When a lab monkey doesn’t have a mother, a cigarette-smoking man in a white coat and horn-rimmed glasses will give the monkey a rolled-up pair of socks and the socks become their mother. Or, more accurately, the monkey needs a mother so badly that it can project enough mother things onto the socks that they do the trick. Become a Motherthing. The socks become a Motherthing, scribbles the cigarette-smoking lab coat man, who tastes his pen and continues writing: They can hug it and stroke it and put their cheek against it and it calms them down, really calms them down. The way a mother would. A real remarkable effect. The baby monkey’s heart rate decreases, blood pressure lowers, all the magic medicine a mother is.
I grinned and grimaced and gritted my teeth all through Motherthing — I would actually love to see a time-lapse recording of my facial expressions as I read this — and as much as one can say, “This is a little bit horror and a little bit comedy”, Ainslie Hogarth seems to have invented something completely unique here. Sure: Ottessa Moshfegh and Mona Awad are doing something similar with their
“Bottomless brown eyes,” I repeat, wincing as I open my can, a mysterious habit with an origin I’ve buried for good reason I’m sure.
“They were strange. Almost frothing.”
I sip my soda, slurp the rim. “Brown hot tubs.”
He frowns. “You’re thinking about diarrhea.”
“Well, obviously, Ralph. You’re thinking about diarrhea too.”
“Only because I know that you are.”
“Perfect body temperature, thick enough to hold you. Might actually be better than water.”
He admits with a shrug that it would be nice to sag nearly suspended, perfectly warm, in a pool of slack shit. “It would have to be ethically sourced, of course.”
This exchange, from the second page, might be a good barometer for another reader’s enjoyment of Motherthing: Not only did this weird potty humour surprise and tweak the pleasure centres in my brain, but I found it to portray the obvious deep connection and compatibility between this couple masterfully; if this exchange does not provoke, amuse, and click the characters into place for you, this might not be a book for you. As for me: I was all in.
As we eventually learn: Ralph and Abby were incredibly lucky to have found one another. Both raised by narcissistic single mothers — Abby’s was neglectful, exposing her daughter to abusive situations as she sought love from a string of men; Ralph’s was guilting and manipulative, emotionally blackmailing her son to give her the love she needed — Abby and Ralph were able to provide for one another the pure and selfless love they had always been missing. Not long before the book begins, Ralph and Abby were manipulated into moving in with his sick mother in order to care for her, and in the opening paragraph, this mother, Laura, has made good on a lifetime of empty threats and opened her wrists in the basement. While Abby believes her mother-in-law’s death will finally free them from her clutches, Ralph is convinced that Laura’s spirit still haunts the house, and he’s not ready to let her go.
The ghostly bits are more uncanny than chilling, and throughout, Hogarth had me wincing at her provocative physical descriptions:
• A small man who seems to wear his flesh, hoisting and adjusting it like a child in his father’s suit jacket, is standing behind a chest-height desk. He comes around and greets us. “You must be the Lambs.” He extends his hand, shaking it free of its flesh-sleeve, connecting first with Ralph, then with me. The top of his head barely comes to my chin, but he’s practiced a way to make it seem like he’s not looking up at you. “How are you both?”
• Ralph is doing that weird smile again, like the back of his skull is pulled off and Laura is manipulating his folds with her hands.
• I look at her face. How her skin pools on the bed so her head seems like a melted candle, lips parted, mouth empty, small hard skull a hidden treasure buried in wax.
And throughout, there is much developed about womanhood and motherhood (there’s no blame assigned to the couple’s absent fathers), and as a piece of feminist fiction, it’s not incidental that this story is told solely from Abby’s POV:
Boys are boys and they do what they want. Women want things too sometimes, but mostly they’re just warm sensory boards for men to tweak and rub and learn about themselves and the world through.
As the plot progresses and we are shown how people try to replace mother love (with motherthings and surrogates), Ralph becomes more lost in his fantasies and Abby becomes more desperate to save him; the line between mental illness and the supernatural is blurred and Abby believes that if only she could be an ideal of wifeliness (a Good Woman) she could rescue Ralph (the Perfect Good):
I see it now, the contours of a plan, a perfect food or, rather, a meal perfectly executed, which will revive that long-buried instinct in Ralph, to be alive, despite the shock of it. To stay alive, despite the pain of it. A food, a flavor, offered once by his Motherthing to make suddenly being alive all right. I can revive that instinct. I can replicate that flavor.
I just have to grab a few things first.
I see now that I didn’t pull much in the way of funny quotes, but I did laugh out loud at Motherthing; I also cringed and gasped and was genuinely touched. And now I want to buy a fish-shaped mould and make jellied salmon (with an inset olive eye) for my husband’s dinner, because that would be funny.
