MOTHER FOR DINNER

SHALOM AUSLANDER Picador, 272pp, £16.99

This is a timely reminder that literature can still be daring, provocative and controversial

Richard Godwin in the Times reflected that all Shalom Auslander’s books end up being about mothers.

Mother for Dinner is the third that features a ‘narcissistic, death-fixated, fanatically religious matriarch who makes her children’s lives hell’. Auslander, reflected Godwin, ‘is like Monet, painting the same haystacks over and over again. He does one thing, but boy does he do it well.’

In Mother for Dinner, Seventh Selzer, a publisher’s reader in New York, is, wrote Sam Leith in the

Guardian, ‘weary of the cynically pious turn in his industry towards foregrounding marginal voices’. For Seventh ‘has a hyphenated-identity of his own: he’s Can-am, or Cannibal American’. And now he must visit the deathbed of his monstrous mother Mudd who is fattening herself up for the funerary Can-am ritual to which her children must submit: eating her.

Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman was rapturous: ‘a timely reminder that literature can still be daring, provocative and controversial, and I read it while gagging with both laughter and nausea.’ And Leith spotted a prevailing Auslander theme – ‘the intolerable weight of history, of its deadening solemnity, and the individual’s rage to throw it off’. He concluded: ‘His resolution is of such life-affirming sweetness that you could almost call it sentimental.’ As Kelly put it: ‘This is a work of genius. It’s not for the faint-hearted, but the faint-hearted most of all should have to read it.’