Review: Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage
Note: This review contains some mild spoilers. It’s next to impossible to critically examine the work like this review will without revealing plot details. If you’re at all interested in the book, I recommend reading it beforehand.
Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage put me very close to home. Though I mean that in the literal sense. It takes place in Pittsburgh, my hometown. I wasn’t aware of that going in to my read, so it was a bit of a shock when innocuous name-drops like Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, and Giant Eagle started to show.
Other than these tiny cultural touchstones (like businesses located in former churches, frequent mentions of walking up and down hills), these simple reminders of home that just won’t resonate with people that never lived in Western Pennsylvania, I couldn’t relate to Baby Teeth.
The novel tells the story of Hanna, a seven year old mute girl, and her father and mother. Family relationships and dynamics are at the forefront here. Hanna has an electra complex, and she hates her mother. She hates her mom so much that she’s decided to kill her so she has daddy all to herself.
Chapters alternate perspective between Hanna and her mother Suzette, in very close third person. Hanna’s chapters are full of childish imagination, and reveal the way she sees the world and others in it, with the diction to match. We also read her delusions and devotion to her doting father Alex. Meanwhile Suzette’s chapters showcase the hell Hanna is unleashing on her, without the machinations of Hanna’s perspective. And we also see that Suzette essentially no longer loves her daughter, and perhaps never loved her enough.
This isn’t The Omen, and Hanna is not our clear anti-Christ antagonist. Baby Teeth is like a Rorschach test of morality. Who is in the right? The murderous little girl that barks like a dog and attacks disabled children? Or the mom that is entirely emotionally dependent on her husband and wants their lives to return to their pre-Hanna state? In turn, Baby Teeth is exhausting, but by design. As Hanna pushes her parents to their brink, and Suzette is constantly breaking down, questioning herself, longing for the continuous love of her husband, all while dealing with the effects of a surgery for Crohn’s disease and the baggage from her own upbringing.
The opening half of Baby Teeth functions as a too-obvious allegory for postpartum depression, and I’m sure a case can be made that the whole book maintains that allegory. Although I think it abandons that idea when Hanna actively attempts murder, personally. The metaphor doesn’t quite last in my eyes. I’m also no postpartum expert.
While reading Baby Teeth I kept thinking about the nature of empathy, specifically characters in literature. By the end of the novel, I drew parallels to recently-read American Psycho’s narrator and resident serial killer Patrick Bateman. I realized I had more empathy for Patrick Bateman than I did for Hanna, a seven year old that is unable to speak. This probably says more about me than anything else, perhaps because I’m a single white man who hates children. But let’s put that aside for the moment.
Patrick Bateman is just about the worst human you could imagine. Virulently racist, homophobic, a sociopathic sadist, a rapist, stupidly wealthy, Donald Trump is his hero, and of course, a serial killer who mutilates his victims in horrific and occasionally cannibalistic fashion. Order is up to you. I’m glad to say that I’m about the polar opposite of Bateman, but at the same time when he says:
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
“a flood of reality. I get an odd feeling that this is a crucial moment in my life and I’m startled by the suddenness of what I guess passes for an epiphany. There is nothing of value I can offer her. For the first time I see Jean as uninhibited; she seems stronger, less controllable, wanting to take me into new and unfamiliar land–the dreaded uncertainty of a totally different world. I sense she wants to rearrange my life in a significant way–her eyes tell me this and though I see truth in them, I also know that one day, sometime very soon, she too will be locked in the rhythm of my insanity. All I have to do is keep silent about this and not bring it up–yet she weakens me, it’s almost as if she’s making the decision about who I am, and in my own stubborn, willful way I can admit to feeling a pang, something tightening inside, and before I can stop it I find myself almost dazzled and moved that I might have the capacity to accept, though not return, her love. I wonder if even now, right here in Nowheres, she can see the darkening clouds behind my eyes lifting. And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn’t and probably never will. This relationship will probably lead to nothing…this didn’t change anything. I imagine her smelling clean, like tea”
I can’t help but empathize with him, or perhaps at the very least pity him. I can’t do the same when Hanna is so singularly focused on inflicting pain on one of the two people who cares about her. Is Hanna less of a rounded character then?
Or maybe it comes down to the way these characters are written. American Psycho is a black comedy, an exaggeration, a clear satire. The novel is hilarious, but it’s intense gore is transgressive by design. On the other hand I had to check to make sure Baby Teeth wasn’t inspired by a real family. In one way it’s quite grounded in that sense where American Psycho can’t be at the very core.
I keep thinking about the idea of “humanity” and what it means when we say characters (or even real people) have “lost their humanity.” Even though we see him eat the rotting body parts of an escort, Patrick Bateman’s final dialogue leads me to believe there’s still a human somewhere in that character. You might spend an eternity searching, but I bet you find it eventually.
Yet this isn’t clearly isn’t a matter of total body count, because I’m not certain Hanna ever had humanity from the jump. I do think Suzette is a shitty parent, but she’s shitty in the way that every average parent is shitty. There’s a classification of shitty parents that aren’t abusive, generally try their best to not screw their kids up too much, but just aren’t perfect. There’s not much shitty parents can do, except recognize and be okay with the realization that most parents are shitty.
What I’m trying to say is that Suzette is probably a bad person, but she doesn’t deserve to be tormented and die at the hands of the child she brought into the world and cares for every single hour of every day. I just don’t have it in me to empathize with a matricidal child.
I think that when a character doesn’t recognize and empathize with others, they seal off (or at least make it very difficult) for the audience to empathize with them. Hanna’s sickly sweet chapters of diabolical plotting in near baby-talk crystallize this idea. In fact, if Baby Teeth didn’t give the reader her perspective at all, I think my feelings about Hanna and Suzette would be quite different.
