by JULIET WATERS

Earlier this year, Heather O’Neill wrote a short personal essay for The New York Times called “Almost Home.” In the early ’80s, O’Neill’s father often used to take her and her two sisters on a two-hour walk from their horrible, roach-infested NDG apartment to the lower Plateau. Back then “it was where the inexplicably poor lived: people whose fortunes had been changed by drugs, eccentricity, indifference and art.”

They hung out in St-Louis Square and sometimes in the grander, insanely cheap apartment of a family friend. Their father convinced the girls that they would one day have this apartment, but this never happened. Now, when O’Neill’s sister visits from San Francisco “she loves to talk about how we almost lived there, about how amazing and big and great it was and how entirely different our lives would have been. It might not have changed much of anything, but there were so many strangely beautiful things that it seemed possible that something magical would have happened. My sister and I go past there the way people visit their childhood homes where they had good memories. But we have no childhood home like that. So instead we go and stand outside a place where we almost lived.”

It’s hard after reading this essay not to see O’Neill’s first novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, as part reparative fantasy and part reparative nightmare. Baby, the 12-year-old narrator, will eventually make a home of sorts on rue Napoleon with Jules, her 26-year-old junkie father. Before they get there, however, the novel opens in front of another apartment on St-Laurent and Ste-Catherine.

It’s a scene that will strike a chord with anyone who’s ever been a drugged-out fan of the cult classic Withnail and I. Jules is Withnail in a fur hat, a long leather jacket and hipster boots with no treads. When we first meet him, he’s lost his grip on an icy Montreal sidewalk. It quickly becomes clear that Jules doesn’t have much of a grip on anything. Baby is “I,” half in love with a father who, when she was born, was only three years older than she is now.

Jules has been taking care of Baby, barely, since her mother’s mysterious disappearance. Why her mother isn’t there is less important than how Baby is surviving her absence, with a ton of imagination and some very poor decision making. Baby is resourceful, funny, extremely intelligent and desperate. Sometimes that desperation fuels her love of characters who don’t inspire love in anyone else: a budding sociopath who is wretchedly abused by his mother, a pimp who will become one of Baby’s first boyfriends, and Jules, who is negligent from the beginning but becomes increasingly abusive and paranoid as the novel unfolds.

But sometimes Baby’s love is remarkably authentic for someone who doesn’t seem to have received much of it in her life. The reader is kept guessing until the end where she gets this ability from. Hope and quirky magic fade and the reality of being a bohemian street kid intensifies—in and out of foster homes and detention centres, in and out of new apartments with her father and motel rooms with strangers. As both characters mature, somewhat, it becomes clearer that there is a genuine love between father and daughter, however mangled by circumstance and insanity. And there’s also Baby’s love of Montreal and its weird kaleidoscope of class and culture, where anything is indeed possible, and where this is not always such a good thing.

In a fall book season dominated by Montreal writers, it seems strange that this hypnotic novel hasn’t yet hit the radar in Canada. This may be because it was published out of New York instead of Toronto. But there’s no question it has the potential to become a cult classic, if not a bestseller. Like its charming, troubled narrator and its ever-changing city, its future is still, for now, an open book.

Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill,
Harper Perennial, pb, 352pp, $17.95