MOTHERS DON’T, by Katixa Agirre, translated by Katie Whittemore
Midway through “Mothers Don’t,” by the Basque author Katixa Agirre, two mothers, the unnamed narrator and her college friend Léa, go out to get drunk and eat oysters. On the surface it’s a standard mothers’ night out — sundresses, scandalous confessions and the relief of escaping the domestic — but the evening is haunted by their former friend Alice, who is on trial for killing her twin infants.
Katie Whittemore’s translation from the Spanish reveals darkly elegant prose throughout. When Alice’s au pair discovers the murders, “the duvet covered them almost completely,” the narrator says. “The twins. Their eyes were closed. Beside the bed, in an armchair upholstered in striped fabric, sat Alice Espanet, the mother, dressed in a nightgown. One of her breasts was exposed. The left.” The call for an ambulance “was recorded and that’s how we know it lasted two minutes, that there were some challenges with communication, sighs, wailing, disbelief. To all appearances, Alice Espanet kept her composure for the duration of the call. She didn’t move from the armchair, or cover her left breast.”
The narrator, still brutalized by the difficult delivery of her son, slips in and out of view (a motherly quality) as she tries to write a novel about infanticide — a book that, like this one, blends a fictional plot with historical precedents. “How could I possibly stylize violence perpetrated against children,” she wonders. She does so in part by interrogating other myths and stories of women killing their children, themselves, or being accused of being bad mothers, from Euripides’ Medea to Sylvia Plath to Lindy Chamberlain.
More broadly, the novel is concerned with the way patriarchal cultures pass judgment on women at large. After the narrator steps onstage to accept an award for her last book, “plenty of Twitter comments were made about my appearance, along with suggestions that I’d only gotten the award because I was a girl.” Both the prosecution and the defense in Alice’s trial try to use feminism to legitimize their position. “A mother can be cruel,” the prosecution argues in an attempt to portray Alice as a criminal, not insane. “To think otherwise is to cave to an outdated view of motherhood and femininity.”
Even our narrator tries, fruitlessly, to comprehend something essential about Alice, using her oyster date to interview Léa about Alice’s childhood as a bulimic and a pathological liar, recounted while each “gluey, formless mollusk” is consumed. She later retches them back up on the banks of a river. Novels about the darkest possibilities of motherhood, gestation and postpartum recovery are easily filled to the brim with all manner of excreta (ripped flesh, raw nipples, blood), and this one is no exception. The sustained attention given to the consumption and regurgitation of the raw oysters — eaten while they are still alive and just as defenseless outside the shell as a fetus is outside the womb — stitches together several of Agirre’s themes.
“Murder is — at most — something men perpetrate against their partners or exes,” Whittemore translates, yet the cases that “inspire so much curiosity, so many clicks, such high ratings” are often the ones committed by women. Agirre’s novel makes the case that the very idea of the bad or even indifferent mother (a type that naturally includes women who don’t want to be mothers at all) elicits a highly emotional and illogical response in our culture. Inventive in form and fearless in style, this novel makes plain how insufficient a courtroom is to hold the complexity of psychology. Agirre has given us a deeply unsettling exploration of what a mother or a woman can or cannot, should or should not do — a topic both timeless and all too timely.
MOTHERS DON’T, by Katixa Agirre, translated by Katie Whittemore | 161 pp. | Open Letter | Paper, $15.95
Catherine Lacey is the author, most recently, of “Pew.”
