The Pumpkin Eater
Ratings1
Average rating3
15
Ratings1
Average rating3
The Pumpkin Eater is a surreal black comedy about the wages of adulthood and the pitfalls of parenthood. A nameless woman speaks, at first from the precarious perch of a therapist’s couch, and her smart, wry, confiding, immensely sympathetic voice immediately captures and holds our attention. She is the mother of a vast, swelling brood of children, also nameless, and the wife of a successful screenwriter, Jake Armitage. The Armitages live in the city, but they are building a great glass tower in the country in which to settle down and live happily ever after. But could that dream be nothing more than a sentimental delusion? At the edges of vision the spectral children come and go, while our heroine, alert to the countless gradations of depression and the innumerable forms of betrayal, tries to make sense of it all: doctors, husbands, movie stars, bodies, grocery lists, nursery rhymes, messes, aging parents, memories, dreams, and breakdowns. How to pull it all together? Perhaps you start by falling apart.
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Written in 1962 and semi-autobiographical, I have to give The Pumpkin Eater credit for a few things. It provides a pretty unique insight into the complexities of mental illness, marriage and the desire to find oneself. The protagonist Mrs. Armitage finds herself drifting through three marriages and an abundance of children before discovering her life has been enraptured by boredom and frustration, being slowly stifled by domesticity and colluding (sometimes quite happily, sometimes feeling she has no choice) in her own oppression. A affecting scene in Harrods where she has a nervous breakdown illustrates this perfectly.
However the book meanders and the last section of the book isn't as tightly written. It made me wish that Mortimer could have achieved the richness of a narrative like Mrs Bridge a book where it felt Connell perfectly captured what he was trying to say within 117 short vignettes. Apart from a few well done passages The Pumpkin Eater didn't have the emotional impact for me unfortunately.
