And then there is Violet: does she represent the newest and perhaps most dangerous manifestation of what begins to feel like a family curse, or is Blythe projecting all her worst fears about herself on the innocent child? This is the tightrope the novel walks, and it is a largely successful balancing act, due to the sheer compelling power of its narrative drive. The Push turbo-charges maternal anxieties with a fierce gothic energy that comes in part from the dark stories of Blythe’s antecedents and in part from the ever-present, primal fear of the Bad Mother: the one who slyly pinches, who lies, who surrenders to her worst impulses. It shows the way the birth of a child can break down the bonds of love between adults as well as strengthen them how the memories of childhood, forgotten or buried, return at the moment of one’s own maternal crisis. Well thought out, carefully crafted, vividly realised and gripping, this is a clever concept novel that manipulates and exploits the fears and insecurities almost every mother has, however happy her own childhood: the fear of otherness, and the illusion of motherhood as a great, beaming, muffin-baking club from which one is excluded.
And then Blythe gets pregnant again, with a son, and what began as anxieties turn into terrors. She can’t love her daughter, and Violet proves to be a difficult child: contrary, unsettling, manipulative and eventually frightening. And yet from the start Blythe feels her family history threatening to overwhelm the stability for which she has struggled. And yet, like her mother and grandmother before her, she falls in love and gets pregnant – with a daughter, Violet.īlythe has in her favour a good father (albeit one who is in denial) a substitute mother in a childhood neighbour with whom she found sanctuary and a loving husband, himself from a family of exemplary, twinkling benevolence. “The women in our family, we’re different,” Blythe says. We learn of Etta’s life, and of Cecilia’s, their stories of trauma and neglect interwoven with Blythe’s.
Keep going, keep going, keep going.Audrain then takes us back to Blythe’s beginnings as a mother – which, of course, predate her own birth, just as foetal nutrition depends not only on the health of the mother but the grandmother too. “I was a soldier, executing a series of physical actions on a loop.
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