The Mothers by Brit
Bennett
Reviewed by NC Weil
This 2016 novel, Bennett’s debut,
deals with secrets and lies; behavior that seems harmless till someone gets hurt;
and, yes, mothers. The narrative, primarily third person as it dips into the
minds of smart but destabilized Nadia Turner, her preacher’s son boyfriend Luke
Sheppard, and her shy religious friend Aubrey Evans, also rides in the first
person plural of The Mothers. This group of older church ladies spend much of
their time in Upper Room Chapel, praying for those who leave prayer requests in
the sanctuary, but also spreading gossip as they learn fellow congregants’
secrets.
The Mothers have seen it all: girls
who get pregnant too young, endure lopsided marriages till either they or their
husbands flee, and every other mistake a girl or woman can make, most having to
do with trusting men. So they look with suspicion at the boys and young men in their
congregation, scold the girls who dress provocatively, and picket the abortion
clinic, though they distance themselves from the white fanatics whose instinct
is to bomb clinics and murder doctors.
Nadia’s mother kills herself
violently when her daughter is seventeen, and Nadia, unable to understand that act,
sees her own existence as the crippling of her mother’s potential. They are a
perfect lineage, each seventeen when surprised by pregnancy. The older woman,
kicked out of her home by her angry mother, joins and weds her baby’s father at
the Marine base in Oceanside, California, where he is soon deployed to Iraq. Nadia
doesn’t consciously meet him till she’s four, and by then she and her mother
are a closeknit pair, her father on the outside. It’s an ordinary household
till her mother’s suicide, but then Nadia goes off the rails.
She and Luke spend as much time
together as possible, sneaking around his parents’ house in their absence, so her
pregnancy should come as no surprise. Luke helps her, but that assistance comes
at a cost too high for everyone their lives touch: Nadia, Aubrey, Luke and his
parents, his friends… the reverberations of Nadia’s and Luke’s actions go on
for years, intensifying when they could have ebbed, and throwing many lives
into chaos.
Nadia thinks about her mother,
about the pregnancy at seventeen that derailed her life: “Nadia had invented versions of her mother’s life that did not end with
a bullet shattering her brain…Her mother traveling the world, posing on the cliffs
of Santorini, her arms bent toward the blue sky. Always her mother, although in
this version of reality, Nadia did not exist. Where her life ended, her mother’s
life began.”
A handful of years pass. Nadia’s
upward trajectory – college and law school – is interrupted by her father’s
health. Luke’s hopeful return to football after a devastating early-college
injury is derailed, opening the way for a more meaningful life. Aubrey, who has
carried Nadia’s and Luke’s secrets, keeps her own locked away where they
fester. And the Sheppards, leading their church as pastor and First Lady, must
pay the consequences of helping Luke end Nadia’s pregnancy.
None are guiltless, all undermine
their own promise in ways alternately thoughtless and self-sabotaging. Like all
of us, they make their tainted choices for what seem the best of reasons, and so
we sympathize even as we shake our heads at the damage they cause.
