To a certain kind of restless girl growing up in West Virginia — this would be me — the work of writer Jayne Anne Phillips was indispensable. It was like a flare from a distant mountaintop that said: Watch me. This is how it’s done. This is how you can write about what you know and more than what you know, about what you only dream might be true.
Phillips, too, grew up in West Virginia, and her novels and short stories were filled with sex and death and wild longing. They read as if they could have been written with the edge of a broken beer bottle dipped in ink.
Then came “MotherKind” (Knopf).
Unlike Phillips’ previous work, which was edgy and dark, her latest novel is cautious, sedate, almost cuddly. Kate, the protagonist, has just given birth to her first child and also must cope with her mother’s terminal illness. While nursing her baby, Kate ruminates about the sacred mysteries of motherhood.
In short, it is not the kind of book that’s going to jump-start the dreams of young West Virginians.
The problem isn’t the subject matter, but Phillips’ soft-hearted treatment, which tends to give unfortunate credence to the dubious theory that women are destined to write pleasant domestic sketches filled with babies and lullabies, while men create thunderously profound epics about war and betrayal.
It’s the same charge routinely leveled against 19th Century novelists such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, and against 20th Century novelists such as Anne Tyler and Margaret Atwood: Being women, they’re allegedly fated to write fussy tales about trifles.
The trouble with this theory, of course, is that so many authors, male and female, refute it. They write persuasively outside their own skins. John Irving writes beautifully about orphans — a so-called female topic, if ever there were one — in “The Cider House Rules” (1993). Conversely, Phillips herself writes searing, tough-minded prose about World War II and Vietnam — putatively men’s topics — in “Machine Dreams,” her 1984 novel. The lyricism of her short stories, “Fast Lanes” (1987) and “Black Tickets” (1975), is spiked with grit.
So what happened with “MotherKind”? What happened to the wild-hearted, cool-eyed Phillips, the one whose sentences could knock you clean out of your seat?
I don’t know. But I do know that it has nothing to do with the novel’s topic or with her gender, which were, I blush to admit, the first things I suspected as I turned the pages with increasing frustration and bewilderment. Phillips herself is a mother and I caught myself thinking: Well, she’s gone soft. And she can’t help it.
Essentialism — the idea that members of a group such as a gender, race or nationality share an essential and unchanging nature from birth — is tempting, but ultimately perilous and foolhardy.
If you doubt it, just ask a Southern Baptist if women are fit to be spiritual leaders. The answer, according to the denomination’s recent edict, will be no — because, their adherents claim, the Bible decrees that women just can’t cut it in the pulpit. There’s no room for argument: If you’re female, forget it.
Free and honest minds bristle at that, because essentialism is an intellectual dividing wall. Nobody writes exclusively “as” anything — woman or man, West Virginian or Newfoundlander.
Put another way: People can write “as” everything. To believe otherwise is to trap us in somebody else’s definitions, to see us as a flat stack of common characteristics instead of a wild shock of talents, to erase the possibility of transcending the narrow limits of a single perspective.
In fact, there have been profound literary works about the intricacies of domestic life by Flannery O’Connor and others. Phillips just didn’t get there.
But she will.
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