Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > The School for Good Mothers

Published in the UK htoday 3-3-22

This book is a future dystopian novel (albeit set in almost the immediate present and not requiring much of a leap of imagination or significant extrapolation from current societal practices) about the rights of parents (particularly mothers) to raise their own children versus the rights of society to teach and effectively impose minimum and agreed standards of parenting for the protection of the children and of their role in society in future.

The close third party protagonist is Frida Liu – an American daughter of two Chinese immigrant parents, thirty nine years old, mother of a young toddler Harriet, she lives in Philadelphia and works at Wharton Business School producing a faculty search digest for the business community. Shortly after Harriet’s birth her husband Gust left her for a younger nutritionist and Pilates teacher (and fan of all things new agey) Susanna.

The book opens with the police calling Frida to say that they have Harriet – after a frazzled and sleep-exhausted Frida leaves her alone for around two hours while she picks up some papers from work. Harriet is given to Gust and Susanna (who remain broadly supportive of Frida) for temporary custody. After detailed and intrusive investigations and surveillance by the social services and police, at a court hearing Frida is given the option (if she ever wants to have custody of Harriet again) to take part in a pioneering residential rehabilitation 1 year course at a newly opened instruction and training facility for bad mothers.

The majority of the book takes place in the camp which is closer to a correctional facility, with mothers (there is a separate and less draconian facility for fathers) given almost no contact with their children and forced to comply with the camp’s rules if they want any chance of post course contact. The main futuristic element of the book is that each mother (the mothers are grouped by the age and sex of their children) given an advanced animatronic doll on which to practice their good-mothering skills, alongside counselling and assessments on their previous inadequacies as a mother.

The parental infractions the mothers have committed are broadly in the areas of neglect, abandonment and mild physical or verbal abuse. One interesting element of the novel is that as a reader we see the facility and situation through Frida’s eyes while I suspect most readers are likely to judge Frida’s actions with Harriet as unacceptable even if they were a one-off lapse. Asked about this the author has said

I wanted to write about a woman who is complicated and flawed. Frida is a Chinese-American mom, her husband has left her, she’s angry and selfish. The question about whether Frida should be more sympathetic was raised. I mean, I could have had her leave her kid in the back seat for 30 seconds, a total accident that was much more benign. But that’s too easy; I wanted the story to exist in a more morally ambiguous place. I wanted her to wrestle with guilt for really making a bad mistake

The book was initially inspired by a New Yorker article by Rachel Aviv about a IRL mother who had her parental rights terminated and fought against what seemed a stacked system for years

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

The author is a short story writer and this is her debut novel. She mentions a key inspiration being Diane Cook and in particular a short story in Cook’s collection “Man V. Nature”. Diane Cook was of course Booker shortlisted for her own dystopian debut novel “The New Wilderness” – in my view a poor novel and one which showed her inability to succesfully translate her short story skills (“Man V. Nature” was excellent) to the longer format.

Chan is I think more successful here although I did feel that the time in the camp was perhaps a little too long – there are occasional excursions into humour but these are a little too infrequent. I think one of the aims here was to convey quite how far Frida becomes from her original life and how her doll (who she calls Emmanuelle) and the machinations of the camp increasingly become her life – but I did find my interest flagging and felt that the time in the camp needed perhaps more of a progression as opposed to what seemed to be a cycle through the training in and simulation of different aspects of “optimal” parenting, not all of which needed to be described in anything like the level of detail that they were.

Overall though this is a thought provoking novel including in its examination of how racial and cultural intersectionality impacts on the idea of societal attribution of correct parenting.

My thanks to Random House UK for an ARC via NetGalley