A family and a misfortune
Anne Chisholm
HER MOTHER'S DAUGHTER by Marilyn French Heinemann, f10.95 Reading this book is like spending a long flight in the next seat to a middle-aged woman who badly needs to talk. She is determined to tell you not only about her problems and her daughter's, but her mother's and her grandmother's as well. Although she is American of Polish des- cent, some of what she says strikes a chord, especially as it is more than likely that you yourself have had experience of, or may even have been, a mother, a daughter or a grandmother. Thus, as the saga drones on, you feel the occasional pang of sympathy or recognition; but above all you feel trapped, exasperated, and bored.
Marilyn French could be said to perso- nify the American women's movement of the late 1960s. Now in her late fifties, she obtained a doctorate from Harvard when she was about 40, and four years later published a book about James Joyce. A year after that, in 1977, she published The Women's Room, a rambling, impassioned, polemical novel about a group of women finding themselves through liberation be- tween the 1950s and 1970s. The heroine is at Harvard, rising 40, working on a thesis. `The kind of book that changes lives', proclaimed Fay Weldon; and it has been a huge success, selling, apparently, nine million copies worldwide.
French has written another novel and two more critical books since then, but her new novel evidently carries her hopes, and her publisher's, of a repeat blockbuster. 'A new milestone work,' shouts the blurb: 'the most honest and moving novel ever written about the primal inescapable bond be- tween mothers and daughters.' Oddly enough, the said bond, as delineated by French, does not provide much in the way of comfort, warmth, or laughs. It is com- pounded of guilt, pain, and resentment. `The truth is it is not the sins of the fathers that descend unto the third generation but the sorrows of the mothers,' is the dispirit- ing message, laboriously and repetitively hammered home.
The heroine of the book (which is nearly twice as long as The Women's Room at 750 pages, and dedicated to the author's late mother) is Anastasia, known as Stacey, a middle-aged photographer with a deceased grandmother, an elderly mother and a difficult daughter. She also has a divorced sister, misleadingly named Joy, a son and a younger daughter, two ex-husbands, many ex-lovers and a friend called Clara who says wise and soothing things and might, it seems at first, be her analyst.
She thus has a full life, but, to para- phrase Ivy Compton-Burnett, she does not much care for what it is full of. She is far from happy; this seems to have a lot to do with the fact that her grandmother, who arrived in America from a Polish village, and her mother, whose life was blighted by having Stacey, were not happy either. They both had to do a great deal of washing, shopping, and cooking, described in interminable detail, and had a bad time with their husbands. However, they en- dured it all for the sake of the children, thus creating the massive emotional bur- den suffered by Stacey. She tries, from childhood, to dodge her heritage: 'I would be happy!. . . I could not bear constriction: yet I felt it was inevitably my lot.. . women's lot.' She soon realises the dis- advantages of being female. 'How many of the great painters were women? None, that's how many.' She too makes an ill-advised marriage, but eventually breaks away to be a photographer and to start behaving more like a man, which leads her to sleep around and compromise her art by taking pictures of machines for magazines. She later marries a younger man, who resents being treated like a wife, and soon her children are blaming her for not sacrificing herself for them as mothers are supposed to do.
All this is related in leaden, long- winded, humourless prose. Stacey's story never has a chance to take hold, because French keeps seeking her depressing pat- terns by cutting back to mother or grand- mother. The last straw is the growing realisation that sensible Clara is not just a friend or an analyst. She is the answer. By the end, Stacey and Clara are lovers.
In The Women's Room, which although dated still reads far better than this novel, the following remark is made by the heroine. 'It's easy enough to blame men for the rotten things they do to women, but it makes me a little uncomfortable. It's too close to the stuff I read in the Fifties and Sixties, when everything that went wrong in a person was mother's fault.' Something odd seems to have happened to Marilyn French since then; ten years later, both men and motherhood are comprehensively indicted. This disastrously bad book at least makes one contemplate with renewed appreciation the non-ideological, unrecon- structed virtues of Compton-Burnett and Brookner. They write about equally dire family passions, but with coolness, brevity and wit.
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