Mothers, Fathers, and Others

Starred review from October 4, 2021
Novelist Hustvedt (Memories of the Future) delves into the lives of those who came before her—people related by blood or purely by her own fascination—to make profound arguments about memory, art, gender, and family in this stunning collection. In “Tillie,” Hustvedt unravels her family’s collective memory, covering the power of both what she knows about her past, and what she doesn’t: “It is only as an adult that I have been able to meditate on the problem of omission... and to begin to understand that the unsaid may speak as loudly as the said.” “Living Thing” characterizes art as a collective memory, claiming it “cannot be fixed to a single location because lived experience is not left behind in the room where the object rests unseen at night after the museum has closed its doors.” “Both-And” explores the “dance, humor, irony, and fun” that is often omitted in analyses of women’s art, particularly the work of Louise Bourgeois, while “What Does a Man Want” parses misogyny as a force that “distorts truths about shape-shifting, dynamic human beings.” In her typical fashion, Hustvedt pulls from psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, and art criticism to make brilliant connections among her takes on the world. Fans of Hustvedt’s work will welcome this, and those less familiar will delight in discovering her witty, lavish style.

December 1, 2021

Novelist Hustvedt (The Blazing World) discusses family, literature, and feminist theory in this collection of new and previously published essays. The book begins with a series of vignettes focused on Hustvedt's heritage that paint vivid portraits of her mother and grandparents, including paternal grandmother Tillie Underdahl Hustvedt, a Minnesotan raised by Norwegian immigrants. Hustvedt makes clear that parents and grandparents shaped by "Norwegian mountains" and "Minnesota woods" molded her in turn. The familial fortitude came in handy when she pursued a PhD in English at Columbia in the late 1970s, where she describes enduring the kind of sexism that's common in academia. She confronted male professors who were dismissive of her work and ideas and treated her like an imposter; she's also been condescendingly compared to her husband, the novelist Paul Auster. In many of these essays, Hustvedt is occupied by literature--writing it; interpreting it; teaching it; concerns about its future as an art form that can convey "emotional truth." Readers are also treated to a discourse on Wuthering Heights that makes one want to revisit the novel. VERDICT Hustvedt is a warm and engaging companion, and essay lovers and fans of her work will relish this book.--Barrie Olmstead, Lewiston P.L., ID

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Starred review from November 1, 2021
Hustvedt is a transporting storyteller, whether she's writing her many-faceted novels, most recently Memories of the Future (2019), or her electrifying essays. This richly stirring and resonant collection begins with a portrait of her tough-minded Norwegian immigrant grandmother and segues into musings on what children inherit and absorb. The architecture of Hustvedt's sentences is at once weight-bearing and fluid, as when a paragraph-long sentence embodies the openness of fields and sea as she remembers her mother. Looping in her daughter, Hustvedt considers the bonds between women over the generations, rejects "sentimental nonsense" about motherhood, and, in a tour de force, excavates the deep, gripping roots of misogyny. Hatred for and resentment of women has distorted every aspect of life, including medicine, which is stymied by sexism in many ways, such as scientists' failure to fully grasp the intricate and wondrous symbiosis of pregnancy. Steeped in literature, art, and science, Hustvedt draws on the fruits of her research and shares harrowing personal experiences as she challenges assumptions about slippery aspects of being, from genetics to empathy, borders physical and mental, notions of purity and impurity, and the anti-intellectualism behind the initial failure to respond responsibly to COVID-19. Hustvedt is a mind-revving investigative thinker and a commanding essayist who stirs the waters, overturns stones, opens curtains, and lifts veils with authority, refinement, and cogency.

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Starred review from October 1, 2021
Another outstanding compilation of essays from Hustvedt. As in her previous standout collections, the author shares personal, familial stories as well as incisive ruminations on a breadth of literary, political, arcane, and germane subjects. These 20 essays and lectures, 12 of which have been previously published and/or delivered in some other version, were penned between 2017 and 2020. The first pieces are more biographical than those that follow. Early on, Hustvedt deftly chronicles her mother's time in Nazi-occupied Norway as a student at the University of Oslo, her grandmother's life in rural Minnesota, and her own burial plans. Although each essay is a stand-alone piece, their cumulative effect is staggering. Themes related to sexual hierarchies abound, whether the author is investigating Wuthering Heights, childhood patterning, or artist Louise Bourgeois. "The simple fact that every person begins inside another person haunts motherhood," she writes. Throughout, Hustvedt questions maternal archetypes and ideology: "Mother ideas invade mothering with a stark morality of good and evil that rarely touches fathering"; "Pregnancy is a chimeric state, and the chimera is still a terrifying animal because it involves mixing"; [Misogyny] is a strange hate...because every human being was born from a woman or person with female reproductive organs"; "That the body, emotion, and nature have been associated with passive femininity, and the mind, reason, and culture with active masculinity is a given in the Western tradition." The author, one of our most appealing literary polymaths, quotes innumerable resources, and she maintains a pleasingly nuanced balance between striking originality and intellectual synthesis. Pluralism also resonates as a topic relevant to both parenting and literature. "Human beings engage with a book, especially a novel, with an intimacy that does not pertain to most other inanimate objects. Reading is a form of ordinary possession of one person by another," she writes, delineating why art cannot be confined to a fixed location nor books (like motherhood) to a single meaning. Brilliant and utterly transfixing.

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