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.

March 1, 2017
A well-traveled writer contemplates the long, menacing shadow his mother has cast over his life.Jay, the narrator of this bile-infused family saga, is a little like Theroux (Deep South, 2015, etc.) himself, a late-middle-aged novelist and travel writer with Massachusetts roots. Jay is one of seven living children whose mother, as the story opens, has just been widowed. Every child has disappointed her in some regard, with the exception of a stillborn daughter: one is too fat, another married badly, another is a poor parent. Jay? He writes novels ("trash," mom says), is twice divorced, and shamed the family by getting a girl pregnant at 18. And, now living a 10-minute drive away, he's damned for either not visiting enough or upsetting her when he does arrive; siblings routinely call to chastise him for some misstep or other, and he suspects dear mother deliberately sabotaged a budding relationship. Is mom a monster, or is Jay projecting his own self-loathing upon her? Some of both, though the storytelling is too straightforward to suggest an unreliable narrator, and once Jay sneaks a peek at mom's finances he has genuine proof he's low on the pecking order. Theroux's writing is robust as ever, but this story is overly repetitive, filled with countless metaphorical comparisons of the family to uncivilized brutes ("a savage tribe that practiced endocannibalism, feeding on ourselves," goes one typical riff). And the dramas that surround mother as she ages past the century mark tend to be well-worn matters of money and property, along with slights real and perceived. That goes a long way toward suggesting that family life can be a death by a thousand cuts, but it makes for a long trek in a hefty novel. A sodden study of domestic resentment.

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March 15, 2017
In this novel-cum-memoirthe details of narrator JP's life align so closely with the author's that fans will find it impossible to read this purely as fictionTheroux depicts a late-career writer who has returned home to Cape Cod, where the siblings in his large family live in thrall to the Machiavellian manipulations of their aging mother. They feud, fight over money, and grow old while becoming weirdly infantilized as Mother, though brittle and ossified, remains stronger than them all. This is occasionally repetitive, and some readers may wish for greater understanding of what made Mother who she was, but it's as intense and searing a portrait of mother-as-monster as exists in literature. It's also an unstinting examination of the author-narrator's late-life downhill slide and, as the book progresses, provides insight into the way Mother made JP both a traveler and a writer by driving him away. A fascinating, minutely observed portrait of family as both dictatorship and closed society, Mother Land is richly written and will enthrall fans but, at 500-plus pages, may overwhelm the uninitiated. It's a good bookend to My Other Life (1996), in which Theroux also novelized his life, but with Paul Theroux as a character. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With first serial rights sold to The New Yorker, audiences will be primed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2016

Though the New Yorker excerpts have helped fans along, this new novel is a long time coming. At its heart is Mother, regarded as a paragon of virtue by the residents of her Cape Cod town and as a monster by her children--including hapless narrator JP, a successful writer whose work Mother hates. A lesson in the damage parents can wreak; with a 50,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2017

Theroux's title character is a recently widowed Cape Cod octogenarian and mother of seven surviving children, all of whom she manipulates and pits against one another with telephone-delivered gossip and selectively doled-out monetary gifts. Son JP, a writer, wryly reminisces about a childhood spent under her control and an adulthood trying to recover from the trauma while maintaining a relationship with his often fractured family. The siblings deal with Mother differently as individuals--some capitulate and coddle, while others ignore or oppose--but all are scarred by a woman seen by outsiders as a "salt of the earth" matriarch. The best-selling author of both fiction (The Mosquito Coast) and travel literature (The Great Railway Bazaar), Theroux turns his jaded gaze to his immediate family in this fictionalized memoir (or work of autobiographical fiction, if you prefer). The result is detailed, intricate, and dark, and like JP, readers may yearn to flee. Whether your scale of readerly judgment tips toward calling this vitriol or catharsis may ultimately determine your ability to make it through this weighty tale of unceasing maternal meanness. VERDICT Be selective when recommending this one. There is little balance and even less joy, but there is, sadly, some truth that many will recognize. [See Prepub Alert, 11/14/16.]--Jennifer B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll. Northeast

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.