MotherKind

Ever read a book where the ending was all but certain, and still find it interesting?

Such was the case with Mother Kind by Jayne Anne Phillips. Throughout the book, it was obvious that the mother character would pass away, yet the stories from Kate's past and the strengthening relationship between mother and daughter kept me as a reader coming back. Themes of growth, re-birth, love, family, learning new horizons, etc. filled the text, but never took away from one another. Phillips' usual densely-written, beautifully descriptive prose lightened slightly in this novel (as compared to Shelter), which was a welcome change.

This is the first of Phillips' books not set in a fictional small town in West Virginia (at least that I have read) and the first, again so far as I know, that is set in a ‘real' place. (Obviously, such a claim does not include her short fiction.) Though Phillips has actually lived in New England for a number of years, she excelled when re-counting the stories of the main character's childhood in rural West Virginia as opposed to the character's travels in India or her life in Boston. Place runs deep in us all - a sort of feeling whereby ‘home' is never taken away, only strengthened - and Phillips' inability to create such a strong connection to the Bostonian setting of the novel was one of the chief detractors in this book for me. I have always admired Jayne Anne's ability to make an urgent connection to the setting of her novels. This one was missing that, and it left the text dry in some places.

In summary, I can't say that I didn't like the book, but there is nothing about it that made me love it. Upon finishing, I'm not sure I can really even comment on what happened; the story could have just as easily been a journal entry written by any new mother in Boston. To make such an ‘ordinary' novel remotely interesting is a commendable feat, but the connection of the family bonds in Mother Kind does not hold up against the dissolution of those bonds so eloquently contained in the pages of Phillips' Machine Dreams. In fact, Shelter and Mother Kind feel like attempts by Phillips to regain the magic of Machine Dreams...oh so close, but still a few feet to go.