NPR review
of
MotherKind
Intro: Writer Jayne Anne Phillips new novel is called MotherKind (pronounced kind as in generous). It's set in a Massachusetts suburb close to Boston and gives us one year in the life of a new mother whose own mother is dying. Review follows.
As the book opens a pregnant poet from West Virginia named Kate Tateman is close to giving birth to the child of a local physician with whom she lives...in a house just outside of Boston frequently visited by his rowdy two boys from his first marriage. At the same time her mother, fatally ill with cancer, has come to spend her last months with Kate. Full house, oh, yes....And a prescription for sentimentality...except that in the hands of a writer as gifted as Jayne Anne Phillips, even the most commonplace care, such as when Kate changes the babys diaper, becomes lyrical... She touched his collarbone and the line along his shoulder, under his gown. His skin was like warm silk . . . She cleaned him with warm water, not alcohol wipes, and used a powder that contained no talc.The powder was as fine as rice flour and smelled as Kate thought rice fields might smell, in the sun, when the plants bloomed. . . . In counterpoint to this Kate must care for her mother, live with her memories of her last good visit to her rural home, and over the course of baby Alexanders first year of life deal with the inevitable progress of the older womans disease ... The weight of both maternity and daughter-hood eventually transforms Kates consciousness and soul, so that the most commonplace activities--washing her mothers soiled sheets and baby clothes and her own shirt, stained with breast milk--take on the aura of the sacred...As many a mother has before her, Kate at the washing machine sheds tears of joy and grief.You may, too, at the end of this beautiful and moving work of fiction that celebrates the profundity of ordinary life.
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