The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer

What did I come here for? Why did I walk, in the spring, along a mile of pavement? Do I want a bed rest, a barbecue, a clock like a plate or a satin stole or a pepper mill or a dozen Irish linen tea towels, printed, most beautifully, with the months of the year? April brings the primrose sweet, scatters daisies at our feet. I am beginning to cry. I stand in the bloody great linen department and cry and cry quite soundlessly, sprinkling the stiff cloths with extraordinarly large tears. Oh, what has happened to you, Mrs. Enterprise, dear? Are your productions limited, your trusts faithless, and what of the company you keep? Think of all those lovely children, dear, and don't cry as the world turns round holding you on its shoulder like a mouse.

We take for granted, I think, the idea that a purely domestic life can be stifling for women. The idea has its opposers and malcontents, who are powerful and numerous, and in practice we still reject it in a thousand ways, but at the very least no one is surprised to hear someone articulate the idea that a life consisting of only childbirth and child-raising could not be enough for a woman. Penelope Mortimer's The Pumpkin Eater seems at once like a message from another world, where such thoughts were so inconceivable as to be inarticulable--but there are moments, too, where it feels like a message from just yesterday.

The novel opens with the narrator, known only as "Mrs. Armitage," talking to a psychiatrist about her home life, as they try to get at the root of her depression. She is on her third marriage and her umpteenth child; there are so many children, in fact, that Mortimer never tells us how many, describing them as a barely individuated mob of wants, needs, and complications. Her husband, a successful screenwriter, is an inveterate cheat, and her accounts of his evasions and cruelties are beyond infuriating. Mrs. Armitage is articulate, even poetic--this is a novel with at least three or four perfect sentences, which is saying a lot, I think--but vacillating and abstract; though it is clear her malaise is the result of the strangling nature of a woman's family life there are no summative speeches or a-ha epiphanies that let her, or us, understand its precise workings. Her husband Jake--he gets a first name--is also vacillating and abstract, but in a way that casts the burden on her to understand. Her sadness is her own to justify, but so are his roving affections.

Mrs. Armitage has everything a woman is supposed to want: a husband, money, children. A woman sees her picture in the newspaper with all her children, and writes to her, begging her to solve a discontent that is nearly identical to her own. Mrs. Armitage imagines writing back:

Dear Mrs. Evans, my friend. Dear Ms. Evans, for God's sake come and teach me how to live. It's not that I've forgotten. It's that I never knew. A womb isn't all that important. It's only the seat of life, something that drags the moon down from the sky like a kite and draws the sea in and out, in and out, the world's breathing. At school the word "womb" used to make them snigger. Women aren't important.

The Pumpkin Eater is a hard sell: I can think of a dozen novels that tell similar stories in ways that are mostly dreary and realistic. Even Joan Silber's terrific Household Words struggles, I think, to make these narrative seem fresh, even as they remain badly needed. But The Pumpkin Eater dazzles because of its weirder symbolic elements: the nameless children, for one, and a glass tower that she and her husband have been building in the English countryside. For most of the novel it stands as a symbol for a life just out of their reach, a life that will be possible after the next child, or after her sterilization and no more children. In the end she ends up, after a final breakdown, escaping there alone, only to watch from a window as, like Macbeth sieged in his castle, her horde of children walks over the hill to come and claim her. It's tragic, frightening, dispiriting; the whole book is a cry of despair without any kind of political program or hope of resolution.