CAITLIN MACY Mrs. Reviewed by Sally Nimon
Mrs is a sometimes witty, sometimes satirical, and sometimes very dark exposé of the cut-throat world of modern motherhood.
What might a reader expect from a novel with the title of Mrs?
A protagonist who is a married woman? Check.
A setting in which she is surrounded by a cluster of other married women? Check.
A tale of domesticity, encompassing home, hearth and children? Check.
At this point, the images being conjured in your mind are probably of the warm variety: of love, comfort, support and companionship; of women forging deep bonds that hold them together through whatever cruelty life can throw at them. Your expectations are probably of something resembling Sex and the City meets Bridget Jones meets The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants.
You would be wrong. Very wrong.
Instead, what you find between the pages of Mrs is a sometimes witty, sometimes satirical, and sometimes very dark exposé of the cut-throat world of modern motherhood.
The story opens on a small group of well-to-do women braving a New York winter while they wait to collect their children from pre-school. Gwen, there to pick up her daughter Mary, is standing a little back from the group, pretending not to notice she’s not considered rich/aristocratic/well-married-enough to merit being noticed by the others. All around her echo the sounds of 21st-century status-jostling.
‘Look at you in your fur! You were so smart to wear it!’
‘Doug will only ski in March …’
‘Something to be said for the tropical Christmas.’
These comments are not idle chatter. They are not intended to foster social bonds over a shared experience of waiting in the cold. Instead, they are weapons of war, barbs in the constant battle to win and then defend the most prestigious social territory. Every gesture, every whisper, the placement of every hair and the twist of every garment is no longer just the trivia of everyday life, but a pregnant signal of who you are, where you belong, and whether allegiance, or deference, is owed. Put a foot – or last season’s Jimmy Choo – wrong and even the most respected could find themselves dodging a sharp sneer aimed down a finely angled nose.
In the classical tradition, tragedy has been the domain of the great and the good, heroes and royals whose lives should have been blessed, but who instead came undone through their own fatal flaws. But the internet that brought us the democratisation of information has also brought the democratisation of tragedy. No longer do our voyeuristic urges extend only to kings and celebrities – it is the lives of ordinary people we now crave, the people we pass in the street, nod to at the school drop-off, stalk on Facebook. We cultivate our friends not just for who they are, but for who they make us appear to be.
This is the dynamic of the world in which Gwen finds herself. Desperate to retain the core of her former, pre-city life, she strives to forge an acceptable compromise between finding a place in this deadly social mire while not losing herself in the process. The cool detachment and apparent insouciance of Philippa Lye, wife of the owner of the city’s last private bank, appears to demonstrate that this might be possible, even if only for ex-models who are young, rich and thin enough to meet the New York ideal. Certainly, snatching at Philippa’s reflected glory is a common pastime within this group. Then there is the ‘new mother’, Minnie Curtis, who appears to sweep aside the rules while wielding them far more effectively than those who have been honing their skills for years. What are the mothers to make of her? And when she laughs at their clumsy attempts to put her down for some imagined faux pas, is she wealthy enough to be allowed to get away with it?
In Victorian times, mothers were seen as innocent and angelic, the embodiment of divine love transformed into a domestic setting. By the time of Mrs this idea has evaporated completely, pounding the last nail into the coffin of an illusion we began to shed with emancipation and bra-burning. There is no question that women are the equal of men, as Gwen shows in her early career before giving it up to be a mother. But the lesson at the heart of Mrs is that this means accepting the bad as well as the good, that women can be sly as well as brilliant, ambitious as well as supportive, seeking to better themselves as much as they jostle for the future of their children.
And that for all the preening, the signalling, the desperation to cultivate apparent intimacy with the great and the good, few are ready for the consequences when the barriers are finally breached, and real human intimacies offered.
Sex and the City or Travelling Pants this is not. But – like many tragedies that have gone before it – Mrs lays bare the reality of what it is to be human, and warns against falling for the false gods of Wealth, Prestige and Glory on Facebook.
Caitlin Macy Mrs Simon & Schuster 2018 PB 352pp $29.99
Sally Nimon once graduated from university with an Honours degree majoring in English literature and has hung around higher education ever since. She is also an avid reader and keen devourer of stories, whatever the genre.
You can buy Mrs from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
