Edward St. Aubyn, Mother's Milk (2006)

Since I'm running a terrible backlog in this chronicle of my reading, I've had a fair bit of time to reflect on Mother's Milk before sitting down to write about it. And I think I like it better now than I did when I read it. Some books are like that for me, they swirl around and mature in the mind. I don't know if that happens a lot to other people. Certainly in music it's a common idea that you have to listen to something three or four times before you know if you really like it.

Mother's Milk is narrated by three different characters with two chapters of first-person apiece: first the eldest son of a family, who is four years old (I believe; one of downsides of writing with such a delay is that the book is back at the bibliotheque). He's a strange four year old in that there's absolutely no indication that he's four, except that the book tells you so. He's preternaturally precocious. In other kid's-voice books, the kid is often unusually smart or gifted but still a kid. If it was St. Aubyn's goal to achieve that kind of balance, he failed. The other two narrators are the mother and father of the nuclear family. They're very intellectually and wryly clever, with a feeling of superiority that is not exactly my favourite, but at least it fits since they're adults.

I don't usually like to say that a book has a theme, because it feels reductionist and assumptionist, but this book definitely has a theme. It is a consideration of the parents' relationships with their own parents, but really only the mothers. They each had what they consider to be highly dysfunctional childhoods, in the sense that both their mothers were too preoccupied with other matters to properly love and care for their children, and, when they became parents themselves, these two seem to have done it with a conscious mission to improve parenting and break the cycle of dysfunction, and both seem to have worried whether or not they would accomplish it. During the period the book is set in, the mother of the pair of little boys has gone over to the light side. She's a wholly, self-sacrificingly attentive mother. She does everything she can to make life perfect, especially for her younger son. The father, on the other hand, is falling apart. He's fighting a lot with his mother and mourning the loss of the mothering attentions of his wife, who now has no time for him because of the aforementioned wholeness of her attention to her baby. And his bitterness is infecting his precocious and perceptive elder son. To his credit, he realizes that he's doing this, and feels bad about it. I suppose both are partially succeeding in their attempts to break the they-fuck-you-up cycle, and partly, inevitably, fucking up in their turn.

It's a neatly organized book. It's an intelligent book. But it doesn't feel like a lovable book. Maybe for the very reason that it states its theme and makes its arguments too clearly. It made me reflect on the nature of parenthood and the history of families, and it had interesting insights into those questions, but they were essayistic insights rather than flowing fiction.