MotherKind [Hardcover]

Jayne Anne Phillips (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 18, 2000

From the greatly praised author of Machine Dreams and Shelter, a major new novel.

MotherKind is the story of Kate, whose care for her terminally ill mother coincides with the birth of her first child and the early months of a young marriage. She must, in a single year, come to terms with radiant beginnings and profound loss. MotherKind is a delicately layered narrative in which the details of daily life resonate with import and meaning.

We enter Kate's present world of first and second families, babies and lively stepchildren, neighbors and friends, baby-sitters and wise strangers. Images of her not-so-long-ago past intermingle in a turning of the seasons marked by the gradual fading of her mother, the strong woman who has been her friend, her guiding star and her counterpart across a divide of experience and years.

MotherKind immerses us in a very contemporary situation, yet deals with timeless themes. Even as Kate's relationship with her mother embodies her childhood and adolescence in another place, she must decide what "home" is, and how to translate all she has come from into what she will carry forward. As her baby grows and her mother becomes increasingly ill, Kate realizes how inextricably linked we are, even in separation -- across generations, cultures, time; across death itself.

It is the triumph of MotherKind that Kate's complex experience of being -- and losing -- a mother is so deeply and luminously portrayed.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Although we know from its first page that the protagonist's mother is dying of cancer, Jayne Anne Phillips's rich, involving novel is not a story of loss but of connection. Thirty-year-old Kate, an unmarried poet, has traveled home to tell her mother, Katherine, that she is expecting a child. A few months later, Katherine will be compelled to move into her daughter's chaotic suburban household.

The birth of Kate's baby approached and her mother consented to chemotherapy, consented to leaving home, consented to never going home again, where she'd lived all her life. She crossed all those lines in her wheelchair, without a whimper, moving down an airport walkway. In its cage, her little dog made a sound. "Hush," she said.

For the balance of MotherKind, the narrative focus shifts between this visit to the country--like time travel to a sepia-toned world of unpolluted streams, flowering meadows, and rural gas stations--and the new life Kate is building with Matt, her unruly stepsons, and newborn Alexander, while Katherine slowly dies upstairs. As Phillips moves back and forth, she emphasizes the continuity of human life, rather than individual endings or beginnings, and functions like thought itself: obsessively returning to a few prized details, puzzling over old mysteries, making occasional random discoveries or unexpected insights, like treasures turned up by a garden hoe. Recalling her sadness and admiration as she watched her mother rolling toward her in the airport wheelchair, Kate is struck by a realization that "all lines of transit came together in a starry radiance too bright to observe," a magical realm where "manly cowboys glanced away from death and rode on through big-skyed plains and sage."

Though her third novel may contain all the emotional ingredients of a made-for-television movie, Phillips avoids tear-jerking through the use of precisely observed details (the plastic medicine spoon for her mother's morphine, the Christmas songs that double as lullabies for little Alexander) and the absence of cliché. She has even side-stepped, at the end, the requisite death-bed scene, knowing that there is almost no way left to write about such moments without recourse to received language and images. MotherKind uncovers the mixed sources of maternal strength in love, habit, and necessity. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly

A meticulous writer, Phillips has produced only four books to date, including the novels Machine Dreams and Shelter, in which she explored the paradoxes of existence from the points of view of youthful characters. This deeply felt, profoundly affecting novel, her best so far, exhibits a maturity of vision both keen and wistful. On a summer day, 30-year-old Kate Tateman flies to her Appalachian hometown to tell her mother, Katherine, that she is pregnant. Always a nonconformist, one who felt most in tune with herself during an itinerant year in Sri Lanka, India and Nepal, Kate is not yet married to the baby's father, Matthew, whose divorce is in progress. During the course of the following 18 months, we watch Kate give birth to a son, Tatie; care for Katherine--who has cancer, and decides to move in with Kate and Matt in Boston so she can live to see the baby--and serve as surrogate mother to Matthew's unruly sons, Sam, eight, and Josh, six, who resent her for destroying their home. The narrative captures the quotidian rhythms of domesticity, the stresses of childraising and of nursing the sick, creating a focused yet universal world. A progression of caregiving women help Kate through these life passages: a helper for newborns, various babysitters and the hospice nurses who arrive when Katherine becomes moribund. Phillips explores the intuitive bond between mothers and daughters with unforced grace. All the characters are articulate and introspective; they ponder the human condition, yet function in the daily sphere, with dialogue so easy and true it seems inevitable. While absorbed in the discomforts of childbearing, Kate ruminates about the continuum of time that sweeps her mother toward "the chasm of death"--even as little Tatie thrives and Sam and Josh gradually become integrated into their father's new household. Kate conjectures "that all lines of transit came together in a starry radiance too bright to observe." Amid the inexorable approach of death, the messy certitude and fecund abundance of human life resonate throughout this compassionate and spiritually nourishing novel. 50,000 first printing.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (April 18, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375401946
• ISBN-13: 978-0375401947
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,196,700 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Motherkind, April 21, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: MotherKind (Hardcover)

This graceful, moving novel tells a heroic story of ordinary life in a way that echoes long after the book is finished. The passing of power and responsibity from one generation to another, the bittersweet flow of family energy passing through Kate at the center as the death of her mother overlaps the birth of her son, the struggles of a young blended family trying to gain a foothold under the weight of terminal illness...all told touchingly against a backdrop of seasonal holidays, neighbors, birthdays. For anyone with a family, this is a must read. Men and women alike will find that Motherkind resonates with the reality of modern family life, reminding me of many of my own experiences. It serves as a guide for those of us hoping to face the challenges of birth and death, marriage and divorce with courage and clarity.

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing Novel from Long-Awaited Return of Phillips, April 20, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: MotherKind (Hardcover)

I finished "Motherkind" just the other night, and I must say, rarely have I experienced such disappointment in a novel. Phillips, the author of the highly acclaimed story collections, "Black Tickets," and "Fast Lanes," and two previous novels, can be a brilliant wriiter. Yet this novel saddened me--not because of the subject matter, which centers on the juggling of a new baby, husband, stepsons, and the death of the protagonist's mother--but because the narrative flow was so often diluted by overly sentimental, maudlin scenes and expository, didactic dialogue, most of which would have succeeded better as narrative. Perhaps having read interviews with Phillips discussing the death of her mother influenced my reading, but I could not help feeling what a dangerous thread of thinly-veiled autobiography Phillips was treading. As a writer, I give her kudos for her courage in tackling a subject so close to her own life and for her lyrical poetic language, yet the novel reinforced my feelings about her earlier novels: as a writer, Phillips is simply better suited to the short form. There are lovely passages, yet the novel as a whole feels hollow, somehow, as if Phillips were never quite able to penetrate the protective membrane in which she has encased it. Sadly, this is not work of a writer--as one would expect it to be--at the height of her powers.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Comfort of Generations, May 23, 2000

By 

Harley "Harley" (CT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: MotherKind (Hardcover)

MotherKind is cathartic. The book is full of humor and insight, and best of all, basic human decency. The relationships between mother, daughter, grandmother, lovers, fathers, friends are familiar and believable, carefully described and absolutely convincing. The resolution of each conflict is so satisfying that MotherKind's conclusion has the comforting resolution of a Bach fugue. Masterful. Thank you, Ms. Phillips!