The
Mothers
by Keith Botsford
279 pages
ISBN: 1902881575
Toby Press, 2002 ($19.95)
 |
The
Toby Press |
Michal Meyer, Jerusalem Post, September 27, 2002
What made mom tick? If the greatest truths are to be found in fiction, what can one say about autobiography presented as fiction? In the hands of Keith Botsford, the particular and the general mix to produce a deeply personal book that is not only the story of a life but also a meditation on how parents—mothers in particular—continue to trouble their children long after their own death.
Botsford's thesis is that mothers (always with a capital M) are a destructive force. Despite this, the book ends up being a tribute to his mother and the women in his life. Botsford vividly paints his written portraits, and is unsparing of Jim Mount, his alter ego and the main character in his novel, while taking a mostly generous look at the women in his life who all, in the end, leave him.
All the women in Mount's life are escaping from something; his first wife Lou—truly awful parents; his second wife and true love, Maria—the confines of a narrow life; Natasha, his girlfriend—a dull husband; Francine, his third wife—a sense of nihilism and worthlessness. All had suffered at the hands of parents, generally mothers.
These are people who cannot exorcise parental demons. Lou takes her mother's death as the last in a line of personal insults. Francine, whose mother beat her terribly, spends the first weeks of her marriage leaving notes for Mount, telling him how worthless she really is.
Mount himself is escaping from his mother, who after being abandoned by her husband looks to her sons for love. He tumbles into marriage too young. Six children later Lou leaves and it doesn't take long before Mount falls in love again.
Natasha, the one who never married Mount, is the most vivid and perhaps interesting of the women. She is also the most self-aware, in the sense of what she's doing and why, although this does not protect her.
Botsford is painfully good at portraying the torment residing in people; especially his own when describing the decline and death of his youngest child or of his mother, his wives, a chance-met stranger. When Natasha looks back at her youth, "she'd look up with anguish—how had her body grown and her soul shrunk?—and then anyone could see the skull beneath the skin."
Already a grandfather, he agrees to marry his third wife, who is still in her twenties, after one meeting - proving insanity can strike a man at any age. Mount is in love with being married and it's impossible to avoid the thought that, perhaps, he doesn't really know the women in his life. For their part, the women find they cannot make Mount happy. He is too much for them.
As for the book's thesis, what happens to girls when they become Mothers? They simply grow up. The unpredictable shifts and destructiveness of the Mothers that Mount describes are the actions of women trying to keep themselves whole in a world trying to tear them apart.
Botsford keeps the pace going and the book is a well- balanced blend of action and reflection. In the enigmatic final chapter Mount measures his past and turns to a critical moment in his life for explanation. Following World War II, Mount was sent to Eastern Europe as a young military translator, dealing with the leftover dregs of war. He worked as an interrogator, interviewing those who denied all involvement in mass murder or said that they were merely following orders. His life briefly intersected with that of a young displaced person, dressed in rags and obsessively putting one foot in front of the other, walking aimlessly. No words were exchanged, but that meeting stayed with Mount; "if life is all repetition, one step after another until you come to the end, then death is something new."
But Mount's life is a denial of that nihilism. Despite everything, this is a strangely optimistic book, a book about people who make compromises with life to survive, but do, in the end, succeed in living.
The ending is hopeful. Peace and acceptance are at last in sight. "Henceforth I shall be as the mayfly, that lives but twenty-seven days, and considers that adequate for its needs." Wisdom is one of the advantages of old age.