The dynamics of group parenting
PERFECT LITTLE WORLD Kevin Wilson Loot.co.za (R394) Ecco Press
REVIEWER: LISA ZEIDNER
A HIGH school senior who discovers herself pregnant with her art teacher’s baby doesn’t have a lot of options – especially if she’s poor, her mother’s dead, her father’s a cruel drunk, and the teacher, distraught about the threat of parenthood, hangs himself. But plucky Izzy Poole isn’t the type to let misfortune get her down. The heroine of Kevin Wilson’s fanciful second novel, Perfect Little World, meets her rescuer in the form of Dr Preston Grind. He invites her and her newborn to participate in a psychological experiment called the Infinite Family Project. Ten babies will be communally raised for 10 years in a $200 million (R2.6 billion) compound outside Nashville, Tennessee. It’s a high-tech Google campus-cumcandyland, complete with a gym, a library and brilliant-green indoor AstroTurf. The children and their parents are coddled and given every all-expenses-paid possibility for personal enrichment – from gourmet meals to therapy and college tuition – and, of course, lots of free babysitting.
What could wrong?
Wilson has had fun with screwy families before. The parents in his first novel, The Family Fang, used their two children as unwitting accomplices in a series of performance art that often put the children at risk.
Dr Grind has a similar lineage: His parents, a husbandand-wife psychology team, raised their son with a toughlove-style child-rearing technique they called the constant friction method, exposing him to danger and deprivation of ever-more-creative varieties.
The dowager bankrolling the Infinite Family Project grew up in an orphanage.
All of these characters experience a profound longing for a community more nurturing than the families that mistreated or abandoned them.
In both novels, Wilson aims for “a weird kind of postmodern fairy tale” – like an animated Edward Gorey cartoon, with a more realistic contemporary setting and a warmer, lighter touch.
Perfect Little World is at its most charming while exploring the dynamics of possibly go group parenting, with the project’s elaborate protocols for breast-feeding and nursery duty: “It felt like (Izzy) had ended a shift in a factory that had been imagined by Walt Disney, the bright colours and happy music overriding the weird fact that you were working on an assembly line that created superbabies.”
Dr Grind remains earnest while performing the comical Stanford marshmallow experiment, which measures how long children are willing to delay gratification when yummy treats are placed before them. (Wilson has done his child development homework – that experiment is real.)
The novel delights in the project’s Willy Wonka sense of antic chaos. (“The less she remembered about the experience of potty-training 10 kids at once, the better. It had been a kind of war zone.”)
Wilson also enjoys poking fun at the size of his cast of characters.
The novel is prefaced with a faux-genealogy chart tracing the relationships between Dr Grind, his three research assistants, the 10 babies, and their 19 parents (Izzy is the only single mother).
When Mr Tannenbaum, the proprietor of the Whole Hog restaurant where Izzy worked in high school, visits her at the compound, he laments: “I believe I need a notebook and a pencil to keep track of all these people.”
Readers may feel the same way, and have trouble feeling totally focused or invested, as the group threatens to fracture. Despite stray antipathies, marital spats and affairs – the predictable problems of cooping up strangers for years – very little real trouble or danger befalls the Infinite Family Project.
The children suffer from no health or behavioural problems, and the adults mostly manage to remain good citizens. (A big early transgression, requiring much sombre conversation, is a drunken game of spin-thebottle.)
So Perfect Little World isn’t terribly big on drama, especially since Izzy and kindly Dr Grind are obviously destined to be together as the co-stars of any romantic comedy.
Fans of the sharper irony in The Family Fang may find Wilson’s new novel a tad sappy.
For the most part, Wilson
Infinite Family Project with superbabies in a Willy Wonka sense of chaos
pulls off his sweet-and-tart tone. Izzy, who develops her talents as a chef over the course of the novel, delights in updating classical dishes.
“You want it to be surprising,” another chef advises her, “but still have the essential properties of the traditional thing that they love.” That sums up Wilson’s approach to fiction, as well.
Perfect Little World is an old-fashioned novel with a soupcon of unexpected spice. – The Washington Post