Missing Mom: A Contemporary Women's Fiction Novel About Loss and Remarkable Transformation

By Joyce Carol Oates

Book Overview

Nikki Eaton, single, thirty-one, sexually liberated, and economically self-supporting, has never particularly thought of herself as a daughter. Yet, following the unexpected loss of her mother, she... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060816228
• ISBN13: 9780060816223
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Ecco
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 0.91 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 1.1" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

A poignant novel about loss and family relationships

There's no stopping Joyce Carol Oates. She arguably may be the most prolific author of the 20th and now the 21st century. She spins literary gold faster than most readers can keep up with her gilded publications. Her latest, MISSING MOM, adds to her sumptuous buffet of fictional delights. Returning to the setting of WE WERE THE MULVANEYS --- Mount Ephraim, New York --- Oates's focus moves from upper class struggles to the mundane of the middle class. Gwen "Feather" Eaton, a widow in her late 50s, is a realistic woman, a mother of two daughters who takes in strays and enjoys playing hostess for family events. She's remarkably likable, in fact more likable than daughter Nikki, the narrator of the book. Nikki, with her "inky maroon" hair, is a somewhat aimless reporter involved with a married man. Her disdain for her mother is clear right from the start of the book when her mother's motherly reaction to her new hairdo leaves Nikki upset and thinking, "Before I was through the doorway and into the kitchen. Before she hugged me stepping back with this startled look in her face. I would remember the way Mom's voice lifted on hair like the cry of a bird shot in mid-flight." Nikki thinks and behaves more like a teenager than the 31-year-old she is. When her mother is brutally murdered by an ex-con fifty pages into the book, Nikki blames her mother when she says, "You are to blame for what happened!" and then asks over and over and over again in a shrill, adolescent voice, "Why? Why?" Ironically, the novel begins with Nikki saying, "This is my story about missing my mother. One day, in a way unique to you, it will be your story, too." The women, despite their differences, are a tight family, and the death of Gwen affects them all. Nikki is forced to mourn, to deal with loss and to deal with revelations she had not anticipated. It is Oates's genius and to her credit that she takes the most mundane of things and crafts them with hypersensitivity --- the items in a junk drawer, the mother's care at meal time, the color of Nikki's hair. They are all heightened by the fraught interactions between mother and child at the start of the story and further charged in the time after the death of Gwen. Violence, a common theme in Oates's work, has its place here, but it is the common, the subtle, that is brought to new heights by Oates. Gwen, an unassuming character who might have been lost at the end of someone else's pen, is rendered by Oates to be long remembered. --- Reviewed by Roberta O'Hara

Moms

We all love our mothers but many times throughout our lives, we don't. When we are old enough we can't wait to get away from them: we crave our freedom and when we get it... returning home is often a chore: "I didn't visit home often. I tried not to feel guilty: Mom tried not to make me feel guilty. But a kind of constriction came over me when I returned, an invisible clamp across my chest...When will you get married, Nikki? When will you have children...Without family, what is there?" Nikki and Clare's Mom, Gwen Eaton was a kind woman. A woman who was called "Feather" in high school because her personality and demeanor was as light as one. After her husband dies she dedicates herself to others: teaching swimming to seniors, volunteering, making others feel comfortable...this made her feel good and it made her feel useful. Then one day Gwen is "there" and the next day she isn't. "Missing Mom" is Joyce Carol Oates tribute and heartfelt reminiscence honoring the spirit of her mother, Carolina and as such it is a major departure for Oates. This novel is warm, cozy and basks in the kind of gold, autumnal glow of a life fondly remembered. Gone are some of Oates' trademarks: the grotesque scenes of gluttony and sexual abandon to name a couple. But Oates being Oates she can't help but include scenes like this: "...her face had been virtually remodeled with some kind of flesh colored putty. It was still a round face but appeared flattened somehow...this was a wax-doll face attractively powdered, rouged, lipsticked rose pink to suggest innocence, purity...you were meant to think...Why she is only sleeping...So Peaceful. Except this wasn't sleep, and it wasn't peaceful. More like a coma." Though Clare and Nikki react to their mother's death in different ways, it is Nikki that Oates zeroes in on: "...Mom had been strong, Mom had not been weak and self pitying. But I was made to realize now that grief would come in waves and there would be wave after wave, there was not one big wave to be overcome and endured." Nikki is the black sheep of the Eaton family. She dyes her hair purple, sleeps around and dates married men. But she loves her family deeply. She is in essence the quintessential Oates heroine: one of the walking wounded, Nikki is deeply flawed on a social and maybe moral level but in possession of a soul filled with caring and love. "Missing Mom" is a novel about just that. As Oates states in the prologue: "This is my story of missing my mother. One day, in a way unique to you, it will be yours, too."

Believable characters

I found myself strongly drawn to this story and could not put it aside until I finished it. The mother-daughter-sister relationships portrayed were so real as was the revealed inner life of the main character. I have always enjoyed this authors writing but I also found this oddly compelling for reasons I still cannot identify.

Oddly compelling

There's nothing dramatic or different about the plot and characters of "Missing Mom," but I couldn't put it down and I'm not sure why! This is the story of an ordinary mom in a very ordinary town in upstate New York, with two very ordinary daughters--an older, competent, settled one and a rebellious, angry younger one. Gwen Eaton, called "Feather" in her youth, is the perfect small town woman, a widow in her late 50's who spends her days in a seemingly endless cycle of visiting relatives, volunteering at various community organizations, and worrying over her daughters. The most extraordinary thing that happens to her is her death, a senseless act of violence that no one can believe happened to her (but then again, have we ever heard anything bad said about a random murder victim?) Nikki the younger daughter goes home, at first to clear out the house, but soon to stay and, in a word, grow up. "Missing Mom" is the novel Oates wrote after the death of her own mother at the age of 87. I heard Oates speak about it--she views it as very different from her other work, and indeed it is in its clear plain style of writing, and sheer "ordinariness." Oates meticulously details the average middle class life--the food, the house, the clothes, with its secrets that aren't so very different from anyone else's. In the interview Oates explained how she tried to portray the lives of those who don't live in NY or LA, don't talk about literature and art, don't undergo therapy, but simply show their love through everyday small kindnesses. Nikki discovers how her grandmother and father actually died, and that her mother had suffered through an awful childhood and a broken heart as a young girl. Gwen's tireless efforts to make others happy was her desperate way of staying above it all, floating like a "feather" above the griminess of her life. Seen in this light, Nikki can finally accept her mother's outward perfection. This is a special book for mothers and daughters, but beware of recommending it to anyone who has recently lost a mom. Oates' descriptions of grief are spot on. I highly recommend this book to anyone who still has a mom--you'll appreciate her more for having read it.

An American Family in New York

Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific author with over 100 works of fiction and essays published (see "Foxfire"-1994 and "Blonde"-2000). Her newest creation is a portrait of one family, especially one daughter, who are rocked by a crime that creates the title of the novel. The reader should be aware that this title has two meanings which are the twin themes of the novel. Ms. Oates goes back to re-visit Mount Ephrain in upstate New York (also the hometown of "We were the Mulvaneys"-1996). The secrets uncovered by the daughters, how they made their life choices, and how they cope with their "Missing Mom" is the heart of the book. While this is a short work (at 400+ pages) for Ms. Oates, the story benefits from the lack of overwriting that occasionally detracts from her longer works. This a book to savor over a rainy weekend.