Custody the Good Mother

By Paul Gray

This first novel by a previously unknown author has managed to climb quickly onto best-seller lists. Such a feat is infrequent enough to prompt the question why. True, The Good Mother garnered some enthusiastic reviews, and the publisher, evidently sensing a winner, launched a barrage of advertising and publicity. But if this sort of support automatically spelled success, the nation would be crawling with best sellers. Genuine word-of-mouth, pass-along reader enthusiasm cannot be sustained by ads alone. Books that seemingly come out of nowhere to capture wide audiences do so primarily because they offer exactly what a considerable number of people are ready to hear.

Knowingly or not, Author Sue Miller, 42, has constructed a parable eerily in tune with the waning of the sexual revolution. The heady sleep-arounds of the 1960s, the freewheeling no-fault divorces of the '70s, have given way as the '80s wane to some sour, after-party second thoughts. Could it be that liberation has created problems as crippling as those produced by the bad old repressions?

Although never formulated explicitly in The Good Mother, this question haunts Narrator Anna Dunlap's recounting of her peculiar ordeal. Admitting that their marriage has sunk into irremediable tedium, she and her husband Brian, a lawyer in Boston, agree to an amicable divorce. Anna gets custody of Molly, 3, and child support from Brian, whose firm is transferring him to Washington. Settling with her daughter into a Cambridge apartment, Anna hopes to support herself by giving piano lessons and taking a part-time job running rats through mazes at a local university.

Everything works fine until Anna bumps into a painter named Leo Cutter at a local Laundromat and, she confides, "my world ripped apart." What started out as a tale of female independence veers into romance. Leo awakens Anna to feelings she has never known before: "I became with him, finally, a passionate person." Besotted with her new lover, Anna does not notice that her daughter is being exposed to some unfamiliar experiences. When Leo stays ! over, casual nudity becomes the order of the night. On one occasion, the child comes to their bed while they are making love. On another, when Anna is away at work, Molly watches Leo take a shower; what follows is either a brief, innocent mistake or an instance of child molesting, depending on who makes the judgment. Molly's father, hearing his little daughter talk of this event, goes understandably bananas and instigates legal proceedings to wrest custody of the child from her mother.

Up to this point, the novel could easily pass as a jumbled meld of popular movies: An Unmarried Woman meets Kramer vs. Kramer. What removes The Good Mother from its predictable ruts is Anna's willingness to give Leo the boot out of her life, if doing so will persuade the judge to let her keep Molly. She testifies at the trial: "I'd be willing not to see Mr. Cutter again." Romantic heroines, after all, are supposed to choose emotion over responsibility. But that was when there were suitable romantic heroes. Try as she might, Anna cannot convey the magic and charm she perceives in Leo. To the nonsmitten observer, he seems to be little more than a foul-mouthed idler and sponge, an unmitigated egotist who is capable of remarking, when Anna tells him that their lovemaking has resulted in pregnancy, "I'm just not anxious to have any kid. There's a way in which I see it as a form of self-indulgence, really."

Miller has concocted a fable that reassures several constituencies of readers. Feminists can applaud the pluck of the heroine and the swinishness of the men who oppress her. Moralists can point with satisfaction to the grueling consequences of Anna's licentiousness, the anxiety, humiliation and the trial itself, what she calls "the price I had to pay." And the novel generates enough suspense to tug even those readers who know they are being hoodwinked into its wake. But a shuffling of cliches does not qualify as a literary breakthrough. The author seems skillful enough to have tried something truly daring -- a story, say, about a woman who breaks up with a boring painter and finds ethereal sex with a corporation lawyer. But such is not the stuff of which best sellers are now manufactured.