Parentis gone loco.(Big Babies)(Book review)

Michael Bywater Big Babies. Granta Books, 256 pages, 14.99 [pounds sterling]

It should've been a joke. There, in my subway car, alongside ads for personal injury lawyers and TOEFL classes--an admonition not to ride on the outside of the train! For those without the benefit of a TOEFL class, there was even a photo of a man taking what we may safely assume was his last trip.

No joke: Section 1050.9d of the MTA Rules of Conduct states that "no person may ride on the roof ... or on any other area outside any subway car or bus or other conveyance." I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Section 1050.9e prohibits standing stock-still in front of an oncoming train.

Such warnings are the nursery-murals of the nanny state; I might not have noticed this one had I not been reading Big Babies, a comical tantrum against cultural infantilization. Our regression is a Jack that cannot easily be put back in its Box. Still, we have to try. Threats foreign and domestic call for the adult resolve of the generation that fought (as my grandfather still calls it) the Big One. The danger is clear: When you stare for very long into the playpen, the playpen also stares into you.

Much of the Big Baby's ruin lies in toys. That includes music, movies, and books, handbags, tiny dogs, and perfume, sneakers, iMacs, and "graphic novels" Owning these things is fine, so far as it goes, but defining oneself by them is a rather poor substitute for being something. Bywater writes:

 
   It is one thing to reveal, to one's beloved, a 
   secret craving for Cheez Whizz or Bailey's Irish 
   Cream, another to have interchangeable supermarket 
   executives knowing it. The old saw that 
   "the innocent have nothing to hide" fails to 
   persuade us.... Having something to hide is 
   contingent not on guilt but on autonomy. 
   Choosing who knows what about us ... is a 
   sign ... that we are grown-up. 

The trouble is, no one wants to choose. Why should he? The child with the ...