Review by New York Times Review
DO OUR MORE modest northern neighbors talk about the Great Canadian Novel? After all, they have big geography there too - the mountains, the prairies. "Always in view was the vastness of what in most countries would be called a sea but in Canada was known simply as 'one of the Great Lakes,'" the Canadian writer Ann-Marie MacDonald writes in her big, troubling and brave new novel. Books like hers have a continental sweep: The writer amply stocks them with people and ideas, with all she knows. Spare, quiet perfection isn't the aim. "Adult Onset," MacDonald's third novel, arrives more than a decade after her second, "The Way the Crow Flies." Her Oprah-anointed debut, "Fall on Your Knees," was a lyrical and distressing book chronicling three generations of an illfated Cape Breton family. MacDonald's heroine here, Mary Rose MacKinnon, is a novelist who has written two parts of a trilogy, the acclaimed young adult "Otherwhere" series. But the third book is stalled, a casualty of motherhood. Mary Rose is home in Toronto with the children, ages 2 and 5, while her partner, Hilary, is out west directing a production of "The Importance of Being Earnest." The novel's structure appears simple - each section is named for a day of the week - but within it lurks a complicated braid of third-person narration. Mary Rose's present tense skips and darts like a ball of mercury as we follow her to the grocery store, a doctor's appointment, the local Montessori school - and back into her childhood. Those stories become a second text, one perhaps written by Mary Rose, yet closely allied with the perspective of her mother, Dolly. Dolly's narrative is slower, less funny; Mary Rose's, reflecting her life with small children, is a "multitasky maelstrom." The final strand in the narrative braid comes from Mary Rose's fantastical "Otherwhere" books. Mary Rose thinks in questions and allusions (from the Bible to "Bewitched" in a single sentence), looping around the stories within stories. She enters a bathroom, examines her reflection and emerges 20 pages later awash in family secrets and curses. On the one hand: "Women have their trauma chatter - like reverse Cassandras laughing at the gates, This happened this happened this happened!" On the other: "Maybe none of it happened." MacDonald loves wordplay; grammar, for her, is a sanctuary of order. But as Mary Rose becomes a more unreliable narrator - she can't keep track of dates, or scissors or even where Hilary is - her language disintegrates into disorder: "and then makes hot chocolate and then wipes it up from off the over the out from under before and after and thenandthenandthen creeps in this prepositional pace from day to day." Motherhood "Macbeth." Indeed, "Adult Onset" keeps company with other novels that could function pretty well as birth control. In Jenny Offill's mesmerizing "Dept, of Speculation," motherhood unhinges and obliterates. Elena Ferrante's unrelenting "The Days of Abandonment" compresses domestic life with young children into suffocating proportions. There is much maternal misery in "Adult Onset" - miscarriages, a stillborn baby, postpartum depression - and those are just in Dolly's story. But even the ordinariness of Mary Rose's days with her children, Maggie and Matthew, can be miserable. Maggie appears to be a cherubic delight, yet Mary Rose is not delighted. What she feels more readily is rage, which she turns against her freezer door and even her own body. She comes by it naturally, "born between two dead siblings," the stillborn sister (the "other Mary Rose") and a baby brother who died of jaundice. What happened to Mary Rose back then, on those long mornings alone with the devastated Dolly? Daybreak usually signals safety, but here it's nightfall that comes as a relief: The children have survived another day. It's a testament to the power of this book that it is in moments difficult to endure. Nestled beside rage is pain. Mary Rose is a "pain connoisseur." As a child she had bone cysts and two surgeries to correct them; as an adult she suffers from what a doctor calls "remembered pain." One day, pain "snapped into flame like a twig, it leapt and spread"; later, "the pain was cold and metallic like an aircraft wing." Hers is a beautifully observed, afflicted body - and it's rare to see a woman's body this way. We know everything about Nathan Zuckerman's prostate, but the detail with which we learn of Mary Rose MacKinnon's uterus comes as a shock. For this reader, a not unwelcome one. There's comedy too. Like Wilde, MacDonald has an epigrammatic wit: Mary Rose had "approached heterosexuality rather like math: she worked at it until she achieved a C, then felt justified in dropping it." MacDonald is also a playwright, and she uses dialogue to reveal her characters. They speak at cross-purposes, mishearing and misunderstanding. Some of these revelations feel stagy, particularly in Mary Rose's conversations with her two surviving siblings. Repeated gags - a lost package, Dolly's faux slaps - have the whiff of farce. A mother by turns charming and abusive, Dolly tests everyone. Should heroines be likable? (Or the dread "relatable"?) Do we want characters to be our friends? If yes, Mary Rose is in trouble, and even she knows it: "If she met herself now, she would not want to be her friend." But in the age of social media, can we commit to "liking" anything other than a photo of a baby wearing a fedora? Can we "like" a novel about - among thousands of things, like all great novels - child abuse? "Adult Onset" puts MacDonald's readers in the interesting and uncomfortable position of liking someone who is occasionally awful. Then again, who can't relate to that? MAGGIE POUNCEY is the author of the novel "Perfect Reader."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 10, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
MacDonald's (Fall on Your Knees) riveting drama features 48-year-old Mary Rose MacKinnon as she dutifully cares for her two young children in Toronto, outwardly making all the right choices with organic foods and extreme toddler proofing. Inwardly, however, she frets over potential disaster scenarios while struggling to retain a sense of self. Although Mary Rose writes young adult fiction and has a loyal fan base, she can't make headway on the third novel in her trilogy. "She never imagined she would be a 'morning person' or drive a station wagon or be capable of following printed instructions for an array of domestic contraptions that come with some assembly required; until now, the only thing she had ever been able to assemble was a story." During a week when her partner, Hilary, is out of town, Mary Rose reflects on her tumultuous childhood, which forced her to shoulder survivor's guilt after the loss of would-be siblings, while coping with her lifelong painful bone condition. Glimmers of escalating anger-a family trait-begin to creep through her constructed veneer in Hilary's absence. MacDonald's strong narrative is a compelling examination of the loneliness and the often-absurd helplessness of being a parent of young children. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
As winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and a finalist for many more, -Canadian author MacDonald (Fall on Your Knees) comes with sterling credentials reflected in the engrossing flow of this book. YA fiction author Mary Rose MacKinnon has put her career on hold to tend to the two young children she has with her partner, Hil, who's spreading her wings as a theater director. The frazzled insanity of parenthood is well rendered here, but Mary Rose is also dealing with physical and psychic pain from her past. Her military father and unbalanced mother, Dolly, of Lebanese descent, lost two babies, including one who would have been named Mary Rose, and as a youngster Mary Rose suffered pain in her arm that led to multiple bone surgeries. The pain is returning, as is a sense that there's more to her difficulties than her parents admit. In addition, their resistance when she came out has melted but still troubles Mary Rose, who's worrying Hil by drifting closer to the edge. VERDICT Though the book seems somewhat drawn out, the fine, clearly detailed writing makes for an accomplished read blending the familiar parental/spousal angst with the specifics of Mary Rose's struggle.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Assaulted by mysterious pains and bracketed by painful childhood memories, Mary Rose MacKinnon engages in power struggles with her willful toddler and endures the stresses of stay-at-home parenting while her partner, Hilary, is out of town. An acclaimed young-adult novelist, Mary Rose is suffering from severe writer's block, unable to complete the third volume in her popular series. Despite the surface comforts of life in her liberal, upper-middle-class Toronto enclave, she feels an inexplicable sense of alienation from her environment; she distances herself from the other mothers at her child's preschool and avoids communication with her own parents, despite their belated acceptance of her homosexuality and loving acceptance of Hilary and their grandchildren. When Mary Rose's charming Lebanese mother, Dolly, was younger, she had numerous miscarriages, stillbirths and babies who died shortly after birth, and she seems to be fixating on this tragic period many decades later. The effect of this sad legacy on family dynamics has never been fully explored, and Mary Rose has many vague, unspoken questions about her own childhood, the answers to which might help explain her emotional paralysis and phantom arm pains, as well as the mysterious bone cysts she suffered as a young girl. MacDonald (The Way the Crow Flies, 2004, etc.) integrates three narratives into this novelMary Rose's mundane day-to-day existence, Dolly's experience of severe depression as a young mother lamenting her lost babies, and Mary Rose's novels, which parallel elements of her own family story distorted through the lens of teen fantasy fiction. While clever, the novel within the novel seems a bit forced. There is a recurring theme of impostors and doppelgngers and a shrewd twinning motif, but the reader is always conscious of the writer's craft. Of the three, Dolly's story is the most naturalistically and sensitively portrayed. Despite the too-neat Freudian implications of Mary Rose's story, this is an affecting, multilayered account of domestic ennui and the painful effects of long-held secrets on three generations. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
