Little Bits of Baby

When British TV show hostess Candida Thackeray asks Robin Maitland, her childhood pal and her husband Jake's former best friend, to godparent her baby, she rattles a chain of improbable but entertaining events. Robin, having suffered a breakdown, has subsequently spent nearly eight years with an oddball religious community off the English coast; he emerges for the christening to find his parents, Peter and Andrea, running a kindergarten. Subsequently, Peter visits Marcus, a man hospitalized with an unnamed terminal disease, and Andrea visits Faber, a painter and the father, by adoption, of Iras, a girl born without eyes. Faber turns out to have once been an intimate of the dying Marcus, Robin to be in love with Faber, and Jake to have caused Robin's psychosis. Although the interconnections are sometimes pat and all females, even the saintly Iras, are shown as hidden saboteurs, this newest black comedy by the author of The Aerodynamics of Pork tries for seriousness but remains essentially lightweight and zany. (May)