BABY BOY

An idyll of convicts' love in the American locker room tradition -- sentimental, inarticulate, chaste, macho. Boodie may not be top banana on the 60-man chain gang where he chunks rocks but he's the only family Baby Boy's got, as the latter discovers when his sentence is (unhappily) up, and he's forced out into a world that's hard on illiterates, let alone ex-jailbirds, and where his ex-wife can barely remember his name, let alone give him any affection. So he throws a crime to get caught in order to be sent back to the only home he's known: after all, in the pokey, there's companionship, three meals a day, plenty of work. . . . An amusing, well-written tale about the usually ignored lower-class apolitical white crook, full of fascinating lore about the games prisoners play inside their microcosmic worlds.