just finished motherthing by ainslie hogarth - nothing to call home about but it was a fun read and i liked it; it amounts to something something, the female anxieties/delusions/lovehate relationships wrt motherhood. everyone's mother sucks and being a mother within a straight nuclear marriage will make life worth living. psycho mommy issues ensue!
mostly it made me ponder this newish genre of the past couple of years that's like.... white straight liberal millennial contemporary literary magical realism. novels that are about mundane (white, straight) jaded millennials living mundane lives but something slightly and/or ambiguously supernatural happens but it is absorbed into the narrative and accepted into the mundane. motherthing by ainslie hogarth, my year of rest and relaxation by ottessa moshferg, a touch of jen by beth morgan, nightbitch by rachel yoder, the pisces by melisssa broder, bunny by mona awad... some of them are legitimately good (of the ones i've read, only the pisces stands out)(GOD i hated bunny so much) most of them blend into each other and are rather forgettable. never nearly as good as the classical latinamerican magical realism of the 20th century
the prose and style is what we identify with contemporary literary fiction. the narrator is usually a woman, unreliable, somewhat unstable, often unlikeable. her life sucks in some deeply unspecial way and continues to do so through most of the novel, which is just her day to day life. in the end, the supernatural thing affects change in some ambiguous way, usually in her favor, regardless of whatever crimes (anything from being a plain old asshole to murder) she has committed. you get the impression that the writer is trying to "defy" reader expectations by not punishing the character for her wrongdoings. the novel ends abruptly in this world of sudden magic. you are left wondering if what just happened was real or not. anyway i don't have a way to wrap up this post i'm just noticing and observing... i think reading so many like... NOT bad, but ultimately forgettable, so not good either? novels in this genre is starting to get annoying though
