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Baby Cat-Face
Barry Gifford
Harcourt hardback (USA), 171 pages
Review by Gerald Houghton (1995)

Another step closer to defining his own chaotic universe, Barry Gifford’s new novel follows his last, the frankly stunning Arise And Walk, back down to an overheated South.

Baby Cat-Face is a black woman – Esquerita Reyna – who takes it on the hoof after seeing a man brutally killed in a New Orleans bar. But the bus she takes is hijacked by the spectacularly named Daylight DuRapeau of a fundamentalist feminist ballet collective intent on forcing the passengers to watch their latest insect work. There is nothing left but for Baby to give it all away and join-up with Mother Bizco’s Temple of the Few Washed Pure by Her Blood.

But purity is purity, and her moment of weakness with the obese Waldo Orchid and his fondness for obscure coital verse leaves Baby pregnant. The baby is born, and when the baby is born she is left with little inheritance beyond the book her mother wrote: Great Women I Have Heard About But Never Met.

Believe it or not Baby Cat-Face is less frenetic than the spectacular patchwork of Arise and Walk. The novel leaps and hurdles all over, from the vaguely conventional to the plain outrageous – that gunpoint desert ballet, for one. Baby and her companions are rescued by none other than Sailor and Lula, soon to be the lovers-on-the-run of Gifford’s best novel, the sparky Wild At Heart, unjustly mauled, of course, by David Lynch’s movie.

Gifford writes with economy, placing a value on space and speed. Like a string of short stories pulled together for the sake of expediency, he can take the tale of Angel de la Cruz, or the remarkable Jewel Wasp – like one of the revenging women of that last book – and tighten clamps in just a few pages, a handful of well chosen phrases. Imagine (and the comparison is not invidious) what the late Raymond Carver might have done if he’d fallen into a genre instead of despair. Edward Hopper with guns and cool cars and even cooler women. Women dominate the humanity in the blackness of Gifford’s world. Men are largely lustful, crazed; his women lustfully, excitingly in control.

‛Be vigilant,’ Jewel Wasp said aloud, ‛because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom she may devour.’

‛This world is wild at heart,’ Lula had it in the book of the same name. Gifford quotes J.B.S. Haldane at the beginning of this: ‛The universe is queerer than we can suppose.’ Both stand as his manifesto. This is literature on adrenalin and speed. Baby Cat-Face is short, tight and thrilling.