Word: motheral
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This first novel by a previously unknown author has managed to climb quickly onto best-seller lists. Such a feat is infrequent enough to prompt the question why. True, The Good Mother garnered some enthusiastic reviews, and the publisher, evidently sensing a winner, launched a barrage of advertising and publicity. But if this sort of support automatically spelled success, the nation would be crawling with best sellers. Genuine word-of-mouth, pass-along reader enthusiasm cannot be sustained by ads alone. Books that seemingly come out of nowhere to capture wide audiences do so primarily because they offer exactly what...
Although never formulated explicitly in The Good Mother, this question haunts Narrator Anna Dunlap's recounting of her peculiar ordeal. Admitting that their marriage has sunk into irremediable tedium, she and her husband Brian, a lawyer in Boston, agree to an amicable divorce. Anna gets custody of Molly, 3, and child support from Brian, whose firm is transferring him to Washington. Settling with her daughter into a Cambridge apartment, Anna hopes to support herself by giving piano lessons and taking a part-time job running rats through mazes at a local university...
...take a shower; what follows is either a brief, innocent mistake or an instance of child molesting, depending on who makes the judgment. Molly's father, hearing his little daughter talk of this event, goes understandably bananas and instigates legal proceedings to wrest custody of the child from her mother...
...this point, the novel could easily pass as a jumbled meld of popular movies: An Unmarried Woman meets Kramer vs. Kramer. What removes The Good Mother from its predictable ruts is Anna's willingness to give Leo the boot out of her life, if doing so will persuade the judge to let her keep Molly. She testifies at the trial: "I'd be willing not to see Mr. Cutter again." Romantic heroines, after all, are supposed to choose emotion over responsibility. But that was when there were suitable romantic heroes. Try as she might, Anna cannot convey the magic...
...call the theater of the mind." Actress Glenn Close, who has recorded the children's book Sarah, Plain and Tall, concurs, "I find it challenging. You have to play five or six different parts, and you have to give a real sense of storytelling. I was raised by a mother who read to us every night. I cherish the memory of her voice. In recording Patricia MacLachlan's work, I believe I am keeping alive a good tradition." Updike is both a recorder of his own work and an avid listener to colleagues: "I love to hear authors themselves reading...