Mother Land

March 13, 2017
The diminutive matriarch of a large Catholic family is the powerful center of Theroux’s engaging novel. Noted for including thinly disguised family and friends among the characters in his stories, Theroux creates an unsparing portrait of Mother, who has fostered malicious backbiting and animosity among her seven children. (The only “perfect” child was Angela, dead at birth, from whom Mother receives guidance in daily conversations.) The narrator, J.P. or Jay, is, like the author, the twice-divorced father of two sons with another son given up for adoption. A successful but financially struggling writer, he has tried to distance himself from his siblings, but the death of his elderly father has brought him back to what he calls Mother Land, the tyrannized clan on Cape Cod. Theroux’s gifts for narrative drive and using darkly humorous descriptive details propel the plot through decades of the fractious lives of middle-aged siblings ceaselessly engaged in insults and rivalry to gain their mother’s favor. Mother’s 90th birthday party is the hilarious essence of family dysfunction. One of the novel’s big surprises is an audacious ploy that revives an old scandal and mixes reality with fiction. The book includes text from a blistering review of a novel by the fictional Jay—which is in fact taken from a real-life review of Paul’s novel My Other Life by his brother Alexander Theroux. The effect is disorienting, if clever. As the pages turn, though, Theroux seems determined to describe every event during years of family discord, with the result that the novel is bloated with dramatic incident, and while each event provides a new spin on Mother’s outrageous manipulation, readers may want Jay to grow up and leave his toxic family long before the end.

Why did Jefferson Mays give the narrator of this fascinating, often repellent book an upper-crust accent when most members of his family talk like blue-collar Cape Cod? The answer is deep into the story, one line about his unpleasant siblings hating him for his "English" accent. (He lived in London for a time.) Everything about Mays's accomplished performance is chosen with care and executed masterfully though the book itself confounds. Seven elderly siblings stay stuck in childish combat decade after decade around their unjust, untrustworthy, manipulative, and horrifyingly long-lived mother. The fascinating question: Does the author intend you to hate everyone in this repetitive book, or does he think the protagonist is sympathetic because the family's pathology is brilliantly drawn? No idea. Over to you. B.G. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine