December 30, 2009
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer
I love a novel with a house at its centre, as its core. To the Lighthouse, most books by L.M. Montgomery, Rebecca, Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House, and I mean all that. I love a novel in which the house is the main character, and the rest is just rearrangement of the furniture, and how the house is the constant through history and time, changing and unchanging. The present, the future, and the past.
The house in Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room (shortlisted for the 2009 Man-Booker Prize) is Landauer House, built on the eve of the 1930s for wealthy newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer. Set on a hillside overlooking the fictional Czech city of Mesto, Landauer House (which has a real-life precedent; see here) is a stark, modern building without adornment. Designed by an architect who doesn’t call himself one: “‘I am a poet of space and form. Of light… Architects are people who build walls and floors and roofs. I capture and enclose the space within.'”
To the Landauer’s, and to everyone, their house represents modernity, which seems to be synonymous with “the future”. In the newly formed Czechoslovakia, with the old order overthrown, to believe that now is the future is not entirely naive. Now is a time of idealism realized, when people live in glass houses, entirely trusting of peace, and live their lives in the open, with nothing to hide. In such an era of freedom and inhibition, the Landauers’ marriage bonds begin to unravel early on. Viktor begins an affair with a common seamstress he meets on the streets of Vienna, Liesel’s passionate relationship with her best friend Hana grows deeper. In the Glass Room of their house, overlooking the city, these two live a new kind of ordinary life that is without precedent.
History is the culmination of such quotidian details, however, and history eventually arrives to show how precarious their peace has all along been. Viktor Landauer, who is Jewish, pays close attention to political events unfolding in Germany and Austria, and though Liesel has protested that these events have nothing to do with them, Viktor is proven right when the Germans invade Czechoslovakia in 1939. However he’s been squirreling money away to Swiss bank accounts and he and his family escape just in time, but they leave Landauer House behind, of course. And so the house continues through history without them to the present day and a satisfying (perhaps too much so?) epilogue.
The story loses some momentum once the Landauers and their associates have parted from it, but the house as an achor is compelling enough. The house is abandoned, used as a labratory by Nazi scientists, and then as a physiotherapy clinic during the 1960s and the Velvet Revolution (and here it begins to read like a Milan Kundera novel, but maybe I’d think that about any narrative containing a Tomas).
The prose is devourable, with smart dialogue, and interesting in that English is used to stand for a hodgepodge of languages and dialects spoken in that part of Europe at that time. Mawer is able to bend English to differentiate between these different ways of speaking, and apart from some conspicuous Britishisms, this is effective. (Or maybe it was only conspicuous because I don’t speak British-English myself, but a few “bloodys” and “jolly-well”ish lines read a bit oddly for people who were supposed to be speaking Czech or German.)
I had reservations as I read this book– initially, its characters seem all too conscious of their places in history. Of course, the personal is political, but never once did the Landauers or their friends have a dinner party conversation that didn’t have massive implications. I sincerely doubt that anyone has ever uttered a line like, “Viktor, you are losing your nerve. It was you who wanted a house for the future and now you seem to hanker after the solid ideas of the past.” There is no subtlety as to these characters’ places in time (and let us just say that James Wood would hate this book). There is also a scene that eroticizes breastfeeding, which I’ve never seen before, and I just couldn’t buy it. But maybe that’s just me…
As I read the book, however, I gave up the reservations. Yes, its characters stood for too much, but that’s why they’re characters and not people, and this is a story after all. A story that sweeps, and it did it to me, and so I was enthralled by all its twists and turns and coincidences as I followed the Landauers through the years, through History:
“The coincidence might seem some kind of predestination but he knows that it is not so– it is pure caprice. You can call it malicious if you like but in fact it is neutral. Things just happen. One country occupies another; people flee, scatter across the countryside, some here, some there, like thrown dice… What was one chance in a million suddenly becomes a certainty. Because it has happened.”
December 21, 2009
On The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Though I suspect my aversion to all things science-fiction/ fantasy might be genetic, I can also trace it to having to watch a cartoon version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe during one rainy indoor recess back in grade one. That witch, the way one character spoke about “strangers in these woods”, what a strangely terrifying thing is whatever is “turkish delight”, and then when they cut the lion’s mane off! I remember it all vividly, and with such a frisson of horror (and don’t even get me started on the indoor recess where we watched The Neverending Story and the horse drowning in the quicksand).
I’ve had a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe sitting on my shelf for a while now, and this weekend I finally got around to reading it. Because it’s a children’s classic, and you can’t judge a book based upon a cartoon adaptation you watched when you were six (as the adage goes). And I can see why I was creeped out all those years ago, but I did enjoy it and will pass it along to Harriet to read when she is bigger. Christian allegory or not, it was an absorbing story, I loved the role of the Professor who confirms that Narnia is not just the children’s fantasy, the obtrusive narrator, the complicating nature of Edmund’s treachery, connections to Lewis Carroll and Wonderland, and idea of a world where it is always winter and never Christmas (which sounds a little like February).
It was an absorbing story indeed. If I were ever to give advice on how to start a novel, I’d advise a writer to have a character discover a secret world (“ok, I’m intrigued), explore it, and very quickly return back and then discover the world’s portal has shut (“ok, I’m reading this book to the end now just to figure out what this is all about”). It’s a double-bait, and it’s excellent.
I’m also now thinking much about book titles that are itemized lists of what the book contains. There are plenty with one item, many with two, but how many others with three items? (Off the top of my head, I can only think of an old YA book called Maudie, Me and the Dirty Book.) Such a title would hardly be inspired, would it? Though alliteration certainly works in its favour here.
I don’t imagine I’ll be reading further chronicles of Narnia, because not being a small child, I’ve come to these books much too late. But I’m glad I finally read this one, particularly in order to discover that (SPOILER ALERT) Aslan doesn’t die!! Or he is reincarnated, or… something. I don’t know how I missed that during Indoor Recess. Perhaps I was so traumatized by him being shorn of his mane that I missed the rest of the film? Nevertheless, I was much relieved by this happy ending.
December 14, 2009
Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo
I once wrote a story in response to Carol Shields’ story “Scenes” (from Various Miracles). The story was rather niftily structured as a “prose glosa” around four lines of Shields’ story, and I fell completely in love with it. I submitted it only once for publication, however, receiving a rejection remarking upon how Shields’ prose next to my prose only made clear that I was no Carol Shields. And that was sort of devastating, of course, though it was nothing I didn’t know already.
There is something about Carol Shields, though. How her death seems to have left a conversation hanging, unfinished in the air. How impossible it seems to consider her work, and that we’ll have no more of it. And this is the reason I’ve been so eager to get my mitts on anything that’s been published about her since she died– Eleanor Wachtel’s book Random Illuminations, Blanche Howard’s letters A Memoir of Friendship. To discover more about Shields is to gain deeper access to the work she left behind. This is also the reason why I so enjoyed using her work as a starting point for my own story. And all of this not just because we don’t want her literary life to be finished, but rather because her literature is such that it never will be– begging to be reread, picked apart and put back together, toyed with, read again, examined from a different angle, a few years down the line. With Carol Shields’ signature generosity, she’s created a legacy that refuses to be left alone.
Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo is a collection of reader responses to Shields and her work. Edited by Aritha van Herk and Conny Steenman-Marcusse and published throught the Association for Canadian Studies in the Netherlands, the responses range from critical takes on Shields’ work and her feminism, to fiction and poetry using her work as a springboard. Susan Swann writes from the point of view of Mary Swann regarding Shields as her creator; one of my favourite pieces “Moving On” by Charlotte Sturgess has one of Shields’ creations reporting to a rather inspired fictional bureaucracy called the Character Complaints Office; several writers created fictional amalgams of ideas presented in Shields’ incredible collection Various Miracles, Alex Ramon advances the story of Larry Weller. Typical for a writer for whom the domestic and professional were so closely linked, two of Shields’ daughter make appearences. Friends and associates have presented eulogies, some of which were first published in newspapers around the time of Shields’ death.
As with my little prose glosa, a response to Carol Shields is a long way from Carol Shields, but these “evocations and echoes” are still very effective– her spirit is evoked in these pieces, and her work opened wider by the echoes they’ve inspired. I particularly appreciated the European focus, writers and scholars who put a different spin on Shields than I’m used to, examining her outside of the Canadian Literature context. This curious scrapbook is a tribute to the engagingness of the work of Carol Shields, and a celebration of readers and reading.
November 30, 2009
Help Me, Jacques Cousteau by Gil Adamson
On the back of Gil Adamson’s success with The Outlander (a popular novel even before it became a serious contender for Canada Reads 2009), House of Anansi has republished her first work of fiction, Help Me, Jacques Cousteau (published in 2000 by The Porcupine’s Quill). Which is kind of strange, actually, seeing as Help Me, Jacques Cousteau has little in common with The Outlander— they’re siblings a decade apart, after all. Somehow, I just don’t see Nicholas Campbell getting behind this one, but the very good news is that I can. While The Outlander was not quite my cup of tea, I delighted in this story collection.
Essential to note, however, that Help Me, Jacques Cousteau is a linked story collection, which follows a character called Hazel from young childhood into her late teen years. And though episodic, these stories do come together to create a narrative arc that would satisfy a reader with a craving for a novel. A little bit like Emma Richler’s Sister Crazy, but not quite as leaden in the end, and with a dash of the spirit of Adrian Mole, what Help Me… has in common with The Outlander is prose constructed with a poet’s deft hand, attention to each sentence, and the paragraphs. Rhythm, cadence, alliteration, precise imagery and perfect word choice. Two sentences stuck together like these ones: “My mother is physically fantastic. She’s long, tall, elastic.”
But what Help Me… also has is wry humour, and a remarkable narrator in Hazel, who is blessed with remarkable powers of perception. Her voice is an anchor in this text of eccentric characters and bizarre goings-on, a voice unchanging as the world around her spirals out of control. This unchangingness works, however, because what does change are the things that Hazel perceives with her remarkable powers as she grows older– eventually, her parents’ fallibility, the strain in their marriage, that things fall apart, that no one (including herself) is quite who they’re supposed to be.
Adamson attributes to Hazel a peculiar deficiency of long-term memory which keeps the collection from being an exercise in nostalgia. Also notable, that Hazel is not the stereotypical misfit, in that she has friendships (however fraught, but this is high school) and boys willing to make out her (plenty of them actually, which is a novel plot device for a poetry-loving teen) so that we’re not taken down that familiar road that always ends with bulimia and somebody’s initials carved in a thigh.
So though its formula is tried and tested, Help Me… is infused with originality. Hazel’s family and her neighbours come to life through her eyes– her fantastic tall mother, strong enough to open any spaghetti jar; her brother and his solar curtains; her experience pet-sitting for a neighbour in a house of tropical fish; a grandfather who frequently turns up unexpectedly, and makes himself comfortable in a bath; a bevy of uncles and aunties; a bed full of cousins; a father who rewires the house when he’s anxious.
Help Me… begins with an epigraph from the Talking Heads’ song “Heaven”: “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” Hazel’s life, on the other hand, is a place where something always does, and though Hazel might desire a bit of a reprieve, at least we get the good fortune of reading all about it.
November 25, 2009
Leave me alone, I'm reading
I spent the weekend enjoying Maureen Corrigan’s book Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading. (My copy is an ARC I picked up at the Vic Book Sale, and may I say it makes me happy to know that an ARC can have its life extended?) Other than the fact that I’m into reading books about reading books (lately, Howards End is on the Landing and Shelf Discovery), before I picked it up, this book didn’t hold a ton of appeal to me. I’ve never listened to Corrigan’s reviews on Fresh Air, and her focus on detective fiction and Catholic martyr stories didn’t exactly turn me on, but she’s a wonderful writer and the whole book was engaging. Also, I realized I recognized the “Catholic martyr story” Karen and With Love From Karen by Marie Killilea, which I don’t think I ever read, but I remember from the paperback rack of every school library I ever browsed through.
Like most books about a reader’s relationship with books, the shape of the narrative was bizarrely (but pleasingly, I thought) random. Corrigan weaves the books of her life into the story of her life– how women’s “extreme-adventure” tales led her to her adopted daughter from China, how detective fiction helped her find her way out of the mire of academia, how she remembers her father through the WW2 history books he used to read. Also, how Maureen Corrigan finally found love, her quest for “work” in the novel, how a woman who reads for a living could be two generations away from a grandmother who never learned literacy. She also mentions Barbara Pym (whose books are proving hard to find used, by the way. Seems those that like her books also like to keep them).
As I read Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, I had to keep going online to put books on reserve at the library– in particular, and in transit to me as I write this (!), I am excited to read Gaudy Nights by Dorothy L. Sayers (which features a literary Harriet) and Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott. And Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym. After discovering Corrigan’s reviews online, I’m also looking forward to reading The Man in the Wooden Hat.
I just finished reading Lost Girls and Love Hotels by Catherine Hanrahan, which was too gritty for my English old-lady tastes (though I am Canadian and thirty. I am just not cool). From that experience, I realized that I get incredibly irritated reading about people spiralling toward rock bottom, and that is just my sensibility. The ending of the book, however, made it for me. Shocking, gross, and brilliant.
Now I am reading Cleopatra’s Sister, which is a novel by Penelope Lively, which means that I’m enraptured. (The book has a whiff of Moon Tiger about it, which has been my favourite Lively novel yet.)
November 23, 2009
Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle
Perhaps Lydia Peelle’s stories seem a bit old fashioned because most of them are so blatantly about something. So that I finish reading one, for example “Phantom Pain”, exclaiming that the story was amazing, and when I’m asked what it was about, I can say, “A one-legged taxidermist and a mountain lion on the loose.” And then, naturally, whoever I’ve been talking to wants to read the story now.
A bit of their old-fashionedness also comes from these stories’ deep investment in history, and a focus on farming and the land. “The Mule Killers” is three generations contained in one single tale, which navigates changes in farming life (mule killers are tractors). “Sweethearts of the Rodeo” looks less far back, an elegy-that-isn’t-an-elegy to a summer two girls on the cusp of adolescence spent working on a horse farm. “Kidding Season” takes place in the present day, but recounts a troubled young man’s experiences working on a goat farm. In “Shadow On A Weary Land”, a motley collection of characters (one of whom is apparently communing with the spirit of Jesse James) search for treasure buried by James’ brother on property outside of Nashville that is rapidly being developed into subdivisions.
Peelle’s agrarian history is no idyll, however. A seminal moment in the “Sweethearts of the Rodeo” summer involves the head of a dead pony in the jaws of a dog. The ending of “Kidding Season” is so sickeningly devastating, you’ll read the final paragraph again and again, willing it to say something different. The narrator of “Shadow On A Weary Land” is an octogenarian stroke victim/former drug addict, and the yarns he spins are a product of his past.
“Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing” reminded me of Birds of America Lorrie Moore. The stories “Phantom Pain” and “The Still Point” paint the underside of the present day in stunningly vivid terms. “This is Not a Love Story” chronicles an abusive relationship, displaying a wonderful treatment of the “life as a flowing river” metaphor, when that river is a man-made lake that had flooded a town, and how there’s nothing else to do but go around and around. This story in particular undercuts any notion of the good old days: “But wasn’t it worth it?’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you do it all over again?’/No, it wasn’t worth it, I told her. Not any of it./ Not one damn minute of it./Trust me.”
Peelle displays some self-awareness in “This is Not a Love Story”, her narrator a girl from Connecticut who in the early ’80s decides to become a photographer and “move to the South, where I had never been and which seemed so mysterious: raw and dangerous and full of relics of a long-gone era.” Peelle, a native of Boston, might have been similarly naive when she moved to the South, when she started writing about the South, but her stories show she’s since learned that the dangers are elsewhere, that the long-gone era is an illusion, and relics aren’t the things you might have chosen to last.
But writing about the South, she treads on a dangerous tradition, and thus come the comparisons of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. There are moments when it feels like she might be striving toward these voices, but on the whole I would posit that, as an outsider, Peelle comes at the South from a unique point of view, and hers are even less elegiac than these writers’ non-elegies for a long-gone era that never was and never went.
Where Peelle is like O’Connor, however, is in these moments in which she digs in her knife and twists it, and then you realize that the story you’ve been reading is darker, its people more awful, what has happened is even more tragic than you’ve ever imagined. I mentioned the end of “Kidding Season” already, and can’t get explicit or I’ll ruin it, but Peelle manages to synchronize her readers’ awareness of dawning horror with that of her protagonist in a way that is absolutely masterful. “Phantom Pain” has a similar impact. Everything is loaded.
I like this book for the lines it crosses– Peelle’s history isn’t dead and buried, but keeps coming up again year after year (and kudos for that wonderful asparagus image in “The Mule Killers”). Which is perhaps where she gets her lack of elegy from, for its hard to elegize something so close to the surface. Peelle’s stories mix urban life and farm life, they’re stories of home and of the road (and neither of these so much like the home and road you read in books). I like that if you picked up this book, and read it straight through, you’d have a hard time telling whether it was written by a woman or a man, and in that ambiguity, I think, Peelle’s writing takes on tremendous power.
This is a stunning collection that deserves to be read and celebrated, and I think the one only leads to the other.
November 19, 2009
Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the Experts
I suppose it’s not so different to those mothers that wish to see themselves in their children’s books, that I’ve been looking for me in my own reading. Or rather seeking representations of my experience since becoming a mother, not because I’m so entirely self-interested, but because the politics of motherhood are hard to understand. And motherhood is politicized, the whole of it, which is natural in the case of any group of people lacking power enough to properly go around.
Mothers are also a group of people desperately trying to tame chaos, which makes them perfect targets for authority of all kinds. And these authorities, I’ve noticed, do tend to be men and childless women, which is probably because these are the only people unlearned enough to think that babies could be a science. In Mother Knows Best: Talking Back To The “Experts” (published by York University’s Demeter Press, which also published Motherhood and Blogging: The Radical Art of the Mommy Blog), writers address this notion of “expertness”, and discuss the impact of these authorities on modern mothering.
And it is “mothering”, which the carefully benign “parenting” is usually an euphemism for anyway. Mothering a baby is scientific like the tide is, natural as anything, tied to the moon, but much more difficult to time by a clock. So that an expert will tell you that your breastfeeding pain is impossible, because Baby’s latch is fine, but feeding makes you want to die. Another will tell you that babies don’t get fevers whilst teething, even though you’ve had three children and it was the case for all of them. I read a book by a breastfeeding champion who said that babies do not require burping, that gulping does not cause gas, but he’s obviously never met my daughter. A baby’s poo (oh, of course I was going to talk about poo! Can you believe I waited until the third paragraph!), says the baby books, will always be yellow, but I’ve met mothers of the healthiest of babes with veritable rainbows. (And even worse, even the “experts” don’t agree with one another. This is very confusing. In making any major decisions about my child’s wellbeing, I’ve found the best solution so far is to throw the baby books out the window. They make a mighty thunk. What fun!)
All of this expertism serves to undermine a mother’s instinct and confidence, and the idea that there is just one way to be a baby or a mom is what pits women against one another so mercilessly. The conflict is apparent even in the anthology– in “Deconstructing Discourse: Breastfeeding, Intensive Mothering and the Moral Construction of Choice”, Stephanie Knaak questions studies that find any difference between breastfed and formula-fed babies. In the next article, Catherine Ma begins “If the Breast is Best, Why Are Breastfeeding Rates So Low?” with “The consensus on the benefits of breast milk is undisputed on both institutional and individual levels.”
So which is it? But in this anthology, that is not the point, which is instead to examine the politics of these ideas, which it does so effectively. And novelly as well, which is novel itself with arguments that have been rehashed over and over again. In “Making Decisions About Vaccines”, Rachel Casiday writes about those parents who “know” that the MMR vaccine was behind their child’s autism, just as that mother I mentioned before “knew” that fevers came with teething. Whether or not these parents are right is not the point either, and Casiday’s thesis is that this kind of parental “knowledge” has to be taken into account by authorities regardless. These parents have their own particular brand of expert knowledge, and the dismissal of their concerns by authorities is what leaves other parents torn between experts (for it was a scientific study, however now debunked, that made the autism/MMR link) and wary of having their own children vaccinated.
Mother Knows Best also examines breastfeeding and attachment parenting, and how these inform ideas of “the good mother”. How many feminists have embraced these practices, though they run so contrary to feminist politics. The fetisization of “the natural”, to justify breastfeeding and attachment parenting, though these ideas are out of place in the society in which we live (and in America, in particular, where maternity leave is pitiful). I have become quite accustomed, in the liberal circles in which I run, to turning my nose up at sleep training and Nestle, but it was interesting to interrogate these ideas, and question where they come from. To consider whether it might be egocentric to forego a career to be there for your child, and assume your presence will make up for whatever material goods the child will lack. How ultrasound imagery renders the fetus subject rather than object. How pregnancy guide advice compares to actual women’s experiences.
Though academic theorizing is odd to those of us outside the academy, I’ve found it quite useful to examine the politics of motherhood within this construct. Because discussions of motherhood get so personal, otherwise, and then defensive, mean and ridiculous. And all the experts who claim to come without agenda, but nobody is, so to take a step back is really worthwhile. An anthology like this is the closest thing to “the big picture” that I’ve been able to grasp yet of the big, big picture that motherhood is, and for that reason among many, I’m glad I read it.
November 16, 2009
What Boys Like by Amy Jones
I’d previously read Amy Jones’ “The Church of the Latter-Day Peaches” in The New Quarterly, and as I read the story again in Jones’ new collection, I was hoping that this time the story might be different. This time, could it possiby have an ending that wouldn’t break my heart? It didn’t, though I was so hopeful that a little trick with italics caught me once again, and I dared to be tripped up by the same trick that caught me before.
And how engaging is that, I ask? To read so far into a story, that it wraps itself around me, and then I get all wrapped up in it too, and the whole thing is an untenable knot?
What Boys Like is a lot like its cover. Though its tone is not upbeat, the colours are so vivid that you’d never find these stories bleak. And yes, the girls are often steeley-eyed, dangerous, tough as nails. The comic-strip touch suggesting a pop-cultural bent, and indeed, Jones’ characters listen to pop music, they play video games, sports is playing on TV, and references are tied up in zeitgeist.
Jones displays impressive range, writing in first, third and an impressively-executed second-person. Her characters are male and female, young and older than young, on the cusp, over the edge, or past the point of no return. They lead such desperate lives, and then there are these moments of grace– the pregnant lady who shares her peanut butter sandwich, the man who dares a young girl to be something, that Jenny goes home at all, Marty looking for bats in the garden, and all that love. The baby inside her. And when those who really get it had it coming anyway.
These are stories mostly of Halifax, in and around. In “The Church of the Latter-Day Peaches”, the first sentence tells the story: “There is nothing more unseemly than a pregnant widow at a funeral”. “Places to Drink Outside in Halifax” is the story of the first party of high school, drinking on Alexander Keith’s grave. In “An Army of One”, a woman attends the wedding of her male best friend (who she’s been sleeping with for years). “All We Will Ever Be” is two sides of a woman from the perspective of the man she’s just about to throw away and the other she’s just sinking her teeth into.
In each of these stories, premise is realized into someting vivid and whole. Amy Jones’ stories are easy to fall into, but complex enough that there is something new upon returning to them again and again.
November 6, 2009
The new Nick Hornby novel is good!
A long time ago, before you were born, dude, when I was still single, and life was rubbish… I thought that High Fidelity was a romantic comedy. Part of this was because I wanted to marry John Cusack, of course, but it was also wishful thinking– that loving insensitive men who didn’t love you back could possibly constitute romance or even comedy, because I was really eager to construct for myself a personal narrative arc.
And then I grew up, but actually, I’d gone off Nick Hornby before that, when I made the mistake of tramping through Europe with only How to be Good in my backpack. Idiotic, I know. And I haven’t read anything he’s written since, until his newest novel, Juliet, Naked. My interest was sparked by this piece at the Guardian books blog, that the new novel was “not as predictable as you think”. And I really, really loved it.
Partly because FINALLY, a popular fiction book that isn’t just a mess of plot and character dressed up as a novel!! I’ve really lately been longing for the likes of this. And Nick Hornby has grown up too. He knows exactly what he’s doing here, doesn’t have to try too hard, and the result is remarkably assured. Juliet, Naked is funny, engaging, interestingly intertextual, smart and current. It is decidedly a Nick Hornby novel, so if you never liked him before, don’t bother, but if you liked him back when he did what does best– well, he’s done it again.
And I’m now barrelling through my to-be-read shelf. Before that, I finished My Cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier, which I enjoyed very much, and am now about to start my first Barbara Pym with Excellent Women.
October 29, 2009
What Mothers Do
What Mothers Do by Naomi Stadlen is a very weird book. In one sense, it’s actually the most informative book on motherhood I’ve read yet. It’s almost a Scientist in the Crib for moms, decoding their behaviour to show that what goes on all day long is more profound than you’d ever suppose. That all of what a mother might spend her time doing during a day in which she “got nothing done” is full of significance, essential to her child’s development and therefore society at large via that next generation.
Stadlen posits that we lack the language to articulate what it is that mothers do. What mothers do badly, of course, we have all kinds of words for (overbearing, possessive, over-involved, negligent, narcissistic, heartless, cold, etc.), but no way to express anything between these two extremes. And it is this lack of vocabulary that undervalues a mother’s work, that she has no way to express what she has accomplished at the end of every day.
“People ask mothers: ‘Is he sleeping through the night yet?’ ‘Have you started him on solids yet?’ ‘Has he got any teeth?’ No one seems to ask: ‘Have you discovered what comforts him?’ Yet the ability to sleep through the night, or to digest solid food or to grow teeth, has little to do with mothering. Babies reach those milestones when they are mature enough, whereas being able to comfort depends on a mother’s ability.”
In her book, Stadlen points out what mothers’ do do. How their worlds are so completely shaken by the birth of their babies, cut off from matrilineal traditions that might have prepared girls for eventual motherhood. But how this “shaking up” opens up the mother to all the knowledge she will have to come by in order to get to know how to take care of her own specific baby. She expresses that to be a mother is to be “constantly interruptible”, which mothers begin to take for granted, which outsiders might find obnoxious or unhealthy, which is hard for a while not to resent. What mothers do as “comforters”, learning to soothe their babies through trial and error and after a while are able to do it without thinking. Tiredness that is absolutely uncurable. That it’s hard, terrible, and wonderful, and changes the way you relate to the world– to your partners, to your own mothers. Also to one another– Stadlen does a stunning job at pointing out the competitive and defensive dynamic in mothers’ conversations, the cycle of desperate talk which leads to a word of advice, and then mother recounts the reasons that advice won’t work which makes her sound more desperate and receive more advice and so it goes…
Stadlen claims to write without agenda, and I could read her book without throwing it out the window because her lack of agenda agreed with mine, but come on: “The literature on crying babies tends to focus on technique. However, responding to a crying baby involves more than technique. Underlying what a mother does is her philosophy of human nature… Her basic choice is either to see her baby as good, in which case she trusts him, or alternatively to see him as the product of evil human nature, or of original sin, which requires her to train him.” Parents who insist their children must sleep through the night, suggests Stadlen, are the product of a generation who were sleep-trained themselves so to be inflexible and now are unable to accommodate the basic needs of their young.
Unbelievable! As someone who is just too tired at 3:00 am to do anything but feed the baby whilst sleeping, I eat this stuff up with a spoon, but it’s terrible! And perhaps what I get for reading a book by a psychotherapist.
Her chapter on maternal love is also problematic. She cites recent literature challenging notions of maternal love, and new ideas of “maternal ambivalence”. Stadlen is troubled by assertions that all women actually experience these feelings, because she hasn’t found this in her years of working with new moms. She is troubled further by the idea of “maternal ambivalence” itself, but this (I believe) is because she understands it as women feeling hatred towards their babies. From what I’ve read on the subject (which is everything I can get my hands on), it’s far more complex than that– rather that whilst loving their babies, women can be amazingly unfulfilled as mothers, or rather not completely fulfilled, and yet the all-consuming nature of motherhood makes other ventures difficult. Also, that spending a day alone and exhausted, hormonally jacked up, being puked on and cried at, is utterly horrible, full stop.
Stadlen seems to think there is no end to what a mother’s comfort can provide. She also thinks that babies always cry for a reason, and that these maternally ambivalent women just couldn’t get past their own selves to figure out what that reason was and tend to it– I’m not convinced. Stadlen is right to counter the “bad mother” trend that is too ubiquitous in current writing about motherhood, but I don’t think all women are naturals when it comes to mothering. Part of this is because mothering is not valued in our society, as Stadlen sets out in her book and as she seeks to rectify with her explanation of mothers’ doings, reclaiming the art of it all.
So it’s a shame, because the women who’d probably most benefit from the fascinating and wonderful things she has to say about motherhood will find themselves attacked here.
