The Lost Mother
Mary McGarry Morris
2005, Penguin Books, $14.00 USA, Softcover, 274 pages
This novel of a family abandoned by their mother during the 1940s speaks to everyone about suffering, betrayal, forgiveness and atonement. Told from the viewpoint of the son, the author does not spread out his feelings on a buffet table for emotional vultures. She turns him this way and that, like a prism in a strain of sunlight, where the right angle will suddenly sparkle out its singular beauty. Her prose is hypnotic: "the leaf rustling of prowling creatures, a canvas thinness away". She keeps our hero, the twelve year old son, true to the spirit and nature of a boy. He is both extremely sensitive, imagining the return of his mother, and unaware of the interplays of adults which occur around him. You learn about the intricate relationships among the characters in many ways: by the son's abrupt, roughhouse, reactions, revealing a growing anger; the daughter's spicy sweet outbursts, which cover her fears; the mother's shaking confusion; the neighbor's protective glances; the father's grim, cool silence. A soft, hard word at a dinner table reveals the father's loyalty to his childhood friend and now spinster sweetheart. The specially prepared meal which, carefully laid, is familiar to those who would avoid Hades, but after having eaten of the pomegranate, find themselves trapped at a potential for eternity. The argument over green apples, between father and son, underscores the bitter sweetness of their lives at that moment. There is a very tiny house for a woman who has little room for anything else, much less her children. This is a pageturner, which will teach you as much about yourself as the intimate details of an impoverished family living during the Great Depression. A great read. Overall, on the heat scale, "white hot".
