MotherKind - Softcover

Phillips, Jayne Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099288737 ISBN 13: 9780099288732

Publisher: Vintage, 2001

Synopsis

Paperback. Pub Date: 2001 Pages: 304 in Publisher: Vintage Jayne Anne Phillips. 'illiant new novel explores the spiritual Statistics education at the heart of that fundamental transition: the child becoming the caretaker of the parent. In MOTHERKIND Kate - whose care for her terminally ill mother coincides with the birth of her first child in the early months of a young marriage - must. in a single year. come to terms with radiant beginnings and profound loss. Phillips tells Kate's story in a delicately layered narrative in which the daily details of life resonate with import and meaning. We enter the world of Kate's marriage. of babies and stepchildren. neighbours and friends. We watch as the tumult of Kate's everyday world is enveloped by the gradual vanishing of her mother. And as the woman who has been her best friend and mentor disappears. we see Kate deal with timeless...

About this title

Review:

Although we know from its first page that the protagonist's mother is dying of cancer, Jayne Anne Phillips' rich, involving novel is not a story of loss but of connection. Thirty-year-old Kate, an unmarried poet, has travelled home to tell her mother, Katherine, that she is expecting a child. A few months later, Katherine will be compelled to move into her daughter's chaotic suburban household.

The birth of Kate's baby approached and her mother consented to chemotherapy, consented to leaving home, consented to never going home again, where she'd lived all her life. She crossed all those lines in her wheelchair, without a whimper, moving down an airport walkway. In its cage, her little dog made a sound. "Hush" she said.

For the balance of MotherKind, the narrative focus shifts between this visit to the country--like time travel to a sepia-toned world of unpolluted streams, flowering meadows and rural gas stations--and the new life Kate is building with Matt, her unruly stepsons, and new-born Alexander, while Katherine slowly dies upstairs. As Phillips moves back and forth, she emphasises the continuity of human life, rather than individual endings or beginnings, and functions like thought itself: obsessively returning to a few prized details, puzzling over old mysteries, making occasional random discoveries or unexpected insights, like treasures turned up by a garden hoe. Recalling her sadness and admiration as she watched her mother rolling toward her in the airport wheelchair, Kate is struck by a realisation that "all lines of transit came together in a starry radiance too bright to observe", a magical realm where "manly cowboys glanced away from death and rode on through big-skyed plains and sage".

Though her third novel may contain all the emotional ingredients of a made-for-television movie, Phillips avoids tear jerking through the use of precisely observed details (the plastic medicine spoon for her mother's morphine, the Christmas songs that double as lullabies for little Alexander) and the absence of cliché. She has even side-stepped, at the end, the requisite death-bed scene, knowing that there is almost no way left to write about such moments without recourse to received language and images. MotherKind uncovers the mixed sources of maternal strength in love, habit and necessity. --Regina Marler

Review:

"Phillips's writing is distinctive, audacious and powerful" (Daily Telegraph)

"A brilliant writer, utterly original and with an astonishing range" (Ian McEwan)

"Jayne Anne Phillips combines extraordinary perception with extraordinary versatility and power" (Margaret Atwood)

"No number of books read or films seen can deaden one to the intimate act of art by which this wonderful young writer has penetrated the definitive experience of her generation" (Nadine Gordimer)

"Delicate compassion and hard-edged honesty... MotherKind is further proof of an extraordinary ability to reflect the texture of real life" (Washington Post Book World)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0099288737
• ISBN 13: 9780099288732
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304