Lullabies for Little Criminals

reviewed by Bidisha

Welcome to the realm of lost children. O’Neill’s gritty, grieving novel uncovers a Montreal of unwanted kids who’re hustling all the time but determined, with kiddish life-force, to shine amidst their neighbourhood’s pawn shops and one-dollar cinema. Bright twelve year-old Baby lives with junkie loser dad Jules in a succession of dud apartments, kept going by her own intelligence and her innate, dignified sense of the love she deserves, but does not find, in the world. She trips on an icy street and 'splayed across the ground like a handful of change.”'That’s what these kids are, forgotten pennies.

It is through Baby’s eyes that we absorb this urban chronicle, a hymn to childhood and plaint for the saving gentleness of a dead mother’s touch. Behind Baby’s rueful, tough-talking loneliness we discern her instinct for happiness, her sensitivity and the sheer unjust shoddiness of her life. Her self-awareness is precisely what makes the novel painful. Baby’s child comrades are depicted as batty, brutalised survivors, betrayed by life and so stunned by the betrayal that they live in perpetual freefall, freaked by natural purity: 'Sometimes when you are standing still and it’s snowing, you think that you hear music.'

O’Neill’s gift is her ability to wrest constant wit and stylistic brilliance from a familiar fable of degradation. Her prose twangs with salty slyness: Baby’s father’s incessant coughing 'sounded like an umbrella being torn apart by the wind.' The set-up, which throws Heidi, Little Orphan Annie and Easy from Taxi Driver together, is defused by the specificity and realism of life on the street. There is a frightening authenticity about this milieu’s pathetic adults, creepy opportunists and unsafe, loveless venues: the foster homes, shoddy apartments, detention centres, a pimp’s cajoling embrace.

Heroically, Baby’s pain never congeals into hatred or madness. She is naturally civilised, able to transcend the unwanted slime of her situation with an artist’s sensibility. Even in a seedy hotel “there were paisleys on the wallpaper. They were like the made-up eyes of silent film stars.” Dead flies are 'keyholes that had left their doors.' It’s as though O’Neill believes in the opposite of original sin: original virtue, original grace. Baby’s sense of her own worth saves her even as she gains a terrible worldliness, until the very wind 'was a man with a lisp talking about people who had stabbed him in the back.' We see that behind the kids’ meaningless and damaging sexual transactions and jittery violence is an open desire to be noticed and loved innocently.

Lullabies for Little Criminals is much more, however, than a tear-soaked elegy, an anti-fairytale about the underage underclass. Baby is one example of many real millions, a promising, eager child shunted aside by an uncaring system that is disgusted, as one character sneers, by troubled children from broken homes. She yearns for grace but even when she picks a flower, 'as soon as I touched the branch, all the petals fell to the ground, as if someone had emptied a hole puncher.'

The book’s ending, at once miraculous and realistic, suggests a last-minute reprieve. It’s a final showing of faith, a hint that the universe can come good. But even though Baby might be saved, this is not a yarn about one plucky girl adrift in a sea of woe (as the cliché goes) but a testifying howl for all the children who receive less love than they deserve – for the parents who just don’t know how – and for the exploiters who step into the breach.