Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday November 4, 2010
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THE MONSTER WITHIN: The Hidden Side of Motherhood
Barbara Almond
Univ. of California
ISBN 978 0 520 26713 8
265 pages
$27.50
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books every Friday for The Washington Post
First, let me recommend this engrossing study to every new mother, old mother, good mother and bad mother. Sons, husbands, dads and lovers might profit from reading this, too. "The Monster Within" addresses what everybody knows, but almost nobody talks about: Even the best mothers among us will be or have been tormented from time to time by strong feelings of dread, fear, hatred and even revulsion at the whole process of motherhood, as well as experiencing downright murderous feelings toward our children.
Right now, in life as we know it, in America, in the early part of the 21st century, this really is one of the last taboos. There is a consensus that at last we have figured out how to parent perfectly, and the corollary to this belief is that people who don't parent perfectly -- especially moms -- are morally just one shade away from being serial killers. The worst thing you can call a woman who has given birth to a child is a bad mother. Those are fighting words. The very worst.
To be a bad mother these days you don't need to feed your child refined sugar, go back to work too soon or talk on the phone when the kid is crying. Like President Carter lusting in his heart, all you have to do is think, however fleetingly, that your baby will hurt you, that you could die in childbirth, that children will keep you from advancing in your profession, that your husband will get bored with you, that your child will grow up to be unloved and unpopular or, at the very least, that he will never stop nursing, never stop crying, never stop making demands. Once you've entertained any of those thoughts, or any one of a thousand others, you're living over there on the dark side, in the country of the damned. You've become inhuman, unnatural, unworthy, disgusting to the core.
But in "The Monster Within," Barbara Almond tells us that such maternal ambivalence is common in every culture. Perhaps only in this one (again, America, at this point in time, among upper- and upper-middle-class women) is the stigma of negative thoughts about parenting so heinous.
Of course, women have perfectly good reasons for being skittish about the burdens of motherhood. Almond quotes the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott: "The baby is a danger to (the mother's) body in pregnancy and at birth. He is ruthless, treats her as scum, an unpaid servant, a slave. He is suspicious, refuses her good food, and makes her doubt herself, but eats well with his aunt. After an awful morning with him she goes out, and he smiles at a stranger, who says: 'isn't he sweet!'"
Almond is a psychoanalyst, that is to say, a traditional Freudian. To illustrate her theses, Almond uses examples from literature (Euripides, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, etc.), as well as anonymized case histories from among her own clients, who turn out to be a self-selected and specific cohort with a marked Freudian twist: well-educated women who want to find out the secrets of their unconscious minds and have enough money to afford traditional psychoanalysis, which often demands four or more appointments a week, appointments not usually covered by insurance. Almond offers good reasons for this extensive treatment, but still, by its very nature, it's not for all of us. And many readers will object to much of the old-time Freudian doctrine, with its relentless emphasis on penis envy and Oedipal moments. Despite these caveats, Almond comes across as a sensible healer, a woman not at all hung up on ideology.
She does subscribe to three Freudian precepts, however: that unhappiness stems first from problematic events in our childhood, then from other traumatic events that occur later in life, and finally because of our imperfect memories and our strong wish to forget. We fall prey, she writes, to "the paradoxical capacity of the human mind to not know -- to keep unpleasant or frightening thoughts and fantasies out of consciousness." In this way, Almond suggests, what we don't know can hurt us, and it's the task of the analyst to help us find all that out.
From her own files, for instance, Almond recounts the story of a mother driven to distraction by the incivility and ungraciousness of her beautiful teenage daughter, who treated her mother's serious illness with scorn. It turned out the daughter was just acting in what she thought were her own best interests, and the mother was suffering from a moderate case of unconscious envy. Almond found a way to accommodate both women and both points of view, allowing them to keep their dignity. In another chapter, Almond uses "Anywhere but Here," Mona Simpson's tortured but insightful account of a daughter pushed to her wits' end by her mother's smothering behavior, to show us that we're not the only ones to be laid low by dazzlingly irrational behavior.
Women of every age and in every culture have been plagued by thoughts of wanting to harm -- or fears of being harmed by -- their children. But with very few exceptions, children make it through. We all have our stories of neglect or inattention; we all entertain the thought that our children will grow up to be less than perfect. Almond calms the reader, suggesting that we can only do our best and trust that our ambivalence is more than compensated for by our devotion and love. The stories here -- often touching and often very hopeful -- tend to bear out this optimistic hypothesis.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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TO THE END OF THE LAND
David Grossman. Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen
Knopf
ISBN 978 0 307 59297 2
576 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Donna Rifkind, a writer in Los Angeles
Most of Israel's modern wars appear in David Grossman's latest novel. Its long prologue takes place in 1967 during the Six Day War. Several later scenes occur during and after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The First Lebanon War in 1982 is here, as are the Palestinian intifadas. And although it doesn't occur in the book, the Second Lebanon War casts a ghostly shadow: In an afterword, Grossman writes that in 2006 his son Uri, an Armored Corps commander just shy of his 21st birthday, was killed with the other members of his tank crew in the final hours of that war, soon after the author had finished an early draft of this novel.
Because the book happens to be about an Israeli woman who flees her Jerusalem home to evade the military notifiers who, she is convinced, will come to inform her of her soldier son's death, Grossman's novel arrives stamped with its own art-meets-life tragedy. It's a situation ripe for sentimentalizing -- a temptation the author has resolutely resisted. After his family finished observing shiva, the traditional Jewish period of mourning, Grossman returned to his novel. As he writes in the afterword, its early incarnation remained more or less intact: "What changed, above all, was the echo of the reality in which the final draft was written."
The notion of literature as echo, as a re-voicing of reality, is useful for readers of this vast and boundary-pushing novel, which seeks to escape the entrenched ways of thinking about the persistent cycle of fear and death that Israelis call ha-matsav, or "the situation." Grossman's book aims to free itself from the congealed vocabulary of war, which the novel suggests has infused every aspect of Israeli life, in much the same way that the novel's heroine, Ora, hopes to escape notification of her son's death. (In Israel, the book's title is "A Woman Flees the News.") How does Grossman go about creating this echo of reality? Mostly through characterization, by creating beautifully and believably complex portraits of Ora and the men who march fitfully in and out of her life.
In a crisis of anxiety about her younger son, who's just re-enlisted during an emergency call-up after finishing his three years of compulsory service, Ora knows that running away from home is "a meager and pathetic sort of protest" that's no more likely to protect her child than any other form of magical thinking, yet she can't stop herself. Her prickly self-scrutiny is as many-sided and full of conflict as the country she both defends and criticizes. On one hand, she's "not one of those mothers who sends her sons to battle, not part of one of those military dynasties." And she remembers saying acidly to her husband as they gazed at her newborn younger son, "Here you are, my darling, I've made another soldier for the IDF."
But at the same time, when that baby (named Ofer) becomes a little boy and declares he no longer wants to be Jewish because "they always kill us and always hate us," Ora takes him to the Armored Corps installation at Latrun, where he's mollified by a vista of dozens of tanks. And she scorns activist groups like Mothers for Peace, finding "something defiant and annoying and unfair about them and the whole idea, coming to harass soldiers while they worked."
Although recently estranged from her husband and her elder son, Ora is not alone during her flight from home. She has dragged along a man called Avram, who's been a key figure in her life and her husband's for 30 years, beginning in 1967 during the Six Day War, when the three met as teenagers under quarantine for hepatitis. Since then, this trio has conducted an intense triangulated love affair, whose course was forever altered during their army service in the Yom Kippur War, when Avram was captured by the Egyptians and savagely tortured.
Though now a barely functioning ruin of the quicksilver artistic spirit he once was, Avram is as richly imagined a character as Ora. Over several weeks, as they hike through a large portion of the Israel Trail -- a series of footpaths that traverses the entire country from north to south -- they reconsider their personal histories, each eulogizing what was or was not. Ora recounts in charming detail her 20 miraculously unscathed years of family life, when she and her husband and boys were "like a little underground cell in the heart of the 'situation.'" Avram is mostly silent but no less eloquent, his rare smile "like the flicker of a candle in an old, dusty lantern."
Grossman invites us to look beneath the shrill headlines, beyond the roadblocks, within the clenched fist -- to see Israel's predicament not as "the situation" but as many situations, one for every person, here including not just Ora and Avram but also Ora's Palestinian driver, burdened with "the principled and complicated matter of being a gentle human being in this place, in these times." Even the landscape here is layered with complexity, its hiking trails alternatively scrubby and lush, with every inch marked, or so it seems, with monuments for the dead. Time has multiple dimensions here, too, with people yammering on cellphones as if they were "breathing tubes to the outside world," while pages later, a herd of sheep, their bells tinkling, seems as ancient as the Bible.
All these delicate echoes of reality join forces to power this novel, Grossman's most authoritative since his 1989 tour de force, "See Under: Love." (It's further enhanced by Jessica Cohen's brilliantly colloquial translation.) A desperate book that somehow does not cause despair, a book about death that stubbornly insists on life, "To the End of the Land," like all great literature, is an act of generosity, opening itself to every human possibility. As Grossman wrote in an essay in his 2008 collection, "Writing in the Dark," "Books are the place in the world where both the thing and the loss of it can co-exist."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF SPRING HEELED JACK
Mark Hodder
Pyr
ISBN 978 1 61614 240 7
373 pages
$16
Reviewed by Michael Dirda
Late October initiates the great reading season of the year. From now until Christmas, the evenings lengthen, the grass and the garden settle down for a long winter's nap, and the cool temperatures invite country walks and neighborhood strolls, followed by warming drinks. It's flannel-shirt and wool-blanket weather, the time for ghost stories, leisurely historical novels and swashbuckling tales of adventurous derring-do.
"The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack" neatly blends all three of those autumn book requirements. Set in 1861 London, it takes for its heroes Sir Richard Francis Burton -- the formidable 19th-century explorer, linguist and scholar -- and the young Algernon Charles Swinburne, the diminutive Pre-Raphaelite poet (and masochist). With a special commission as king's agents from his majesty King Albert, the two friends soon emerge as the era's dynamic crime-fighting duo, yet another version of Holmes and Watson, Batman and Robin, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker.
King Albert? Whatever happened to Queen Victoria? Alas, that young monarch was assassinated by a mysterious gunman in 1840. As a consequence, the 19th century and the British Empire are no longer quite as we remember them from high school history books. In fact, we've entered the fabulous and always entertaining realm of classic steampunk.
Just as much of today's horror fiction is vampire-driven, one major branch of modern fantasy -- in novels, "cosplay" (costume play), gaming and comics -- is obsessed with an alternate 19th century, one in which the inventions and mad scientists of Jules Verne, the tweedy science fiction of H.G. Wells and the gaslight romances of Arthur Conan Doyle have been mixed and remixed. In steampunk fiction, a count from Transylvania might win the hand of Queen Victoria (see Kim Newman's "Anno Dracula"); Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace actually do invent the computer (see William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's "The Difference Engine"); and heroes like Allan Quatermain and Captain Nemo combat Martian invaders (see Alan Moore's "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," Vol. 2). If you remember it, the cult science fictional television series "The Wild Wild West" clearly possessed a proto-steampunk feel. So does the alternate England of Philip Pullman's young-adult series "The Golden Compass" and its sequels. By stretching a bit, one can even add the recent vogue for mash-ups, in which classic fiction is reimagined with a horrifying twist: "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" or "Android Karenina."
In "The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack," gentlemen still wear top hats, carry sticks and visit their clubs; young ladies are expected to observe the Victorian proprieties; Limehouse is dirty and dangerous; and the London fog rolls in thicker than ever. But there are also flying rotorchairs, specially bred dogs who deliver the mail, mechanical litter-crabs to devour the street's refuse. Chimney sweeps ply their trade, but they belong to a strange guild headed by an unseen figure named the Beetle. Because of his facial treatments and life-extension surgery, the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, resembles a wax dummy from Madame Tussaud's. A young Irish newsboy, with a gift for quips and repartee, is named Oscar Wilde.
As the book opens, Richard Burton learns that his fellow explorer, former friend and current enemy John Hanning Speke has apparently attempted suicide. Having blown off half his head and been rushed to a hospital, Speke isn't expected to live -- but that night he is mysteriously spirited away. By whom? The hospital staff has been mesmerized and told to forget everything they have seen. But Burton soon realizes that there is some connection between Speke's abductors and the rumors about strangely predatory criminals, dressed in scarlet cloaks and hoods, who have been slashing throats and kidnapping young boys in the East End. When the artist Gustave Dore -- making drawings of London's underclass -- glimpses one, he sketches what appears to be a "loup-garou," a werewolf.
Even more unsettling, however, is the sudden reappearance of Spring Heeled Jack. Long held to be an urban myth, he is very real to the teenage girls whose clothes he tears away. Burton first glimpses him late at night, in an alley filled with a billowing white vapor: "The steam parted and from it sprang a bizarre apparition: a massively long-legged shape -- like a carnival stilt-walker -- a long, dark cloak flapping from its hunched shoulders, bolts of lightning crackling around its body and head. ... Was it human, this thing? Its head was large, black, and shiny, with an aura of blue flame crawling around it. Red eyes peered at him maliciously. White teeth shone in a lipless grin."
The creature addresses Burton and tells him "to stay out of it" and "stop organising forces against me! It's not what you're meant to be doing! Your destiny lies elsewhere. Do you understand?" In fact, Burton doesn't have the least inkling of what the creature is talking about. But most readers will already begin to guess that Spring Heeled Jack is ...
Well, I shouldn't say, should I?
As the action proceeds, Burton roams London in disguise -- as an old seaman or a Sikh -- and the dapper Swinburne goes undercover among the chimney sweeps, and the strange happenings increase. Could Spring Heeled Jack have some connection with the Libertine movement founded by Henry de la Poer Beresford, aka the Mad Marquess, or with the Technologists, a scientific league formed by the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the eugenicist Francis Galton, the medical genius Florence Nightingale and the great scientist Charles Darwin?
Mark Hodder's "The Strange Case of Spring Heeled Jack" is apparently the first of a series of adventures involving Burton and Swinburne. As fantasy, the novel doesn't really break new ground, given that the plot combines elements from notable works by Robert A. Heinlein, H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley, among others. But if you're looking for a cold night's entertainment, this high-spirited mix of fact and fancy will do quite nicely, quite nicely indeed.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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GREAT HOUSE
Nicole Krauss
Norton
ISBN 978 0 393 07998 2
289 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/roncharles. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
"Great House" seems to offer everything we loved about Nicole Krauss' previous novel five years ago: the pursuit of a lost object fraught with meaning, multiple narrators contributing pieces of a convoluted tale, and fractured visions from across a century punctuated by the Holocaust. All of that came together with gorgeous finesse in "The History of Love," a high-wire dance over pits of mawkishness and confusion.
A finalist for next month's National Book Award, "Great House" doesn't take so many risks -- none of those clever tricks that might have seemed gimmicky the second time around -- but it also never dazzles us, never sweeps us away. Its beauty is a heavy brocade of grief that won't let these characters soar.
One of the fundamental, often unmet challenges of reviewing novels is describing the plot without giving too much away. (See: "Atonement.") "Great House," though, presents an almost unique example of a book you'd enjoy more if someone spoiled the suspense first. The whole story seems built around the possession, the loss and the search for a giant wooden desk of 19 drawers -- one tantalizingly locked. Four main narrators, thousands of miles apart, deliver somber testimonies of their lives and their interactions with this errant piece of furniture.
How are these narrators related? Where did the desk come from, and what are its "hidden meanings"? Who has the key to that one locked drawer?
Krauss buries the answers to these mysteries in a thicket of scrambled testimonies; you can fill the margins of these pages with little clues and sketch out a web of transactions and relationships.
But -- spoiler alert -- don't bother.
The dispiriting punch line to this complicated novel is that these mysteries are the least interesting thing about it. The desk turns out to be rather incidental, and the obscure relationships among some of these characters are merely accidental. The riddles that soak up so much attention are distractions from the moving stories that these disparate narrators have to tell.
Nadia, for instance, acquired the desk from a young Chilean poet who died at the hands of Pinochet. A minor novelist in New York, she describes a lifetime of writerly seclusion that calcified into loneliness before she realized it was too late to change. Her two mournful chapters reflect on the horrible cost of that attitude. She realizes she was "someone who made use of the pain of others for her own ends, who, while others suffered, starved and were tormented, hid herself safely away and prided herself on her special perceptiveness and sensitivity to the symmetry buried below things, someone who needed little help to convince herself that her self-important project was serving the greater good."
On the other side of the world in Jerusalem, a widower delivers a bitter internal monologue to his long-absent son. It's a harsh, raw cry that bleeds recrimination and regret. The introspective boy he never understood has become the distant, impenetrable man he's now desperate to reach, but the two of them live in a "special glass silence," and "the moment for compassion is long past."
In England, another widower struggles to fathom the intimate secret his wife concealed from him for almost 50 years. Like Nadia, she was a writer, too, who defended her privacy and her time from all intrusions. "It seemed to me that my wife was built around a Bermuda Triangle," he says. "What hope did we really have of ever making sense of ourselves, let alone one another?"
And finally, a young woman named Isabel describes her bizarre involvement with two very, very close siblings who seem to have stepped from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." Cloistered in their enormous old mansion packed with ancient furniture and a grand piano hanging by ropes from the ceiling, this brother and sister draw Isabel deeper and deeper into their family's strange obsession. "I began to think of their talent, if one can call it that, as something borrowed from ghosts," she says.
Each of these roughly interlocking stories offers its own untreated pain and a gallery of haunting images. Sometimes the stories slide into the surreal, such as a night spent in what might be Heinrich Himmler's hideaway, a room filled with origami cranes, or an encased shark that serves as "a repository for human sadness." But despite these several narrators and their widely differing stories, a kind of tonal monotony lies across the novel, which is devoid of the charming humor that leavened "The History of Love." "Great House" remains unrelentingly serious, even dreary in its portrayal of "extreme solitude" coalescing into remorse. "My work would always win," Nadia says, "luring me back, opening its great black mouth and letting me slip in, sliding down and down, into the belly of the beast, how silent it was in there, how still."
"All my life it has shadowed me," says another character (it could be any of them), "a gnawing sense of doubt and the loathing that accompanied it, a special loathing I saved only for myself."
There's no denying the somber beauty of Krauss' prose, but in such a great house, one craves a wider spectrum of humanity.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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