Humans Are Paper Table Cloths at Homestyle Italian Restaurants
a review of The Mothers by Brit Bennett
In this house we worship at the altar of bildungsroman!!! Hence, we loved The Mothers by Brit Bennett. It’s set in an alternate universe, one in which going to the University of Michigan is exotic and thrilling. That universe? Southern California.
The past few months have driven me to loathe making decisions, something I never liked in the first place. It’s not indecisiveness; I wish my life was more like a raffle or advent calendar and less like a choose your own adventure. I find it easier to make peace with reactions to stimuli than my tendency to choose bogus adventures that aren’t even adventures in the first place, but rather “options that people won’t think are bizarre so it will all be fine.” Nadia, the protagonist, does make decisions (and chooses adventures).
The Mothers is set in a Black community in California, anchored by a church with a pastor’s son whose personal brand is “Friday Night Lights re-runs.” There are a few, fantastically architected characters, one of which is this amorphous chorus (ok that’s the name of my a capella group…) known as the mothers. The mothers are women who belong to the church and stage whisper about other people in the room like my grandma does at Thanksgiving. Gossip is a narrative force in The Mothers, but not in a Bravo way. We humans are like paper table cloths at homestyle Italian restaurants, colored and stained by people we meet.
It’s not a rote love story, rather The Mothers is an excavation of the many relationships that shape us. They are good and they are bad. Some people show you how to drink coffee, some buy you blue gatorade while you stumble through a work shift hungover, others tell you that your dead dog is “fine” when he was clearly GQ handsome. But often, it’s the closest relationships that teach us the most. Bennett mines the shared histories of Nadia, Luke and Audrey for gold nuggets of realism that made me be like: “I hope they’re all doing well now.”
It ends like the season finale of Insecure (no spoilies… iykyk) and it’s impossible not to feel your stomach lurch like you ingested bad ham when you read the ending. Thank you Grace for letting me borrow this book and sorry I’ve had it for a dog’s gestation period.
58 - 68 days in case you were wondering.