Behind many great novels are some terrible parents
Is there any good fiction featuring excellent or even betterthanaverage parents? OK, once in a while we get an Atticus Finch or Marmee, but, by and large, negligent or even abusive parents are behind many more great stories.
Avni Doshi’s impressively assured first novel, “Burnt Sugar,” opens with this: “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.” And it’s no wonder. Tara, the mother at the center of the novel, escapes her arranged marriage and highly critical motherinlaw to join an ashram, where she becomes the guru’s lover and completely neglects Antara, her young daughter, to the extent that she “would disappear every day, dripping with milk, leaving me unfed.”
When a middleaged Tara gets earlyonset dementia, Antara, by now a married adult, takes her in, the irony being that she, who has received so little maternal care, becomes her mother’s caretaker. In an act that seems at least partly intentional, Tara sets fire to Antara’s guest room, destroying years of her daughter’s artwork.
It’s the mother’s selfishness and instability that makes Antara such a complex character, hypersensitive, anxious and filled with rage.
The absence of exemplary parental behavior is much more benign in Chang Rae Lee’s “My Year Abroad.” The protagonist, Tiller, a somewhat unmoored college student, has a mother who abandoned the family and a father who’s distant and checked out. These deficiencies are, in part, what cause Tiller to readily latch on to Pong, a charismatic and somewhat mysterious entrepreneur who takes him under his wing.
When Tiller joins Pong on a hedonistic, exhilarating business trip to Asia that has a very dark ending, his father is so clueless as to believe he’s in Western Europe on his junior year abroad. The lack of a mother and an effectively absent father also help explain Tiller’s own sweetly paternal attitude toward his partner’s precocious son.
Among literature’s other lessthanideal parents, who range from neglectful to insanely abusive, my thoughts turn first to everyone’s favorite “poor little rich girl,” Kay Thompson’s Eloise, who lives at the Plaza. Her absent mother, who’s pals with Coco Chanel and the owner of the Plaza, supplies Eloise and the everfabulous Nanny with all the resources they need they need for endless room service, lunch at the Palm Court and French lessons. Eloise’s father is never mentioned, although her mother “knows an ad man whatever that is,” and when her mother’s lawyer comes to visit, Eloise feeds him rubber chocolates.
Margaret White, Carrie’s mother in Stephen King’s first published horror novel, wins the UberHorrible Mother award hands down. An abusive and fanatically religious woman who finds everything sinful, especially when related to the human body or sex, Margaret is not exactly warm and nurturing when Carrie is surprised by her first menstrual period while at school. Who can forget Piper Laurie and Sissy Spacek in the 1976 film version of the book, in the scene in which Margaret drags a terrified Carrie into a closet that’s been turned into a nightmarish chapel, complete with candles, Bibles and a bloody crucifix?
Which brings us to Cathy Ames, the shedevil of “East of Eden” whom even John Steinbeck, her creator, called a “psychic monster” with a “malformed soul.” Cathy gets an early start destroying men by using her precocious sexuality to manipulate them. Before she leaves her childhood home, she burns it down, killing her parents, who are trapped inside.
After attempting and failing to abort her own pregnancy and shooting her husband, she commits another murder in order to take over as mistress of a whorehouse, the whole sorry mess only ending when (spoiler alert) she commits suicide with a lethal dose of morphine.
Whew! No wonder it took Steinbeck more than 600 pages to tell the story.
Margaret White, Carrie’s mother in Stephen King’s first published horror novel, wins the UberHorrible Mother award hands down.