“What do you do when your mother dies? You get on a plane and go home.” So begins the eighth and latest novel by award-winning author Kate Christensen. “Welcome Home, Stranger” serves as both title and taunt for this astute novel of grief and reconciliation. Rachel, the book’s narrator, long ago fled the confines of family and Maine for work as a climate reporter in such remote regions as Antarctica. Given the yawning geographical distances at hand, one might rightly conclude that “home” was a place she needed not only to escape, but to purge.

Rachel arrives home to the rotating chaos of Maine. Her 50-something younger sister, Celeste, resents Rachel’s long absence and abdication of care for their ailing mother; her old lover, David, newly married to Celeste’s best friend, remains as addictive as ever to Rachel; and Lucie looms large over everything. Lucie is the mother from hell and the undisputed center of this book, around which, in true narcissistic form, all else flows. In the annals of bad mothers in fiction, she is an epically hateful, soul-sucking figure. She spent a lifetime pitting her two daughters against one another; competing with them sexually; seducing their boyfriends; deriding their teenage curves; and generally demeaning them at every turn.

“Since childhood, I’ve never felt comfortable in any of my mother’s houses,” Rachel says. “They’ve always been hostile environments of uncomfortable extremes…. the furniture either too hard or too soft, the air smelling either of burned food or too much floral perfume.”

Nor has adulthood proven any less trying for our divorced narrator, now menopausal, burned out, more than a tad ambivalent about returning to Maine. Her last visit came after Lucie fell down a flight of stairs, years back, requiring two surgeries and a long rehab. Rachel took a two-month family leave from work to care for her mother.

“She was a terrible patient, imperious and needy, demanding and high-handed, histrionic and obtuse. She had a horrible little bell she rang to summon me. Trapped and bound to do her bidding,” Rachel says, “I found myself repulsed by the very heat of her body in its thin nightgown, crushed by her importunately demanding presence, the inside of my head one long silent wordless shriek.”

“And somehow, throughout this entire time,” Rachel adds, “she remained under the staggering delusion that I was there for my own enjoyment, as a sort of vacation from my stressful job, as if this were some sort of honor for me, and the pleasure of her company was its own reward.”

Of course the book also cooks at a lower flame, tamped down a few notches, with a lively cast of characters, and less of the crazed theatrics. But one of the joys of a Kate Christensen book is her signature exuberance. No one writes about excess and appetite with such gusto, making over-the-topness a mainstay. While moderation is at times a goal – in this case, Rachel has stopped drinking, and pines for the freeing of alcohol – it is always elusive and rarely fun. Sobriety is the wish that seems to cut both ways.

By the end, this book satisfies on a number of fronts. It’s about the pull of family you thought you knew, but didn’t; of long-buried resentments and freshly minted ones, as well. As a meditation on grief, it is, by turns, raucous and fiery, despairing and resolute – and wittily entertaining throughout. Still, it is the horror of Lucie, “a criminally neglectful mentally ill mother,” as Rachel depicts her, that so animates this book, a portrait for the ages.

Joan Silverman writes op-eds, essays and book reviews. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune and Dallas Morning News. She is the author of “Someday This Will Fit,” a collection of linked essays.)

Copy the Story Link

« Previous

‘The Maid’ was a surprise hit. Its sequel lives up to the hype

Next »

Cozy up with these books set in winter in Maine