The Push by Ashley Audrain

It isn’t often that I feel compelled to read a book in just two or three sittings. I love word play and cleverly crafted sentences, provided they don’t slow me (and the action) down too much. However, even though the ending of the novel was clear and inevitable to me soon after the very first scene, I had to witness the denouement of the story for myself, and didn’t notice the time I had been glued to my Kindle.

The central story concerns motherhood and how each woman’s genes have arrived through two generations of other women; so, essentially, it is also a story of the conflict (or balance?) between nature and nurture.

Women in general provide the bad genes here, whereas men are simply weak and at least partly complicit in the outcomes initiated by their partners. The narrator delves back into the blood and guts of childbirth and the mess of parenting in order to try and find answers to why her daughter is behaving in the way she is. Sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be a reason, and this is the journey we embark upon with her as readers.

I felt a great empathy with the main character’s sense of emptiness and a lifetime of relative futility as a result of other women’s actions, whether derived or driven. This resonated with me most throughout the story in the way it transcended even the worst kinds of cruelty, neglect and unimaginable (actually, easy to imagine through such well-constructed words as these) grief.

There is also a well-worn theme of apparent favouritism from parents, though, of course this is usually to be frowned upon and deemed unacceptable behaviour – or would be if such thoughts are actually voiced. Not, however, in a work of fiction where everything (sometimes literally) is turned on its head.

I don’t understand why some readers found this book so difficult to understand and/or did not progress between the first chapter, or those initial introductory paragraphs. Surely it is better to have those onion slices peeled away slowly, to put off the orgasm of relief and true knowledge for as long as possible?

The characters propelled me forward, though I did find things a little repetitive towards the end and felt the book was too long because of that. I didn’t find myself in emotional suspense, as the author herself would have it, but, at the same time, I had to see how what I had suspected would happen all along did happen.

As a parent I still remember fondly the very young years of each of our three children. What I do recall in particular was a sense of malevolence when certain of their peers would attend birthday parties or come round for tea. In most of those cases, though not all, my suspicions subsequently proved entirely justified. Not bad for a mere man?

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