Book Report: Name The Baby

Name The Baby
by Mark Cirino

Found this book at Half Price books, in the clearance bin.

From the flap:
Name the Baby is the hilarious, heartbreaking rant of a young man whose girlfriend has just committed suicide in their New York City apartment. Burdened with guilt, sadness, and rage, he can't bear to stay in the apartment, so he grabs the gun his girlfriend turned on herself and heads out the door.
Embarking on a wild search for meaning and solace, he hits a blues bar first, gets kicked out, and continues on to a dance club where he dances the night away with a beautiful girl he'll never see again. He then visits his family in New Jersey, where he walks the family dog, takes mushrooms with his younger sister, and watches the local high school's performance of Romeo and Juliet. After the play, he boards a bus back to New York City and returns to his apartment, where he finds something that forces him to finally face up to his sadness and guilt.
Over the course of his three-day odyssey, he reflects with rousing originality on family, failed relationships, music, Shakespeare, dogs, cemeteries, and drugs. Conversational and intimate, he sweeps the reader away into his turbulent twenty-one-year-old world. Full of haunting surprises, unexpected warmth, and brutal honesty, Name the Baby is a raucous, soulful tale about the mysteries of life and love.

At page 38, I wanted to hurl this book across the room and call it a loss.
At page 39, I was in love.

This first-person story is so heavily saturated in dialect, just getting used to the sometimes-grating New York accent took some work. The words crowd each other amidst long, chunky paragraphs--not the type of book to read if you're tired or have ADD. The opening pages introduces the reader to a cocky, arrogant protagonist who tries to forget his troubles by drinking them away in night clubs. I could not feel any empathy, in fact, I was even turned off by him.
But after his night out, the protag decides to catch a bus home, and everything about the book got better: the accent fades, the protag shows vulnerability, the writing becomes more wistful and poetic.

Going home, somehow, is like defeat in the worst way. You don't go home; you retreat home. There's nothing, I mean nothing, glorious or victorious about visiting your parents at your old house.

The story procedes with a sense of familiarity and of strange comfort as the protag goes through the motions of normalcy, reflecting about events that are anything but.

And the images of the night turn familiar, and the stones on the street compramise their shapes, and the glory moon in the high heaven splits and scatters, and the stars in the sky are spread for all seasons. Is it selfish to think all those things are only there for you? Is it selfish to think that no one else is looking at the stars at that instant, and that they're just putting on a show for you, so you can have an inside joke, a secret, among just the two of you?And, of course, shortly, the phenomenal theater of the universe fades, and I imagine Leonia, with her grace of a diamond, until I showed on the scene and interrupted, stomping my Timberlands to the wrong rhythm, tripping her up in the process. Only way for me to look at it is that life got in the way of love, and death got in the way of life, restoring the love.

Cirino has a gift that was buried in this story under his own character. His writing in lyrical and dazzling and thoughtful, the story moving, the emotions real. There are many hints and questions sprinkled throughout, details fed out slowly but never completely, so that the end of the book resonates with perfect finality and yet, is not. Cirino brings the resolution to the surface, but it is up to the reader to make the grab.

Four out of five stars for permeating tone, insightful and revealing reflections, exposing the bleeding heart of a man who pretends not to have one, and for so cleverly leaving me hanging.