Most of the people who knew my mother either slept with her or wished they had, including me, my aunt Medina and a man who boarded with us…As for me wanting to sleep with my mother, if you disapprove, try spending your childhood with a face that looks long past its prime, with hands and feet like the paws of some prehuman that foraged on all fours -- and then get back to me. Or better yet, read on.
This opening salvo appropriately prepares the reader for what is to come: Anyone who might be offended by incest or lesbians or rationalised prostitution should close the covers and back away. As someone who is not offended by a literary treatment of incest (and not in the least offended by lesbians and prostitutes), I was prepared to accept whatever came along after such an intriguing start -- and I was left rather disappointed.
Percy Joyce, eponymously The Son of a Certain Woman, was born with a benign form of a congenital defect (playfully referred to throughout the book as False Someone Syndrome, or FSS) that left him with a port-stained face, large and drooping lower lip, and oversized hands and feet; making him the subject of ridicule and cruelty from everyone outside his family; a situation that intensifies when he starts school. His only advantage (beyond the unfailing love of his mother and aunt) is the attention of the Archbishop of Newfoundland who, because he believes it auspicious that Percy was born on the Feast Day of John the Baptist -- Patron Saint of St. John's -- delivers a sermon that warns the boy is under his personal protection; sparing Percy not only the physical bullying of his peers but also the corporal punishment of his school teachers (making him the only child in all of Newfoundland not beat to shreds by the sadistic nuns and Christian Brothers charged with their education). Nothing, however, can prevent the other children from shunning Percy, or testing the limits of the Archbishop's protection with name-calling and vulgar taunts, and the loneliness that the boy feels was the most honest part of this book for me.
Apparently, Wayne Johnston's goal was to do for St. John's what James Joyce's Ulysses did for Dublin, and although I've yet to read Ulysses, I don't know if he has succeeded with The Son of a Certain Woman. (But hey, nudge, nudge, the abandoned Mom is named Penelope and the missing Dad is Jim Joyce -- get it? Nudge?) Johnston captures a time and place, and especially the stranglehold that the Catholic Church had over that time and place, but he only shows us one small street and only the part of that small street that leads from Percy's home to his school -- hardly an odyssey of epic proportions. Not only is this street tread over and over, but the same things happen over and over: for a 400+ page book, it felt like very little happened -- Percy gets teased or tries to get attention with one of his "give me myth or give me death" lies; his mother overreacts; the church has a response. And while this book is considered humorous, it's more farce than anything else, and I don't know that James Joyce by way of John Irving was what I was expecting.
As the book drew to a close and the machinations of the Archbishop were finally revealed, I had hopes that the payoff would be worth the journey, but the ending scene undermined whatever claim to seriousness that The Son of a Certain Woman may have been preparing. I was left cold.
What I did like was the portrayal of the Catholic Church's absolute power over its adherents at the time (even if it may have gone over the top with the sadism of the teachers -- but who knows, maybe that was Johnston's experience -- my mother doesn't have a lot of nice things to say about the nuns who taught her). And I felt compassion for Penny and Medina -- I can't imagine a time when two consenting adults lived in fear of being "hauled off to the Mental" for acting on the love that dare not speak its name. By now I know that Johnston didn't win the Giller Prize for this novel, and based on the few books on the shortlist that I have read, that seems appropriate.
I'll repost here a story I included in my review of Galore, which is all I know about the Catholic Church in Newfoundland at this time of this novel:
A true story: I have a friend who married a Newfoundlander, whose own father was a fisherman in a coastal community of less than two hundred people, fifty and more years after Galore concludes. This man was away on the fishing boats most of the time but when he was home, he was a mean and abusive drunk who forced himself on his long-suffering wife, eventually siring fourteen children by her. The woman was so overwhelmed, barely able to care for and feed the ever growing brood, essentially all alone, and she went to the parish priest for advice. The priest called down all the wrath of God upon her head for daring to complain about her lot in life and impressed on her that her only duty as a wife was to submit to her husband.
