A Review of Rumaan Alam’s That Kind of Mother (Ecco, 2018)

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A Review of Rumaan Alam’s That Kind of Mother (Ecco, 2018).
By Stephen Hong Sohn

Rumaan Alam brings us another installment in the world of female friendships (and alternative kinships) with That Kind of Mother (Ecco, 2018). Alam is also author of Rich and Pretty, which was earlier reviewed here on AALF.

Let’s let B&N give us some context: “Like many first-time mothers, Rebecca Stone finds herself both deeply in love with her newborn son and deeply overwhelmed. Struggling to juggle the demands of motherhood with her own aspirations and feeling utterly alone in the process, she reaches out to the only person at the hospital who offers her any real help—Priscilla Johnson—and begs her to come home with them as her son’s nanny. Priscilla’s presence quickly does as much to shake up Rebecca’s perception of the world as it does to stabilize her life. Rebecca is white, and Priscilla is black, and through their relationship, Rebecca finds herself confronting, for the first time, the blind spots of her own privilege. She feels profoundly connected to the woman who essentially taught her what it means to be a mother. When Priscilla dies unexpectedly in childbirth, Rebecca steps forward to adopt the baby. But she is unprepared for what it means to be a white mother with a black son. As she soon learns, navigating motherhood for her is a matter of learning how to raise two children whom she loves with equal ferocity, but whom the world is determined to treat differently.”

This description provides us with an excellent grounding of this novel. What is especially crucial to the novel’s momentum is the deep connection Rebecca makes with Priscilla, so when Priscilla unexpectedly passes away, it is Rebecca who feels an almost suffocating sense of responsibility. The word “privilege” is also key here precisely because Alam is mining that delicate terrain of upper class whiteness, which introduces many complications. Rebecca tries to raise her black child through her colorblind visions, which grates against Priscilla’s daughter Cheryl. But these two and their respective husbands (Rebecca to Christopher; Cheryl to Andrew) and children (Rebecca; Christopher with Jacob/ Andrew; Cheryl with Ivy) manage to forge a relatively strong alternative kinship, even as Rebecca’s marriage slowly crumbles. Rebecca’s husband Christopher, a foreign diplomat turned banker, finds himself drifting away from her and from Rebecca’s sense of propriety. This development is not surprising; Rebecca’s attentions always seem oriented elsewhere: to her mothering of her children Jacob and adoptive son Andrew or to the maintenance of the community she’s developed between her family and Cheryl’s. Rebecca’s career as a poet also begins to take off, after she wins the Yale Younger Poet’s prize. Rebecca’s seemingly quixotic interests in art and writing diverge from Christopher’s practical sensibilities and desire to keep the family afloat through higher paying jobs.

Alam’s eye is particularly acute because of the third person narrator’s willingness to mine the subtleties of the mother’s everyday life: the controlled chaos of raising two young children and the rewards that come with this kind of care. The major confrontation of the final arc did make me think that the narrator’s proximity to Rebecca’s perspective was not only calculated but exacerbates the reader’s ability to see past Rebecca’s privilege. Indeed, when Cheryl finally confronts Rebecca about her white privilege, the initial sting first feels catastrophic, but this revelation is of course entirely appropriate: we’re experiencing the shock as closely as Rebecca might and realizing all the way how much we too may have missed because of this myopic, if well-meaning protagonist’s lens.

Buy the Book Here!

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email:
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu