Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

A richly detailed, darkly hilarious novel of a family held together and torn apart by its magnificently narcissistic matriarch

  • Format: eBook
  • ISBN-13/ EAN: 9781328664105
  • ISBN-10: 1328664104
  • Pages: 528
  • Publication Date: 05/09/2017
  • Carton Quantity: 1
About the Book
About the Author
Excerpts
Reviews
  • About the Book
    “Theroux possesses a fabulously nasty sense of humor.” — Stephen King, New York Times Book Review 

      

    To those in her Cape Cod town, Mother is an exemplar of piety, frugality, and hard work. To her husband and seven children, she is a selfish, petty tyrant. She excels at playing her offspring against each other. Her favorite, Angela, died in childbirth; only Angela really understands her, she tells the others. The others include the officious lawyer, Fred; the uproarious professor, Floyd; a pair of inseparable sisters whose devotion to Mother has consumed their lives; and JP, the narrator, a successful writer whose work she disparages. As she lives well past the age of one hundred, her brood struggles with and among themselves to shed her viselike hold on them. 

                      Mother Land is a piercing portrait of how a parent’s narcissism impacts a family. While the particulars of his tale are unique, Paul Theroux encapsulates with acute clarity and wisdom a circumstance that is familiar to millions of readers. 

      

    “Paul Theroux ladles a steaming cup of dysfunctional-family chowder in Mother Land.” — Vanity Fair 

      

    “An engrossing, emotionally tangled and often merciless examination of family and self . . . Mother Land is a bittersweet, brutally frank family saga that offers enough redemption to make the journey worth it.” — Shelf Awareness

    Subjects

  • About the Author
  • Excerpts
    Part One 

     

    Mother of the Year

      

    Weather is memory. Even the wind matters. The slant of rain can serve as a nudge, so can a quality of light. You don’t need a calendar to remind you of personal crises. You smell them, you feel them on your skin, you taste them. If you go on living in the same place year after year the weather begins to take on meanings, it is weighted with omens, and the temperature, the sunlight, the trees and leaves, evoke emotions on every anniversary. The whole venerating world turns on this principle of weather-sniffing familiarity: all such pieties have their origin in a season, on a particular day. 

     

    That lovely morning in May we were summoned from our homes and told Father was ill. Mother ?— ?frugal even in emergencies ?— ?seldom called long-distance, so the implication of this expensive phone call was that Father was dying, that we were being gathered together for a deathwatch, but a peculiar ritual all our own. 

    You come from a family as from a distant land. Ours was an outlier with its own customs and cruelties. No one knew us, nor did we invite any interest, which is why I told myself that when the moment was right I would put my family ?— ?Mother Land in every sense ?— ?on the map. 

     

    There were eight of us children, and one of us was dead. Our parents were severe, from hard work and their fear of the destitution they had seen in the Great Depression. They seemed ancient to us, but as long as they were in our lives, no matter how doddering, we remained their much younger and unformed children ?— ?still children, still behaving like children, when Mother was a living fossil. In old age we embarked on our true, awful childhood ?— ?infantile fogies ruled by their triumphant mother. 

     

    The fact that two of us were writers was a nuisance to the others, and often an embarrassment, since writing had little value in the family’s estimation. Being a writer seemed to this rabble a conceited form of laziness. I was blamed for what I wrote. I doubt that my writing will figure much in this family story, except incidentally when it becomes a problem for the rest of them. My concern here is the life I lived, while I was still a flight risk, before I left home, when I was about eighteen, and the continuation of it after I returned to confront death and failure and confusion, forty years later ?— ?the beginning and the end; not the books of my life, but the bookends. 

     

    When I was very young my mother, all smiles, used to tell me the story of a man who was shortly to be hanged. As a last request he said, “I want to talk to my mother.” She was taken to the foot of the gallows, where her son stood handcuffed. “Come closer, Mother,” he said, and when she inclined her head he made as if to speak confidentially to her and bit into her ear. As she screamed in pain, the condemned man spat out a piece of her ear and said, “You are the reason I’m here, about to die!” 

     

    Telling the story, my mother always folded her hands in her lap and nodded in satisfaction. Was she telling me that I was luckier than that man, and that she was not that kind of mother? Or did she think I was too confident and unruly. I didn’t know why, though the story terrified me, because I often felt like that condemned man, someone who had to be punished, a child among unruly children, a potential ear biter. 

     

    Even sixty years later, that was how we behaved toward one another, too, childishly, with pettiness and envy. The taunting was endless, and years after, all these big stumbling teasers, bulking and bullying, late-middle-aged potbellied kids, balding, limping, belching with ailments and complaints, went on mocking each other, wagging their fat fingers. When we were older there was much more to mock. 

     

    Our childishness was so obvious that Floyd once said, “Who was that dreamy French philosopher who talked about the permanence of childhood: A motionless but enduring childhood, disguised as history. Nobody in this family has the slightest idea of his name! Is it Pecos Bill? Time is the arch-satirist! It was Gaston Bachelard.” 

     

    Each of us children had the same father ?— ?he was solid, though he was often ill. He had the nervous anxiety of a compulsive saver. Frugality was his obsession. He would take a stick of gum and tear it in half, because chewing a whole stick was a needless luxury. He saved string, saved rusty nails and screws in a jar, saved planks of wood, saved everything. To the end of his life he retained a great fondness for the town dump, for the treasures it held. Going to the dump was an outing, and it made him smile as he set off, as though headed to Filene’s Basement, certain to return with a bargain. He always took a barrel of trash, but he returned with half as much in possibly reusable items he’d found, scavenging on the heaps of smoking refuse surrounded by contending seagulls. The dump was also one of his meeting places ?— ?he had friends there; the other was church. A boyhood of poverty left him with something like a lingering illness he carried with him through his life and made him grateful to be alive. 

     

    Mother was unreadable and enigmatic, at times unintelligible, like a wrathful deity. Insecure in her power, she had an enduring and demanding cruelty that seemed to come from another century, another culture, and it was never satisfied. It made her a willful killjoy. Mother’s contradictions, her moods, her injustice, her disloyalty, and her unshakable favoritism made her different to every one of us; we each dealt with our own version of her, we each had a different mother, or translated her, as I am doing now, into our own particular idiom. Fred might read this book and say, “Who is this woman?” Franny or Rose might object. Hubby might growl, “You ree-tard.” Gilbert did not know the woman who raised me. But Floyd, the family’s other writer, had more than an inkling, and when we talked he might raise a fist and say, “The Furies! The betrayals! The cannibalism! It’s the House of Atreus!” 

     

    Mother’s stories and confidences varied according to which child she was talking to. I should have guessed this early on, because her habit was to see us one at a time. She encouraged us to visit her separately and hinted that she loved to be surprised with presents. But the phone call was her preferred medium of communication; it allowed for secretiveness and manipulation; she liked the surprise of a ring, the waywardness of conversation, the power of hanging up. In seven phone calls ?— ?needy people are chronic phoners ?— ?she would tell a different version of her day. 

     

    It might be Fred, the eldest, the only child she deferred to and respected. He was a lawyer, with a lawyer’s circumspection and the ability to hold two opposing notions in his head, neither of which he believed. She poured out her heart to him and he responded, “This is what you should do, Ma,” and then the opposing view, “Or you could do this.” Later he would act as her counselor, her defender, her explainer. 

     

    Or it might be Floyd, second oldest, whom she despised and feared, saying, “He never was right.” He was a university professor and an acclaimed poet. Floyd used to say, “Art is the Eden where Adam and Eve eat the serpent.” 

     

    Or the sisters, Franny or Rose, both of them bulky and breathless, like those anonymous startled eyewitnesses on TV who gasp, “I’ve lived here my whole ...

  • Reviews
    “Reading Mother Land is like watching a slow-motion car crash…Mother Land is an exercise in mean-spirited score-settling. It’s also fun…the clambake in the assisted living facility where (Mother) celebrates her 102nd (birthday) is downright hilarious…Theroux possesses a fabulously nasty sense of humor…As for me, I enjoyed Mother Land against my will… a version of his cozening, calculating mother can be found in many homes. But I also found a little bit of myself here. Theroux ends up assassinating all of his characters, but I still enjoyed the play.” —Stephen King, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 

     

    “Delivers what is perhaps his most personal novel: an engrossing, emotionally tangled and often merciless examination of family and self… his prose succeeds. It excels when evoking the setting and weather. With painterly effect, he ties the Cape's harsh winters, muddy springs and splendid summers to the changing moods of his characters' relationships. Mother Land is a bittersweet, brutally frank family saga that offers enough redemption to make the journey worth it.” SHELF AWARENESS 

      

    “There is a thoroughly wised-up atmosphere… Theroux has always been a master at rendering regional accents in the right letters… This is indubitably pure Paul Theroux.” THE HUDSON REVIEW 

      

    “Detailed, intricate, and dark.”LIBRARY JOURNAL 

      

    “Theroux's Mother Land is hilarious and wicked… If you’ve never had a problem parent, Paul Theroux has one for you in his overwritten, overlong yet irresistible new novel, Mother Land… devilishly funny… Theroux has fashioned an unforgettable character here (two, counting the wonderfully insufferable Floyd) -- and he has given us a family for the ages.” —THE BUFFALO NEWS 

     

    “Theroux has trafficked in troubled families before… But in Mother Land he takes it to a whole new level… antic and unpredictable… Jay’s portrait of the verbally extravagant Floyd (‘He hated a pithy declarative sentence like this one’) is a treat, whether they’re feuding or in cahoots… Theroux’s prose is suitably silky in its insinuations and vicious in its ability to claw... Theroux, fusing anguish and glee as he picks at the same raw scabs for 500-plus pages, evokes something truly memorable: a realm many come from, to which some of us have no desire to return.” —THE BOSTON GLOBE 

      

    Page by page, his Mother Land is engrossing and amusing, a sharp-eyed domestic comedy of greed, resentment and the ties that strangle… The Justus kids are clearly defined characters, each with recognizable tics and traits, but they don’t change much over time… Without stooping to sentimentality, the resolution of Mother Land is both moving and apt, the comedy and the tragedy deployed in equal measure.” —PORTLAND PRESS HERALD 

      

    “Paul Theroux ladles a steaming cup of dysfunctional-family chowder in Mother Land.”VANITY FAIR 

      

    “The diminutive matriarch of a large Catholic family is the powerful center of Theroux’s engaging novel. Theroux creates an unsparing portrait of Mother… Theroux’s gifts for narrative drive and using darkly humorous descriptive details propel the plot through decades of the fractious lives of middle-aged siblings ceaselessly engaged in insults and rivalry to gain their mother’s favor. Mother’s 90th birthday party is the hilarious essence of family dysfunction” PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 

      

    “As intense and searing a portrait of mother-as-monster as exists in literature… A fascinating, minutely observed portrait of family as both dictatorship and closed society, Mother Land is richly written and will enthrall fans.” —BOOKLIST 

      

    “Theroux's writing is robust as ever” —KIRKUS REVIEWS 

     

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