45 pages • 1 hour read
Heather O'NeillLullabies for Little Criminals
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5: “the devil in a track suit”
Chapter 1 Summary
Jules starts spending more time away from home, leaving Baby alone. Baby spends some of this alone time soaking up attention from their Russian landlady; Baby acknowledges the ridiculousness of “hanging out with an old woman, but that was the way it was. I’d started looking for adults to hang around with. They had more quality time for me and said sweet encouraging things and gave me gifts” (145).
Chapter 2 Summary
Baby craves adult attention, and she starts hanging out with a twenty-year-old man named Peaches. One day, he sits beside her on the stairs and tells her to call him Benjamin, and she knows that he likes her. He has a cousin named Alphonse whom everyone considers cool and attractive. He’s a pimp and has a lot of money.
Baby meets Zoe, who is Baby’s age but tries to look a lot older. One day, she gets Baby to smoke a joint, and she loves how it makes her feel spontaneous, daring, and carefree.
Chapter 3 Summary
When Jules is gone, Baby smokes a joint and puts on one of his suits. She goes outside and meets up with some neighborhood kids. She hears music and starts dancing, “rolling my hips around, spinning an invisible Hula-Hoop, just like a stripper” (154). She notices that Alphonse is staring at her from across the street. Later that day, she’s reading a comic book outside, and Peaches brings her a pair of white stockings as a gift from Alphonse because he thinks she’s “a hot tamale” (155).
Jules finds the stockings and correctly assumes that they came from a boy. He yells at her, calling her a whore, and he punches her.
Chapter 4 Summary
The next morning she has a black eye, and she decides to go down to the empty swimming pool to do her homework. Alphonse appears with a flower and tells her that she’s “the prettiest girl on this street” (158). He notices her black eye and tells her that she should trust him; he says she can stay with him whenever she wants.
Chapter 5 Summary
Baby becomes obsessed with Alphonse after that encounter, and she tries to run into him on purpose. One day, she and Alphonse are smoking a joint together on a bench when Leelee comes over. Leelee is a prostitute, and Alphonse is her pimp. Baby walks away to give them privacy, and when she comes back Alphonse and Leelee are making out. He tells her that he wants “that girl,” meaning he wants Baby (168).
She walks home high, and the landlady gives her a disgusted look.
Chapter 6 Summary
Jules and Baby share a brief bonding moment while listening to their favorite tape and sharing a drink, but the moment is quickly spoiled when Lester arrives. Baby tries to keep her dad’s attention, but he sends her outside to eat her dinner on a bench. Leelee sits down beside her and tells her how much Alphonse likes her. She also calls Baby a “little mouse” (172), which feels insulting because she considers herself to be wild. So she sticks her tongue out at Leelee and walks away.
Chapter 7 Summary
Baby is walking down the street, feeling sad about not being part of the community center anymore, when she runs into Alphonse. He invites her to see a movie with him. Afterwards, he buys them a beer and Baby feels drunk quickly. She enjoys it: “The booze made me feel alive. I felt like I was being kissed by every person who looked at me” (181). They stop in an alley and Alphonse kisses her. She feels like his mouth is too big, like she’s being swallowed. She considers this her first kiss, because it’s “the one that tells you what it feels like to be an adult and doesn’t let you be a child anymore” (182).
She goes home feeling dirty, wishing she could feel like a little kid again. Jules is home and has a table spread with gifts for her because the next day will be her thirteenth birthday. He tells her everything will be okay for them, but she doesn’t believe him despite wanting to.
Part 5 Analysis
In this section, Baby’s desire for connection leads her into the arms of the villain, Alphonse. With Jules nearly completely absent from her life, she seeks adult attention wherever she can get it, including the landlady and drug addicts on the street. None of these people fill her need quite like Alphonse—not by accident. Alphonse knows what he’s doing. He’s a pimp and is used to grooming young girls into doing what he wants. When he first meets Baby, he is aware that she doesn’t have a good relationship with her dad because she’s always on the streets. Her black eye is another indication to Alphonse that Baby is vulnerable to abusive male adults. He gains her trust by buying her gifts and complimenting her; but most of all, he gives her attention. These are all things she wished Jules would do, so at first, Alphonse is a father figure and fills that need in her. However, he quickly betrays this vision when he kisses her, revealing that he wants her sexually. Baby’s sense that she is being eaten by his adult-sized mouth metaphorically indicates that he is consuming her innocence. After the kiss, Baby is aware that she will never be the same. She feels dirty; she can’t be a kid anymore.
Besides Alphonse, drugs are another turning point for Baby in this section. She begins smoking pot regularly, and unlike the mushrooms, she likes the way the pot makes her feel. When she’s left alone at home by Jules, she smokes pot to take her mind off of being alone. When she smokes, she feels carefree, spontaneous, and happy. She also drinks alcohol for the first time, and drinking gives her the same feeling as being high. While she enjoys the feeling, she’s aware that people look at her differently. She walks down the street dancing, like high people do, and the landlady gives her a disgusted look. She wishes people would look at her sweetly like they did when she was a little kid, but at this point she doesn’t understand that they’re looking at her differently because of her lifestyle choices rather than because of her age.
