Missing Mom: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Joyce Carol Oates (Author) "Last time you see someone and you don't know it will be the last time..." (more)
Key Phrases: jimmy friday, ephraim police, bossy older sister, Wally Szalla, Gwen Eaton, Aunt Tabitha (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Oates's latest returns to upstate New York's Mount Ephraim, the setting of We Were the Mulvaneys, Oates's 1996 novel—a 2001 Oprah pick—about one family's privilege and decay. This time, Oates turns to the middle class: narrator Nikki Eaton, 31, is a reporter for the smalltown Beacon and her family's black sheep. She's having an affair with a married DJ; she barely tolerates her widowed mother, Gwen, and her homemaker sister, Clare. As the novel opens, Nikki arrives at Gwen's Mother's Day party with newly spiked, "inky-maroon" hair and contempt for Gwen's cooking, one-story house and endless munificence to her ragtag guests. Two days later, Gwen is murdered by an ex-con. Chronicling Nikki's year following Gwen's death, the novel includes some wonderfully precise emotional observations. But more often the prose sags beneath the weight of banal information and a story line too redolent of pulp. Naturally, the "swarthy" police detective investigating Gwen's murder initially seems repulsive, and naturally, in the novel's final pages, Nikki thinks: "I had not noticed in the past how strong his profile was." There are no surprises, that's for sure. And yet the novel is so conventional and relentlessly detailed that it can't help showing its characters behaving in ways that resonate. (Oct.)
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From The Washington Post
The event horizon in literary stardom is littered with artificial light, but in 1963, with the publication of By The North Gate, an authentic star was born. That stellar energy was Joyce Carol Oates, and, because in the last 40 years her prodigious literary output rivals little else on Planet America, her phenomenon resembles less a single source of information than the busy, contradictory, ambient noise of cosmic radiation in the Universe.

She's here, she's there, she's everywhere -- holding down her teaching chair at Princeton, dashing off impassioned Letters to assembled Editors, compiling instructive essays for periodicals as varied as the New York Review of Books and Road & Track, averaging 2.5 published volumes a year between herself and Rosamond Smith, her nom de plume.

Each October, according to Greg Johnson, her biographer, Oates anticipates the Nobel call from Stockholm -- and why not? With the death of Sontag, only Oates and Didion can claim title to First Lady of American Belles Letters. Like Didion, Oates writes as if the act of writing is life-saving. But, unlike Didion, she never seems to find redemption in the act. Brutal murder, madness, beatings, rape, class jealousies -- these are the themes of her fiction, peopled by a cast of physically and emotionally undernourished heroines, traumatized by a scrum of over-sexed and over-powering males.

Anticipating another Oates Novel, then, given these basic ingredients, is like watching the Iron Chef: What she'll race to serve up next is anybody's guess. Gothics, grotesqueries, tales-told-in-real-time -- she's tried them all. Experimentation -- almost to the point of sacrificing her own readers -- is the candle Oates burns at both ends. Which means -- either because she's overconfident or sloppy -- that sometimes what she hands you on a plate is just too squiggly to swallow.

In Missing Mom, Oates's latest dish, the first 50 pages are spiked with the kind of spice we expect from the author of them, Wonderland and We Were the Mulvaneys. The "Mom" of the title is Gwen Eaton, one of the most memorable characters Oates has created to date: a widow in her late fifties, given to baking fragrant breads and ministering to strays, flawed but lovably fragile, with the irresistible and, one suspects, justifiably deserved nickname of "Feather."

At the book's beginning, it is Mother's Day, and Gwen is fussing through last-minute adjustments before her guests arrive for a celebratory meal. Among them are her two daughters, Nicole and Clare. Clare, the older, is married, with two kids. Nicole ("Nikki") is single but dating an older married man. She's 32, although the way Oates writes her, she sometimes sounds no older than 12. Which is unfortunate, because she is our first-person narrator. She arrives in Gwen's kitchen:

" 'Ohhh Nikki! What have you done with your hair!' First thing Mom said to me. Before I was through the doorway and into the kitchen. Before she hugged me stepping back with this startled look in her face. I would remember the way Mom's voice lifted on hair like the cry of a bird shot in mid-flight." Classic Oates -- not only because of the macabre juxtaposing of images, but because 50 pages later "Mom," herself, is dead. Murdered -- leaving us with only Nikki to tell the family history. And even though Nikki is supposed to be a feature writer at the local paper, she's no dab hand at narrative. All we get are diary entries of the bloggy sort. Whereas Gwen was a character anyone could love, Nikki is self-absorbed, insecure about her job, her lover, wardrobe, diet, hair, appearance:

"My jeans were faded, just snug enough to show my derriere to advantage. I was skinnier than Wally Szalla 'preferred' me but I was making an effort to eat more regularly, fret less and not to forget: lipstick!" What Oates has written here is really a teen novel.

Even if we are to believe Nikki has never dipped into the reservoir of feminist literature, surely Oates has. Oates knows her Wharton, James and Austen; but Nikki is more Olsen twin than Bennet sister. Our previous heroines were women struggling to lay claim to identity in a society bound to render them invisible. Oates's heroine is rendering herself invisible via her insecurities.

There may be great literature waiting to be written about these neurotic girls who starve themselves of love and calories, and I suspect no one could tell that story with more wit than Oates herself. But she's chosen a shrill voice for it here. Halfway through the book comes one of Nikki's entries titled, "blaming mom": "why Mom? why Mom? . . . you are to blame for what happened! what happened to you! what happened to us! you are to blame! you are to blame! you! you! no one else! Mom, why? Mom, why? why? why Mom? why Mom? WHY MOM? WHY MOM? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY?"

This is followed by 109 more WHY?s in capital letters.

Having nothing more interesting to think about on that page, I counted them. And you know what? Sometimes less is more. Now how do we ask for that doggy bag in Swedish?

Reviewed by Marianne Wiggins
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; First Edition, First Printing edition (October 4, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006081621X
• ISBN-13: 978-0060816216
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #686,568 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Moms, January 7, 2006

By	MICHAEL ACUNA (Southern California United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

We all love our mothers but many times throughout our lives, we don't. When we are old enough we can't wait to get away from them: we crave our freedom and when we get it... returning home is often a chore: "I didn't visit home often. I tried not to feel guilty: Mom tried not to make me feel guilty. But a kind of constriction came over me when I returned, an invisible clamp across my chest...When will you get married, Nikki? When will you have children...Without family, what is there?"
Nikki and Clare's Mom, Gwen Eaton was a kind woman. A woman who was called "Feather" in high school because her personality and demeanor was as light as one. After her husband dies she dedicates herself to others: teaching swimming to seniors, volunteering, making others feel comfortable...this made her feel good and it made her feel useful. Then one day Gwen is "there" and the next day she isn't.
"Missing Mom" is Joyce Carol Oates tribute and heartfelt reminiscence honoring the spirit of her mother, Carolina and as such it is a major departure for Oates. This novel is warm, cozy and basks in the kind of gold, autumnal glow of a life fondly remembered. Gone are some of Oates' trademarks: the grotesque scenes of gluttony and sexual abandon to name a couple. But Oates being Oates she can't help but include scenes like this: "...her face had been virtually remodeled with some kind of flesh colored putty. It was still a round face but appeared flattened somehow...this was a wax-doll face attractively powdered, rouged, lipsticked rose pink to suggest innocence, purity...you were meant to think...Why she is only sleeping...So Peaceful. Except this wasn't sleep, and it wasn't peaceful. More like a coma."
Though Clare and Nikki react to their mother's death in different ways, it is Nikki that Oates zeroes in on: "...Mom had been strong, Mom had not been weak and self pitying. But I was made to realize now that grief would come in waves and there would be wave after wave, there was not one big wave to be overcome and endured."
Nikki is the black sheep of the Eaton family. She dyes her hair purple, sleeps around and dates married men. But she loves her family deeply. She is in essence the quintessential Oates heroine: one of the walking wounded, Nikki is deeply flawed on a social and maybe moral level but in possession of a soul filled with caring and love.
"Missing Mom" is a novel about just that. As Oates states in the prologue: "This is my story of missing my mother. One day, in a way unique to you, it will be yours, too."

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oddly compelling, November 27, 2005

By	J. Marren "jtm497" (Glen Ridge, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

There's nothing dramatic or different about the plot and characters of "Missing Mom," but I couldn't put it down and I'm not sure why! This is the story of an ordinary mom in a very ordinary town in upstate New York, with two very ordinary daughters--an older, competent, settled one and a rebellious, angry younger one. Gwen Eaton, called "Feather" in her youth, is the perfect small town woman, a widow in her late 50's who spends her days in a seemingly endless cycle of visiting relatives, volunteering at various community organizations, and worrying over her daughters. The most extraordinary thing that happens to her is her death, a senseless act of violence that no one can believe happened to her (but then again, have we ever heard anything bad said about a random murder victim?) Nikki the younger daughter goes home, at first to clear out the house, but soon to stay and, in a word, grow up.

"Missing Mom" is the novel Oates wrote after the death of her own mother at the age of 87. I heard Oates speak about it--she views it as very different from her other work, and indeed it is in its clear plain style of writing, and sheer "ordinariness." Oates meticulously details the average middle class life--the food, the house, the clothes, with its secrets that aren't so very different from anyone else's. In the interview Oates explained how she tried to portray the lives of those who don't live in NY or LA, don't talk about literature and art, don't undergo therapy, but simply show their love through everyday small kindnesses.

Nikki discovers how her grandmother and father actually died, and that her mother had suffered through an awful childhood and a broken heart as a young girl. Gwen's tireless efforts to make others happy was her desperate way of staying above it all, floating like a "feather" above the griminess of her life. Seen in this light, Nikki can finally accept her mother's outward perfection.

This is a special book for mothers and daughters, but beware of recommending it to anyone who has recently lost a mom. Oates' descriptions of grief are spot on. I highly recommend this book to anyone who still has a mom--you'll appreciate her more for having read it.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Absorbing, October 31, 2005

By	Pat (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews

I became a fan of Joyce Carol Oates after reading "The Falls" and "We Were the Mulvaneys." As with those novels, there is more - much more - to this book than I originally assumed after reading the first few chapters. The dual identities of the characters crept up on me and I looked back on my original premises with surprise as I continued to read. Oates is a master at drawing her readers into character and plot complexities. This is a book that should not be missed - it is harrowing, heart-rending and, above all, absorbing. You won't be able to put it down until you have read the last page and then you will sit and think about it.