Reviewed by Maggie Hill
7.21.07

Alfred Hitchcock once said that the key to being a wonderful director is knowing how to use suspense to string your audience along. He said it’s not the actual event that keeps audiences alert and anxious, but the build-up to the event. Given that definition, one could classify The Other Mother as a suspense novel.

You don’t have to be a mother to feel dislocated or disquieted by Gwendolen Gross’s The Other Mother. But if you are a mother or father, or know any mothers or fathers, you will worry about the motherhood archetypes as revealed inside the minds of the two main characters: Thea, stay at home mother of three; Amanda, full-time worker with a new infant. Imagine the possibilities. Then, forget everything you’ve imagined and go along with the story’s flow.

The set-up feels cliché, so sophisticated readers may initially balk: New Jersey suburbs; publishing job (Amanda); low-level depression and feelings of self-doubt (Thea); high-level frustration and feelings of self-hate (Amanda); high, high maintenance two-year-old child always underfoot (Thea); perfectly abiding infant (Amanda); husbands who just don’t get it (both). However, it’s the sum of its parts that keeps The Other Mother gnawing at the reader when the book is closed and just innocently sitting on the end table. Maybe that event being subtly telegraphed happens in the next chapter, or even the next page? Pick it up and read some more. Take it with you to the beach. Nothing wrong with a good beach read, right?

Here’s a little bit of what happens: Amanda and her husband move next door to Thea’s family. Thea spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about them; maybe it’s because her best friend used to live in that house. Maybe it’s because she’s lonely for adult company. Maybe it’s because she’s a psycho. (I’m just saying…) Amanda, on the other hand, is pregnant and does not really know just how psycho a new, self-doubting mother with an infant can feel. A storm sends a tree crashing into Amanda’s new house, forcing them to vacate in the middle of the night. Of course, the remarkably perfect next door neighbor won’t hear of them going to a hotel. So the family moves into the basement of the next door neighbor’s house for a short, but interminable, period of time. Nannies are interviewed, construction workers do the slow home-improvement dance, hotel rooms are finally reserved, job performance slips—and both mothers start living on the edge. For one mother, this is because the life she’s living internally does not coincide with her external life. And The Other Mother’s external life forces her into lock-step actions when her internal life does not want to march.

Gross alternates the point of view between these two characters so readers truly feel like powerless, popcorn-chugging witnesses to both sides of an accident. What is significant in The Other Mother, just as in a Hitchcock film, is the quality of the director’s perspective. Gwendolen Gross serves a satisfyingly page-turning book with the flourish of a literary consciousness. Her prose enabled this reader to move into that netherland where good fiction ultimately takes us. Beyond the overall plot, on a purely sentence level, Gross is a caring, crafting writer. Inside Thea, we learn: “I never expected to live in the house I grew up in. I never expected to lose my mother before I became a mother myself. I never expected the losses and the gains, the shapes they took in the corners of days, of years, shifting in their chairs like visiting aunts.” We are taken inside Amanda’s pregnancy, on her walk from the PATH Station to her office: “Six sticky-skinned, achey-ankled blocks. The baby banged around inside me, her sharp ends asserting themselves against the spongy resistances of my liver, bladder, spine.”

In a book where everything seems as familiar as, well, mom and apple pie, the writing removes all hint of cliché, leaving this reader with only a willingness to read on.