I loved The Mosquito Coast, which is what drew me to pick up Mother Land from a book store. The book is billed as a novel, but Theroux takes pains to make it feel as autobiographical as possible: the narrator is a travel write and novelist with two sons, and many of the family members referenced in the book correspond to real people in Theroux’s life, albeit with different names.
This lends a certain queasiness to the story, as the characters are, to put it bluntly, not pleasant people to be around. And no one is more unpleasant than the titular mother of Mother Land, a vain, narcissistic woman who sees her children more as treasures of conquest than actual people. The book chronicles a period stretching most of the narrator’s (Jay, though he may as well be named Paul) life, though it focuses primarily on two points: one period in his young adulthood when he fathered a child out of wedlock, and another in his middle age when his father dies and he moves back to Cape Cod. The plot is light and episodic, focused more on the interactions between the siblings than on events. There is a certain repetitiveness to the story, and we get the sense by the last fifty pages that Jay’s mother will simply never die. That she is somehow eternal, a creature of avarice feeding off her own young.
If I’m being honest, I didn’t exactly enjoy reading Mother Land, though that’s not to say the book was boring or bad. Theroux’s writing is rich, and his characters have great psychological depth. They just aren’t very nice people. I had no trouble picking p the book to read it, but when it was over, my biggest feeling was of relief. It’s a feeling shared by the children at their mother’s death, so this sensation may be deliberate. If so, then it’s a bold literary move and one Theroux should be proud of. It takes courage to write such an ugly book, especially one that most readers will assume is about you and your family.