Fiction
Note: Most of these are not appropriate for young readers.
"What did Cinderella's mother die of?," my daughter asked me, when she was 4. I myself had never troubled to think about this.
But I came to realize that, in stories for children, from fairy tales to adventures to Walt Disney musicals, the mothers' presence is
usually notable for its absence. Their deaths are required so that plots can unfold.
And yet, I have recently come across a few novels that consider thoughtfully the role(s) a mother may play in her daughter's future.
In the two grimmest, White Oleander and The Book of Ruth, the power of the mothers to destroy their daughters despite great
distance, time, and, in the case of White Oleander, despite tall prison walls, is absolute. The sorrows of mothers, say Janet Fitch and Jane Hamilton,
are visited on their daughters.
Unless and What To Keep convey more nuanced messages. In Unless, a mother is beside herself at her daughter's
transformation from promising college student into street person. Eventually, the mother reassures herself that not every activity
she undertakes is invested with deep meaning and that she is not responsible for every anguish that afflicts every member of her family.
In What To Keep, the daughter of a brilliant but flawed neurosurgeon learns to appreciate the imperfect life her mother
has helped her to lead.
Perhaps it is because the mothers in White Oleander and The Book of Ruth are so monstrous that we cannot forgive the mothers
for the torment they inflict on their daughters. We hold them responsible for failing to surmount their own troubles in order to better the
lives of their children and grandchildren, even when their daughters actively contribute to their own tragedies.
After reading these books, I sat my daughters down and said to them, "You are what you are. I have done my best by you. But what you
become is now entirely up to you."
-- Emily Berk
Some quotes from Unless
How can this be? How can a woman who has lost her daughter and is suffering acute separation anxiety be capable of writing a comic fantasy? ...
On winter days she often found herself in her kitchen looking out the window at the largest of the old and leafless oaks. But not quite leafless. One brown leaf, only one, remained. The wind blew and blew, but that particular little leaf refused to let go its grasp. There were two ways you could think about this leaf. Either it was exceptionally healthy and strong, or else it was somehow deformed and unable to engage the mechanism that allowed it to fall to the earth where all the normal leaves lay buried in snow. The unfallen leaf was an anomaly.
... I need to know I'm not alone in what I apprehend, this awful incompleteness that has been alive inside me all this time but whose name I don't dare say. I'm not ready to expose myself.
Does Danielle really get it? I thought she did, but now I'm not sure. ... How does she bear it? All the words she's written, all the years buried inside her. What does her shelf of books amount to, what force have these books had on the world?
How do you bear it? I wait for an answer, but none is forth coming. Tell me, tell me, give me an answer. Give me an idea that's as full of elegance and usefulness as the apple orchard behind my house, something from which I can take a little courage. She shrugs again. For a split second I interpret this as a shrug of surrender. But no. To my surprise, she breaks suddenly into a bright smile, her false teeth gleaming like tiles. And then, slowly, making a graceful arc in the air, she salutes me with her glass of tea.
from Unless by CAROL SHIELDS
Definitely worth reading, and you will need to read it TWICE (once to get the plot over
with, then again to savor the language)
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