The School for Good Mothers

It's not everyday you finish a book that you don't really know what to do with. Overall, I enjoyed reading it. I don't regret having done so. But having finished it, do I walk away from it with some lingering feeling or impression? Not really.

This book is about a mother, Frida, who has “one very bad day”, and leaves her infant daughter alone at home for a few hours. Child protective services is called, the child is removed, and Frida is sent to a year-long reeducation pilot program for “bad mothers”. This school has much of the dystopian features that we associate with books like the “Handmaid's Tale” or “1984”, and much of the narrative is getting to know each of the women at this school and how they survive and what they endure, so on and so forth. Many similar books have been written since Atwood's novel–and that's not to diminish the quality of this book, but to lay the scene in order to ask if she really contributes something new.

This is Chan's debut novel. She's been a short story writer for some time, so she knows how to write. The book does not suffer many of the habits that more underdeveloped writers have in their first novels. However, something about it still feels like it is the first book written by the author. It's a little meandering, and its year-long timeline necessitates us being removed from the story for fairly large swaths of time, to be dropped back and zoomed in to a specific period of time with a brief summary of what happened between those moments. This lessens the horror that we are to feel about the nature of this school. Maybe if all of this were compacted within 6 months, it would have a greater sense of dread. But the pacing of the book is kind of odd, with some moments being unnecessarily drawn out and slow and others being so briefly summarized, that we start to feel like we don't in fact know these characters, or their lives, very well.

If there is one new thing that Chan brings to this general genre, it is some of the racial commentary. Chan herself is Asian, as is her protagonist here. I think Western mainstream audiences are still growing in their understanding of Asian Americans within the racial complexities of our society. The book skillfully shows us how the world is much more complex than simply all minorities being in tension with all white people, or Asians being lumped in with whites as “model minorities”. There are fascinating racial calibrations and navigations amongst the women at the school that are interesting to watch, even if nothing much happens or comes out of those tensions.

Additionally, I do appreciate how a lot of these characters are more fleshed out than in most debut novels. I especially appreciate that none of the characters were purely evil or righteous, with attempts at complexity and nuance being brought to different people's mindsets and actions. (But more on this in a minute.)

I do end the book with a sense of frustration, though. As the year progresses in the novel, I grew a growing interest in what was going to happen once her time at the school was over, but purely on an intellectual level. I don't think there was much about the text itself that was effectively ratcheting up the tension. Some of those latter months of the school program are really rushed through, almost as if Chan was on deadline and needed to finish the book and didn't quite know what to do with it.

But then, the ending comes. And it really falls flat. I'd read this whole book wondering if it was building up to something. And rather than ending with a bang, it does so with a whimper. It does attempt to make it interesting at the very end, but I don't think it works.

I am very comfortable with sad or unresolved endings in novels. I really love them, in fact. And I think that's what Chan is trying to do here. I think she's wanting to talk about how the system almost always wins, how there is not really any catharsis against injustice, and how no system and no person is completely good or completely bad.

And this ties back to my earlier statement about the characters being complex. I think Chan wants to stress the messiness of humans and systems. Not everything that this school does is horrifying. And many of the women at the school are women that we would not want to sympathize with or that we may think should be sent to a school like this. I appreciate that no one really has any sort of narrative arc–neither the systems nor the people.

From the beginning of the novel, I really liked Frida as a narrator, because she really was complex and on the spectrum between good and bad, we would probably think she was a little more on the selfish and narcissistic side. We actually do feel like she she is not well equipped or prepared to be a mother. She says thoughts that I'm sure every parent has, but never utters out loud. And yes, by the end, she wants to be a mother whereas there is some ambivalence in the beginning. But I cannot tell you how she got to that place. I don't actually think she has come to terms with any of the weaknesses or dysfunctions inside of her. Honestly, I am not rooting for her at the end.

I think throughout the novel, Frida really is screwed by the system unjustly, but I don't know that she's any different of a human coming out of this year-long hell than she went in. In fact, it seems like she may have collapsed in on herself and her narcissism all the more while there.

Maybe that is Chan's point: unjust systems, even if they are intended to help, will often make people worse than better, perhaps even to justify their own existence. But even if so, the contrast and the arc and the movement to that place is not well executed, in my opinion. This may be one of those books where inconsistency and a lack of vision and clarity is confused for complexity, nuance, and ambiguity. But I think there's a way to clearly demonstrate complexity, even if you want to do it with a “less is more” sensibility. I just don't think it was successful here.

I believe I read somewhere that this book has already been chosen to be made into a TV series. I'll probably watch it, and maybe they can flesh all of this out and create much more tension and depth. And I still am looking forward to Chan's later works. But though I mostly enjoyed the pros in this novel, I feel it was a bit thin and lacking depth which I feel Chan is capable of giving us. And that's a little frustrating. Or perhaps I am a bad reader. But I am learning to be good.