us to the Chicago World's Fair of 1933 to make these points and ask these questions in her third novel, THE HATBOX BABY, the title of which leads one to believe the book will be about a baby.
Well, it is about a baby, but the child only plays an active role in the very beginning and at the very end of the story. Between these two spaces, he is an unnamed linchpin --- in the background in his incubator but splendidly palpable --- around which all the characters revolve throughout the summer of 1933. And, by the end of that summer, no one is as they began: not Dr. Leo Hoffman; not the gorgeous fan dancer, Caroline Day (whose near-nude fan dance takes place daily in the space next to the Infantorium); and not Caroline's dwarf-like cousin, St. Louis Percy. All come together as a result of the arrival of the hatbox baby and all end up with a personal stake in its fragile but very special future.
On a sweltering June day in 1933, a young man arrives at the Chicago World's Fair carrying a cardboard hatbox containing the tiny body of his newborn son, who was born three months too early. The young man is looking for Dr. Leo Hoffman, renowned medical expert on premature babies and proprietor of one of the fair's most popular exhibits, the "Infantorium." Hoffman's exhibit is composed of premature infants displayed to a paying public, but he is no petty barker dealing in human misery. The money taken in from the exhibit goes back into the doctor's work with "preemies," and he has saved many little lives that otherwise would have been lost, all due to a simple accident of timing.
Following this little baby's birth, the neighbor who served as a midwife to the young man's wife tells him, "Take it to that doctor, the one at the fair. He's the only one can save it." So the young man takes his tiny son to Hoffman in a cardboard hatbox, having no idea of the chain of events this act will set into motion.
The novel evokes a misty, dreamlike quality, which contrasts sharply with the hard realities faced each day by Dr. Hoffman and his nurses and the raucous, semi-warped atmosphere of the carnival that surrounds them.
"The giant, elongated shadows of early morning fell around him. Passing through zebra stripes of light and dark, he saw fountains and monuments, tents and bivouacs, brightly colored facades and cool, dark passageways. Pausing at the intersection of two wide thoroughfares, he hesitated. A vague instinct prompted him to look up. There in the pale blue sky, between the towering canyon walls of the exposition's architectural monuments, a dirigible balanced lightly on a rack of cloud. Oh! It was a fantastic thing ..."
While freaks and oddities display themselves along the midway in Dr. Hoffman's tent, babies battle for breath and life, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. The fair's weird yet lyrical atmosphere blankets every event and every character protectively, giving the reader the feeling that there is no world outside this one.
Brown's poetic style and ease of language maintain a consciousness of the novel's backdrop, while not making it overly grotesque or obvious. The fair is a place where "normal" is redefined altogether from society's commonplace definition, becoming a relative concept. In the end, it's something that just doesn't matter, when greater things like love, personal transformation, and the fragility of dreams and life come into play. Rich with imagination and haunting in scope, THE HATBOX BABY will remain with the reader long after the midway lights have been extinguished and the Ferris wheel torn down.
--- Reviewed by Laura G. Carter (gcarter01@sprynet.com)
|
