A review by mepresley
The Push by Ashley Audrain

dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

I love the epigraph, quoted here only in part, "Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother's ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother's womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born...."

This is Blythe's story, and the story of her mother, Cecilia, and Cecilia's mother, Etta. Etta, who was
violently abusive, then an absent presence, then hung herself from a tree in their front yard. Cecilia, also abusive and then an absent presence, finally abandoning her family to start a new one and never once looking back--just stepping right into an identity where she was not, and had never been, a mother.


Blythe has ambivalent feelings about becoming a mother because she does not want to be like her mother, or her mother's mother. She wants to be better but is afraid that she won't be, that she doesn't know how. When Violet is born, Blythe does not feel that immediate bond between mother and child.
Certainly a better parent than Cecilia or Etta, Blythe does struggle mightily in the early days of Violet's life. From the beginning, Violet is needy but also pushes Blythe away. In one scene, a very young Violet bites Blythe in the face during bath time. Blythe takes to leaving Violet crying in the crib when she wakes from her nap, wearing headphones so music downs out the baby and Blythe can write. Otherwise, we see Blythe mostly making good decisions and being the best mother that she can be, while her husband, Fox, unfairly blames Blythe for the relationship between Blythe and Violet and for Blythe's perfectly founded concerns about Violet, who clearly is a little psychopath.


The story is told out of chronological order, shifting between Blythe's memories, one short chapter focused on Etta's POV, and seven on Cecilia's childhood, the latter two presented in italics.

Blythe's story contains
her 20-year relationship with Fox falling apart, her marriage ending with his affair with his secretary Gemma. It contains Blythe behaving in unhinged ways, such as when she puts on a wig and joins a mommy's group and ends up befriending Gemma in this disguise, under a false name, such as when she sits outside Fox and Gemma's home, watching their happy family through the window, which is where the novel begins. But what it's about is the death of her son, Sam, and her grief over this loss. Sam, who she brings back to life as her only child in her false identity, whom she gives a childhood that he never got to have. The central event on which the story hinges, really, is whether Violet pushed Sam's stroller into the road on purpose. (She did, which she admits through the window the night Blythe brings her story to Fox & Gemma's home. She also killed another little boy on the playground, and tortured her fellow classmates as a 4-year-old.)


I found Blythe to be a very sympathetic character, and--aside from Blythe's "adopted" mom, Leda Ellington, and Gemma--
the only sympathetic character. Her story was dark and difficult, exactly the kind of story that speaks to me, and her self-doubt and guilt, her attempts at growth, reflect a woman who would have been a fantastic mother to Sam or any child who wasn't a total psychopath.
 

The extremely clever
twist at the end of the novel is that Blythe was blind not to her own issues or the mental illness she might have passed along to Violet, but to Fox as a psychopath, too--the bond between Fox and Violet coming from their lack of empathy, their desire to control and manipulate and hurt; this wasn't just a marriage falling apart because of a difficult daughter and a dead son, or even a case of Fox not believing that Violet killed two little boys. Violet inherited her violence and coldness from Fox, which is cemented in the closing pages of the novel. Blythe has asked Fox to return the painting he took, the one that hung in Sam's nursery, and he claimed not to know where it was. The doorbell rings one night and the painting is on the porch, with a note from Gemma saying that it has been hanging in Violet's room the entire time, apologizing because Violet dented the frame and punctured the canvas, because Gemma didn't know what it meant to Blythe. The return of the picture reminds me of how Fox left it at the end of their bed after Sam's death, which at the time seemed potentially insensitive but also, what do you do with it, and how does grief affect everyone's ability to think clearly, and which now strikes an entirely different chord. Fox comes back to the porch to tell Blythe, through uncontrolled laughter, that it wasn't the cleaning company who stole all her nice clothes after Sam's birth--that he had found Violet in the bottom of the closet with one of his modeling tools, having shredded all the clothes, which he then threw away--a secret he kept through all of Violet's other 'problem behavior.' And I recall, too, the night that Blythe overheard Violet telling Fox that she hated Blythe and wishes that Blythe were dead, Fox replying only, "She's your mother." Fox repeats a familiar, gaslighting refrain to Blythe on the porch--that Violet "deserved better" from Blythe. No. No, she did not. The final line of the final chapter is Gemma calling Blythe to tell her that something happened to Gemma & Fox's son, Jet, which something I assume is Violet, all the more alarming when you consider it's not just Blythe that Fox has lied to about Violet, but Gemma, too, insisting that Blythe is wrong about Violet pushing Sam, doing nothing to intervene when Gemma blames Blythe for the modeling tool ending up in their home in Fox's hands (a full year and a half before the "something happened" call). Fox has known that Violet is a danger to Jet and done absolutely nothing. 

Other than my personal preference for chapters that aren't so uniformly short, the only thing that I think would have made this novel better is if there was more doubt about Blythe's sanity/ perspective and Violet as potential psychopath. The only doubt that exists is in Blythe's head, mostly due to the natural denial of a mother and Fox's gaslighting; it's very, very clear that Violet is guilty, which takes some of the wind out of the sails of her eventual window confession. Also, I do really wish that had gotten the details about what happened to Jet & what the aftermath of that looked like, but I fully recognize that the ending Audrain chose is more powerful than the details I longer to get, and that my very desire for those details is testament to Audrain's storytelling / my investment in her narrative.
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