Red It has taken me 8 years to read and review this book. As stated previously, books do not allow you to read them until you are ready. Also, they (the books) can read you back. They can read you for filth, they can read you inward, onward…outward. They can give you voice and they can silence you. I think “The Mothers” silences before giving voice. Perhaps because it desires a deep introspection from the reader. So many realizations have been made since beginning this book in 2018 while on a trip to Black Mountain. It sat on the nightstand during a major full moon and I was presumably at the end of a marriage and at the start of my introduction to spirituality . It did not hold my attention because there were other things holding my attention at the time. And I wouldn’t say they were things necessarily worthy of my attention. They were distractions, numbing agents, even vampirical modalities all designed to guide a person like me to see a path that I maybe should’ve been walking blind on. So, pray over the books you choose to read. Ask them if they are ready. They will tell you. If they are silent, leave them be or walk through with blindfolds only.
“She’d already learned that pretty exposes you and pretty hides you and like most girls, she hadn’t yet learned how to navigate the difference.”
Synopsis: Knocked up to Upper Room church – that is how Nadia Turner’s story is introduced to us in “The Mothers”. Following the suicide of her mother and the emotional shutting down of her father, Nadia meets Luke, the pastor’s son and hometown football star whose promising career is derailed due to a leg injury. Already spiraling from the loss of her mother, Nadia forms a teenage romance with Luke and becomes pregnant. Nadia chooses to not go through with the pregnancy and Luke (with the help of his parents) funds the abortion. Bennett’s depiction of young romantic love – the innocent yet volatile ties, the lust, the dodging of true emotions not yet able to be named…is fantastically authentic. Bennett goes on to explore parental love through Nadia’s interactions with both her own parents and Luke’s parents. Platonic love is depicted mainly through Nadia’s interactions with Aubrey – a reserved member of Upper Room who resides with her sister due to her own parental love…trials. Nadia and her father (Robert Turner) move quietly and hesitantly around each other following the suicide of Nadia’s mother. He is not privy to Nadia’s deep emotions upon approaching young adulthood nor her coping mechanisms following the death of her mother. Reeling from the abortion and Luke’s failure to pick her up following the procedure, Nadia borrows her father’s car and crashes it while drunk. Feeling guilty for the circumstances surrounding Nadia’s apparent spiral, Pastor Sheppard (Luke’s father and minister in charge at Upper Room) ushers Nadia to be Mrs. Sheppard’s summer assistant at the church. The pairing is awkward and both resist throughout. Mrs. Sheppard seems to accept Aubrey who (religious, homely and devout) also works in the church while gazing upon Nadia with an air of disapproval. Despite their differences, Nadia and Aubrey form a friendship and bond as two daughters living without mothers. Nadia ventures to Michigan following her summer at Upper Room and pursues legal studies at university. Older than Nadia by a few years, Luke joins a local football team. His once-again athletic endeavor ends in calamity as he is caught making-nice with a teammate’s wife and severely beaten by some of his teammates as retribution. Luke is forced to recover from physical injury once again and his parents place him in a rehab facility. Beckoned by requests from the Upper Room, Aubrey goes to visit him and the two begin a romantic relationship once Luke is finally discharged. Nadia partakes in her own new romantic endeavors while at university. Though she is not necessarily glad to hear about Luke and Aubrey’s relationship, she still agrees to be present for their nuptials when the two decide to wed. It is illness that brings Nadia back to her hometown once again as her father suffers an accident while lifting weights and Nadia returns to care for him. This time it is Luke who’s beckoned by the mothers of The Upper Room to deliver food to Nadia and Robert Turner. The reunion of the two (Nadia and Luke) turns into an affair as Aubrey (seemingly none the wiser) desperately tries to conceive. More hidden truths come to light with the love triangle that is Nadia, Luke and Aubrey. Luke grows disproportionately upset at learning of the emotional affair Aubrey has with a marine named Miller. Nadia accompanies Aubrey to the fertility clinic and is faced with buried feelings surrounding her own pregnancy and pregnancy termination. And Robert Turner is heart-broken upon finding a small golden pair of baby feet given to Nadia by a nurse at the abortion clinic. Aubrey finally becomes pregnant and moves out of she and Luke’s home; refusing to speak to both him and Nadia as all of the secrets seem to come to the surface along with her growing belly. After Robert Turner confronts the Pastor Sheppard about his and his wife’s role in Nadia’s abortion, the church seems to dissolve, eventually closes its doors, Nadia continues her life away from her hometown, and Luke and Aubrey reconcile with the birth of their daughter. The mothers still gather every Sunday to pray for anyone who crosses their spirit. The novel ends in vivid abstraction – open to interpretation from the reader:
“We will never know why she returned,” the Mothers say, “but we still think about her. We see the span of her life unspooling in colorful threads and we chase it, wrapping it around our hands as more tumbles out. She’s her mother’s age now. Double her age. Our age. You’re our mother. We’re climbing inside of you.“
Yellow Nadia undergoes so much loss before leaving home and venturing off to college. How she deals with such loss is telling – not merely of her own developing character but of the environment that rears her. Published in 2016, Bennett makes a point to really highlight the setting – west coast beach town, diverse character backgrounds, military patriarchy paired with the church…the chapters all strung together by short, prose-like introductions in the voice of the mothers of the church. Who has a voice outright and whose voice is muffled through shaky societal expectations? Moreover, what is the cost of such a voice? Though Nadia does not blatantly have the kind of voice that can outright name her anger, sadness, spiraling or inner/outer chaos, Bennett relays these sentiments through Nadia’s actions. Disappointment is the word. And yellow is indeed the color – a highlighted hue that spans the spectrum of happiness, optimism, warmth, caution, envy and cowardice. I think Nadia would look back at the beach town that raised her and be both blinded and validated by the truths uncovered there – a yellow turned golden.
White Reserved – this is Robert Turner. Though framed as devoted, of service, single-father, he is also…reserved. He is a character with sturdy, quiet expectations (and rightfully so) – expectations to give so that his family might receive. He has given to his country, he gives to the church and community and he gives to his daughter. What (if anything) could Robert Turner have given to his wife to make her stay? What could he have given to himself? Are these fair questions? I think the disappointment obviously felt by characters such as Nadia, Luke and Aubrey are indeed strongly muffled when it comes to Robert Turner and the other male figures in this novel. One cannot protect that which it both fears and does not understand. As Bennett frameworks a mostly matriarchal structure in The Mothers, she in turn highlights the limitations of both the male figures and the youth. Again, the male characters in The Mothers cue me to Ernest Burkhart in the movie Killers of the Flower Moon and to Tom Spader in Good Fences. They are deeply troubled and attempting to navigate true love, ego and heinous societal expectations & circumstances. As in the novel and in these movies, a whitewashing takes place and what comes out in the wash is the annihilation of a people, their dreams, hopes and trust in a system erected to care, dismantled to teach.
That evening, we found a prayer card with his name on it in the wooden box outside the door. In the centre, in all lowercase, the words pray for her. We didn’t know which her he meant – his dead wife or his reckless daughter – so we prayed for both.
Pink What happens to the souls of babies not born, of those gone too soon by their own hand, of those who chose to both pray and live for themselves…with the guts to blaze their own path? I think these are the hard questions asked by this novel sans the knee-jerk reaction of the holy to send it/them all to hell. The mothers know what both Nadia and Aubrey are figuring out – as a woman you have both the power to bring forth new life and the power to do the opposite. How one views this knowledge and yields said power is what life is all about. As with previous novels recently read and reviewed, I wished more for these girls turned women. I wished for them true stories of endurance, survival, a dredged through yuckiness that yielded something worthwhile told out of the mouths of mothers who cared. I wished for them to be treated with respect beyond what is earned. I wished for them pasts understood to the point of celebration and even jubilation. I wished for them creative forms birthed outside of the likeness of whatever male lover or husband could afford them. I wished for them the knowledge to know that wishes are oftentimes prayers. I wished for them an art that was officially theirs – intelligent enough to see past the veil, motherly enough to reach back and get what belongs to them. Perhaps Bennett’s last few lines (as abstract and open-to-interpretation as they are) of this novel does just that – reminds us all that art of any form really is an intelligence and that it holds a great bit of weight…much like church mothers and the upper room they occupy.
Bennett, Brit. The Mothers. New York: Riverhead Books. 2016.