Yet Mother Land isn’t just a hatchet job. It’s too antic and unpredictable in its sympathies to be that. Jay’s portrait of the verbally extravagant Floyd is a treat, whether they’re feuding or in cahoots. His take on his progenitor reveals as much about Jay as it does about her. When he writes, 'Mother wanted praise, needed attention, craved to be noticed and marveled at, and like a tantrum-prone two-year-old, she wanted independence,' he could be describing himself. If this is a self-portrait, it’s a scathing one ... Theroux, fusing anguish and glee as he picks at the same raw scabs for 500-plus pages, evokes something truly memorable: a realm many come from, to which some of us have no desire to return.
...[an] exercise in self-regarding arrogance and self-pity ... And still, I sort of liked it. As with some of the more gruesome Thomas Hardy novels (Jude the Obscure comes to mind), reading Mother Land is like watching a slow-motion car crash ... Theroux can tell a story when not occupied with his narrator’s need to enumerate old hurts and settle old scores ... Mother Land is an exercise in mean-spirited score-settling. It’s also fun ... Is style enough? Shall we read this Bible-size rant for its prose? The reader must decide for him- or herself. As for me, I enjoyed Mother Land against my will.
Paul Theroux has finally taken the plunge with Mother Land, a stunningly perceptive and wickedly funny autobiographical novel that will no doubt infuriate his family members and thrill his readers … The focal point of Mother Land is, of course, Mother — a cold, manipulative shrew fond of making hideously thick pea soup and telling her brood that their failings are ‘their own goddamned fault.’ Her shortcomings are infuriating and at times hilarious … Theroux skillfully captures the hazards of returning home in late middle age — the feelings of failure and defeat, the sense of déjà vu and returning to a childlike state, and the depressing realization that in witnessing a parent’s decline, one is getting a grim preview of one’s own impending fate.
Theroux’s writing is robust as ever, but this story is overly repetitive, filled with countless metaphorical comparisons of the family to uncivilized brutes ('a savage tribe that practiced endocannibalism, feeding on ourselves,' goes one typical riff). And the dramas that surround mother as she ages past the century mark tend to be well-worn matters of money and property, along with slights real and perceived. That goes a long way toward suggesting that family life can be a death by a thousand cuts, but it makes for a long trek in a hefty novel. A sodden study of domestic resentment.
One of the novel’s big surprises is an audacious ploy that revives an old scandal and mixes reality with fiction. The book includes text from a blistering review of a novel by the fictional Jay—which is in fact taken from a real-life review of Paul’s novel My Other Life by his brother Alexander Theroux. The effect is disorienting, if clever. As the pages turn, though, Theroux seems determined to describe every event during years of family discord, with the result that the novel is bloated with dramatic incident, and while each event provides a new spin on Mother’s outrageous manipulation, readers may want Jay to grow up and leave his toxic family long before the end.
...the dark satire of Mother Land, the fictional chronicle of one family’s struggles with the most manipulative of matriarchs. Theroux’s new novel follows the adult members of the large and unruly Justus clan of Cape Cod, in the aftermath of Father’s hospitalization and eventual death ... As he recounts his version of his family story, JP acknowledges the unlikelihood of seven siblings existing in any kind of harmony ... Page by page, his Mother Land is engrossing and amusing, a sharp-eyed domestic comedy of greed, resentment and the ties that strangle ... The Justus kids are clearly defined characters, each with recognizable tics and traits, but they don’t change much over time ... Without stooping to sentimentality, the resolution of Mother Land is both moving and apt, the comedy and the tragedy deployed in equal measure.
With fury, rage and spite, it seems. Theroux’s new novel Mother Land has as an epigraph the famous lines from WB Yeats’s 'Remorse for Intemperate Speech': 'Great hatred, little room, / Maimed us at the start. / I carry from my mother’s womb / A fanatic heart' – which pretty much sums up the tone of the book ...the object of Theroux’s articulate rage is the narrator’s ancient mother – referred to throughout simply as Mother – and his many siblings, whom he carefully describes with utter contempt, one by one...will quickly find correspondences between Theroux’s life and work and the life and work of Justus ... There are dozens of insights and aperçus throughout the book not only about the mysteries and challenges of family life but also about the writing life.
Essentially, it’s a 500-page whingeathon about JP/Theroux’s large, dysfunctional Cape Cod family … Let it be said that Theroux retails the snap back and forth of snarky dialogue to great effect, that he has an acidic sense of the inanity of clichés, and that his account of the psychological set-up is very plausible. It’s very funny, in bits. But the novel, if that’s what it is, is a baggy monster. And — the hazard of describing a compulsion to repeat oneself — it does nothing but recapitulate … Where’s the art? Where’s the selection and shaping? Had Theroux attacked this material with the tools of a novelist, which he undoubtedly owns, he might have shaped a venomously funny 150-pager out of his experience.
