AS OPENING CHAPTERS GO, this One from "The Need" does not mess about: A mother crouches in the corner of a darkened bedroom, straining to listen, holding her small children close and willing them not to make a sound. Molly has heard footsteps in the next room. An intruder is moving around her house. "Her desperation for her children's silence manifested as a suffocating force, the desire for a pillow, a pair of thick socks, anything she could shove into them to perfect their muteness and save their lives." There are several threats here. The reader is immediately on edge, fearful not simply for Molly, but about her. Are we safe with her? Are her children? "Another step. Hesitant, but undeniable. Or maybe not." In her other life Molly is a paleobotanist, a scholar specializing in plant fossils. Searching for clues and connections at the bottom of a 20-foot excavation pit, she keeps "pressing even farther into the earth, hoping that someday it would all fall into place. Nonsense converting, wondrously, to sense." She excavates her emotional life in the same manner, layer by layer, and because she knows herself well, she doubts herself. Even as she cowers in the bedroom - trying to quiet baby Ben and Viv, her exuberant, chatty toddler; wishing her husband, David, weren't on a plane bound for another continent - she suspects she might be imagining the whole thing. Attempting to orient herself in motherhood, Molly finds only "a cosmic precariousness." All her certainties have been upended, the rumble underfoot signifying an earthquake rather than a garbage truck. Molly has lived in this state of heightened anxiety since Viv's birth, and Viv is about to turn 4, an event that will be marked with the usual festive junk: juice boxes, rainbow sprinkles, a piñata. But celebrations do not mean respite. At all times Molly is "acutely aware of the abyss, the potential injury flickering within each second." Perhaps the surges of adrenaline and cortisol have warped her perceptions a little because her grasp on reality seems to be slipping, both at home and at work, where the pit has started to yield unlikely items (most notably a Bible with a curious misprint). David attributes her state of mind to sleep deprivation and dehydration. He may have a point. Possibly it's more serious than that. So Molly does not feel equipped to confront the intruder, but she does it anyway. This is when Helen Phillips's novel begins to reveal itself, veering away from what looks initially like conventional suspense into something more speculative and philosophical with nods to both sci-fi and horror. (Its preoccupations as well as its frankness reminded me a little of another recent genre-busting exploration of motherhood: Diablo Cody's marvelous 2018 film "Tully.") Molly believes herself "immobilized by what-ifs," but the what-ifs animate this novel, the narrative splitting and looping back on itself as it tries out parallel possibilities, various fantasies and nightmares. Phillips favors a succession of rapid-fire chapters, some only a few sentences long, and at several points the timeline breaks up so that each new section requires a significant recalibration. The reader, trying to keep track of the chronology, trying hard to make sense of it all, feels the full force of Molly's panic, the unruly runaway velocity of her life: "She was always hurrying to get ready for work, hurrying to put the groceries away ... every single thing in life shoved between the needs of a pair of people who weighed a cumulative 57 pounds." Like parenthood itself, "The Need" is frightening and maddening and full of dark comedy. Molly may be wrestling with the big existential questions (the irreconcilable tidal pull of her rival identities) but she's doing this while finding peas in the freezer, organizing an ocean-themed birthday party, wrangling kids in the grocery store. Very occasionally at work she is able to forget her utilitarian obligations, and this comes as a vast relief. "Her focus took hold of her and time passed around her. In the pit, in times of observation, she forgot that she was a mother. That she existed at all, really, except as a pair of eyes and hands." But that other world is insistent - for a start, her milk keeps coming down at inappropriate moments - and won't be shut out for long. Yes, this is how it feels, to spend your days in the company of tiny despots whose wit and energy far outstrip your own. Here it is, the mess, the crazy conversation, the endless strategic bargaining. '"But we have to finish the shopping,' Molly said. 'Remember the juice boxes? You can have one as soon as we pay for it.' She didn't respect herself, her never-ending tactics and bribery." Phillips, as careful with language as she is bold with structure, captures many small sharp truths. She is very good on drudgery and tiredness and marital resentment: "Sometimes you had to hate the person who was using the toilet or taking a shower or at work or sleeping or doing any other indulgent thing while you were caught in the cyclone of your children's needs." She evokes a baby's beginner steps, "so dainty, halting and sticky," and the peculiar exotic novelty of a newish mother finding herself out alone at dusk: "This was the time of day when her home demanded everything of her. Once in a while she would peek out the window at the tail end of a sunset. But always she was needed inside." With forensic precision Phillips identifies the price a parent will pay for tuning out just for a second, because that will certainly be the second when someone rolls off the bed or gets a finger trapped in the door. There is even a bravura section toward the end when everyone comes down with a stomach bug. The novel, it should be said, may well mystify nonparents. It may even mystify parents who have forgotten the reality of the early years. Perhaps these people will judge Molly - as she judges herself - for not being able to cope alone, for falling apart when her (affectionate and perceptive) husband is out of town. But she has my sympathies. I would like to tell her it does get easier. And, you know, more fun. "She wouldn't mind sitting quietly for five minutes and drinking something, tea or wine, before playing with the children. "But the children were already playing with her." Everyday life, here, is both tedious and fascinating, grotesque and lovely, familiar and tremendously strange. Molly - worrying about the person she is becoming, and whether that person can adequately meet a family's needs, let alone her own - is finally alive to it all, to its terrors but also, on those rare occasions when everyone is happy (or asleep), to its incandescent joys. Harriet lane is the author of "Alys, Always" and "Her." |