.com Review Although we know from its first page that the protagonist's mother is dying of cancer, Jayne Anne Phillips's rich, involving novel is not a story of loss but of connection. Thirty-year-old Kate, an unmarried poet, has traveled 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 newborn Alexander, while Katherine slowly dies upstairs. As Phillips moves back and forth, she emphasizes 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 realization 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 Read more From Publishers Weekly A meticulous writer, Phillips has produced only four books to date, including the novels Machine Dreams and Shelter, in which she explored the paradoxes of existence from the points of view of youthful characters. This deeply felt, profoundly affecting novel, her best so far, exhibits a maturity of vision both keen and wistful. On a summer day, 30-year-old Kate Tateman flies to her Appalachian hometown to tell her mother, Katherine, that she is pregnant. Always a nonconformist, one who felt most in tune with herself during an itinerant year in Sri Lanka, India and Nepal, Kate is not yet married to the baby's father, Matthew, whose divorce is in progress. During the course of the following 18 months, we watch Kate give birth to a son, Tatie; care for Katherine--who has cancer, and decides to move in with Kate and Matt in Boston so she can live to see the baby--and serve as surrogate mother to Matthew's unruly sons, Sam, eight, and Josh, six, who resent her for destroying their home. The narrative captures the quotidian rhythms of domesticity, the stresses of childraising and of nursing the sick, creating a focused yet universal world. A progression of caregiving women help Kate through these life passages: a helper for newborns, various babysitters and the hospice nurses who arrive when Katherine becomes moribund. Phillips explores the intuitive bond between mothers and daughters with unforced grace. All the characters are articulate and introspective; they ponder the human condition, yet function in the daily sphere, with dialogue so easy and true it seems inevitable. While absorbed in the discomforts of childbearing, Kate ruminates about the continuum of time that sweeps her mother toward "the chasm of death"--even as little Tatie thrives and Sam and Josh gradually become integrated into their father's new household. Kate conjectures "that all lines of transit came together in a starry radiance too bright to observe." Amid the inexorable approach of death, the messy certitude and fecund abundance of human life resonate throughout this compassionate and spiritually nourishing novel. 50,000 first printing. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more See all Editorial Reviews
P**E
Voices Are Poorly Done but the Story is Welll Written
Most of the women in this audio sound like children and the children sound like Disney characters. It is a marvelous piece of writing but the audio leaves much to be desired.
K**E
Really struggled through this one
I had a really hard time with this book and almost gave up on it more than once. While I liked the characters and the scenario well enough, most of the book seemed repetitive and really dragged for me. I feel like the story could have been told in half the time and been better. The author does give us a pretty in depth look at the characters, but in the end, I didn't care much about them or their story.
L**Y
A MEDITATION ON DEATH AND BIRTH AND LIVING
I didn't find this novel to be the easiest thing to read that I've picked up in the last few months -- but, that being said, I felt that the beauty of the language compelled me to finish it, once I had begun.Jayne Anne Phillips has taken on a monumental task in writing this book. She has reduced the events and emotions of life-changing events -- the birth of a child, the agony and ecstasy of breastfeeding, and the at-home hospice care of a dying mother -- into words, onto the printed page. Her observations and meditations of these events are illuminating and moving. The seemingly everyday events in the lives of her characters take on a luminosity usually only bestowed by painters on their subjects. Things we take for granted -- a walk down the street to the market, a confidence shared with a friend, the touch of a mother's hand -- all take on an importance that is magnified. This magnification is not a falsification -- it is an opportunity for us to realize the importance of small things, an importance too often overlooked in our busy lives. This novel, then, becomes a study in priorities.I had a hard time getting past the first 100 pages or so -- and I think, in retrospect, I can attribute this to the author's pursuit of the 'mundane' details in everyday living. When I finally accustomed myself to the style she employed, I was able to relax more, take my time, and relish her creation.As far as other works I've read by Phillips, I must say that I enjoyed her novel SHELTER a bit more -- but her talent is genuine and accomplished, and I look forward to reading other works.Lastly, I have to say that this is a book that should be read by more male readers -- its subject (mother-daughter relations and the birth/breastfeeding experience) might tend to cause it to be classified as 'women's fiction', but that would be doing it a disservice. It would also cause it to be passed over by men who could use the lessons it teaches in order to allow them to better relate to their female counterparts. Understanding and empathy can go a long way in strengthening a relationship -- and we could all use a little more understanding, especially between the sexes.
S**A
A mixture---some characters enjoyable, good plot, odd style
Even just after reading this book, I am really mixed on how much I liked it! The basic plot premise was a very interesting one---dealing with a mother's dying in the same year you are dealing with being a mother for the first time. Some characters were well drawn, especially the young stepsons and the main character Kate. It's hard to have believable children in a good, but Jonah and Sam were really well done. The parts of the book that were written in a fairly straightforward well were also very good---what it is like to start out with nursing, how it feels to wake up over and over to care for a demanding baby, etc. However, the style of this book is quite odd and not one I like. Each chapter starts with a long flashback in italics--remembering a visit to Kate's mother when she was first diagnosed with cancer and when Kate was telling her she was pregnant. The parts of the story told in the present are told in a circular way---you never find out the whole story of an incident until it's told over and over, with a bit more revealed each time. Minor happenings in Kate's life (especially a few shopping trips) are described in minute detail---I think these parts are supposed to reveal more than is said on the surface, but for me sometimes they didn't. Also, the book has several minor characters that to me muddle the story and don't add much---the babysitter Amy, her sister Hannah, the neighbor Camille, several home health aides at the end---all these people have interesting stories, but there are just too many of them for me to care about all of them! All this being said, I did finish the book and cared about the ending, and I think the story was a good one to have told---as I am sure there are other's in Kate's situation, and in fact I had a friend who went through something very similar. I guess a potential reader would have to decide how much the distracting elements would bother them!
L**E
Nicely written.
Phillips' writing just flows easily from one chapter to the next. In this semi-autobiographical novel, Phillips illustrates the bond between a mother and daughter from birth to death, and the various ways in which all women become nurturers. Kate discovers she's pregnant shortly after her own mother, Katherine, is diagnosed with a serious illness. Katherine leaves her home in Pennsylvania and moves in with Kate and her boyfriend in Boston. Kate's life is turned upside down as she becomes her mother's caretaker, a stepmother to two boys, then gives birth to her own child and needs some care of her own. Through flashbacks, we meet all of the female caretakers that come in and out of the women's lives--the young woman who comes in to prepare meals until the new mother gets back on her feet, the babysitter, the next-door neighbor who offers her own brand of nurturing, and the visiting nurses who help her mother through the last painful days of her life. My only complaint is that the male characters are minor characters with no substance. Obviously, Phillips had her reasons for writing them that way, but as someone who was nursed back to health by a husband after a serious illness, it bugged me that all of the nurturers in the book are women. Aside from that, it was a good read.
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