TeaIt’s the last day of maternity leave, and an unnamed mother of two has decided to celebrate a “Yes Day” full of treats and good feelings. Of course it doesn’t go according to plan: behavior is lacking, misjudged and underappreciated; Good feelings are fleeting, quickly extinguished by worry, guilt, or humiliation. This familiar-sounding scenario is the simple but inspiring premise of Lisa Owens’s second novel of female-centered modernity, following her impressive first comic fiction, 2016’s Not Working.
Academic EN Kaplan once wrote that “Motherhood is the major emotional experience of my adult life” – certainly a relevant observation, and reason enough why some writers may shy away from the experience altogether. But when using it as narrative material, the aim is to present the chaotic but lonely planet of motherhood in something new, harnessing the energy of honesty and eccentricity to make a common, universal adventure singular and memorable.
The day begins at 5 a.m., when Felix is woken up by his younger brother Rudy and sends the “Three Musketeers” – the mother and her two boys – into the kitchen for a “special” breakfast. The father and husband, also unnamed, are at a health-tech conference in Barcelona, and remains a shadowy, stuffy presence throughout the novel, the focus of various “varyingly sized parcels of resentment”, including suspicions of adultery and gaslighting, depending on what his wife is experiencing at any given time. To the wider society – doctors, cashiers – she has a name: “Mother”, referred to during a difficult moment in a shop where Felix is in a violent rage, and later during the medical emergency that dominates the second half of the book. This broad, anonymous term of address is an example of the painfully precise realism achieved by Owens in her account, in which a woman’s identity is usurped by the immediate existential needs of her children; She becomes “a flat, rudimentary approximation of a person, lacking nuance or finesse”.
It is the people around “Mum” who embody the bold colors and textures of the novel’s precision. Her retired parents are cleverly drawn, also playful and obedient in distress, while the children themselves are full of life and fun, jumping off the page in their obvious impudence, and also in how much they are loved. Brutal moments of maternal beating, such as “the pedals of Felix’s bike brutally hitting his shins every few metres” as she pushes the buggy in the rain, run alongside the enduring observational description: the little boy’s equal capacity for anger and forgiveness, “a marshmallow of love in his puffy winter coat”. It’s not easy to get children right in novels, but when it’s done well they become a winning literary attraction.
As we follow the Three Musketeers through the trials of their day, there are occasions where the nuances of parenthood perhaps become too precise, too involved, and we are taken too deeply into logistics, such as the details of obtaining baby items from Gumtree and the exact contents of a fridge. This gives the natural disaster a bit of a slowing down effect, but it can also be argued, a feature of its realism: the slowing of time that motherhood can bring, the yawning length of a day that can in turn slow one’s thoughts to focus on the mundane and the mundane while the “active” world whizzes by. Owens writes of his character’s anticipation of going back to work, “His entire being is filled with guilt for all this,” but a significant part of him hungers to escape “a routine descent into a black hole of dead-eyed indifference”, to return to being a “suppressed, distorted, hollow creature.”
Amid comedic and visceral scenes of marital strife, casual texts, a mysterious tampon and breastfeeding on the toilet, serious issues are addressed about the modern woman’s practical and emotional reactions to “having it all”, and whether any real satisfaction can be found on that path. Is it better to focus on your children until they are of school age, or to work full-time with the help of nannies and nurseries, potentially producing more confident, resilient offspring? Is it possible to maintain a sense of self during the wonders and perils of the maternal rollercoaster, or are we irreversibly and forever changed, becoming just an outline, waiting to be refilled? These are eternal, ever-repeating questions, and Owens doesn’t attempt to answer them, merely pondering the heightened details of a singular, emotionally innumerable experience. Both serious and celebratory, this novel is a powerful contribution to the literature of living reproduction.
Diana Evans is the author of I want to talk to you: and other conversations And a house for alice.
