Cynthia is 21, bored, and desperately waiting for something big to happen. Her striking fitness instructor, Anahera, is ready to throw in the towel on her job and marriage. Emptying Cynthia's father's bank account, they run away and buy “Baby,” an old boat docked in a beautiful bay, where Cynthia dreams they will live in a state of love. But when Gordon the German comes to live on board Baby, two’s company and three’s a crowd, especially when you’re a psychopath living on a tiny boat. Gordon soon becomes a rival for Anahera’s affections, and perhaps even worse than that, he dares to hold a mirror up to Cynthia and her narcissism.
“Cynthia, the simpering, scheming, covetous emotional sinkhole of Jochems’s debut novel, Baby, is alive and squirming; a memorable addition to the growing coteries of unapologetic antiheroines (dis)gracing the pages of contemporary fiction … There are echoes here of Megan Abbott, Emma Cline, Zoë Heller and Miranda July: writers drawn to the intricacies and ferocious possibilities of female friendship. There’s a dollop, too, of Tom Ripley and a dash of Lord of the Flies. What Jochems adds is a cloying grotesqueness. Baby is a novel of close-quarters living: of masticating mouths and human stink; of piss and vomit, sunburn and bruises, pimples and dandruff; of new fat expanding under the skin. A novel of bodies.” —The Guardian
“From page one, Baby is a dryly funny study of a young woman driven to shocking acts by what seems like boredom and lust alone, devoid of any semblance of a conscience … Come to Baby for a full-blown psychopath who makes you laugh out loud despite your horror.” —The Saturday Age
(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)
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