Natural Disaster by Lisa Owens review – the last day of maternity leave is a comic rollercoaster
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The last day of maternity leave, and an unnamed mother of two decides to stage a “yes day”, full of treats and good feelings. Of course it does not go according to plan: the treats are deficient, misjudged and underappreciated; the good feelings are fleeting, quickly upstaged by anxiety, guilt or humiliation. This familiar-sounding scenario is the simple yet bracing premise of Lisa Owens’s second novel, following her impressive first comic fiction of female-centred modernity, 2016’s Not Working.
The academic E Ann Kaplan once wrote that “motherhood is the major emotional experience of my adult life” – certainly a relatable observation, and reason enough why some writers may swerve going through the experience altogether. But when using it as narrative material, the aim is to render the cluttered yet lonely planet of motherhood in some new way, drawing on the energies of honesty and idiosyncrasy to frame a common, universal adventure as something singular and memorable.
The day begins at 5am, when Felix is woken by his baby brother Rudy, sending the “Three Musketeers” – mother and her two boys – down to the kitchen for a “special” breakfast. The father and husband, also unnamed, is away at a health-tech conference in Barcelona, and remains a shadowy, loaded presence throughout the novel, the focus of various “differently shaped parcels of resentment” including suspicions of adultery and gaslighting, depending on his wife’s experience at any given moment. To wider society – doctors, cashiers – she does have a name: “Mum”, which is how she is referred to during a sticky moment in a shop where Felix has a violent tantrum, and later during the medical emergency which takes over the second half of the book. This blanketing, anonymous term of address is an example of the achingly exact realism Owens achieves in her account, in which a woman’s identity is usurped by the immediate existential requirements of her children; she becomes “a flat, rudimentary approximation of a person, lacking in nuance or finesse”.
It’s the people closely surrounding “Mum” who embody the bold colours and textures of the novel’s precision. Her retired parents are deftly drawn, at once playful and commanding in a crisis, while the children themselves are full of life and entertainment, springing off the page in their convincing rambunctiousness, and also in how much they are loved. The cruel moments of maternal battering, such as “Felix’s bike pedal brutalising her shins every few metres” as she is pushing the buggy in the rain, sit movingly alongside lasting observational description: the little boy’s equal capacity for rage and forgiveness, “a marshmallow of love in his puffy winter coat”. It’s not easy to get children right in novels, but when it is done well they become a winning literary charm.
As we follow the Three Musketeers through the trials of their day, there are occasions where the minutiae of parenthood become perhaps too precise, too involved, and we are taken too thoroughly into logistics, such as the details of acquiring baby paraphernalia from Gumtree and the exact contents of a fridge. This gives Natural Disaster a slightly plodding effect, but it is also, it could be argued, a feature of its realism: the slowing of time that motherhood can bring about, the yawning length of a day that can in turn slow one’s thoughts to fixate on the mundane and prosaic while the “active” world rolls on outside. “Her whole being is marbled through with guilt of it all,” Owens writes in anticipation of her character going back to work, “but a significant part of her has been hungering to return”, to escape the regular plummet into “a black hole of dead-eyed apathy”, as a “pinched, warped, hollow being”.
Amid the humour and viscera of marital squabbles, accidental texts, a mysterious tampon and breastfeeding on the toilet, serious issues are addressed about the modern woman’s practical and emotional responses to “having it all”, and whether any real contentment might be found down that path. Is it better to focus on your children until they are of school age, or to work all the way through using nannies and nurseries, possibly producing more confident, resilient offspring? Is it possible to maintain a sense of self throughout the wonders and woes of the maternal rollercoaster, or do we change irrevocably and for ever, becoming merely an outline, waiting to be refilled? These are eternal, ever-repeating questions, and Owens does not attempt to answer them, only to reflect on the heightened particulars of a singular, emotionally myriad experience. Both sobering and celebratory, this novel is a powerful addition to the literature of surviving procreation.
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