The Baby

Marie Darrieussecq, translated by Penny Hueston

Text Publishing

Otago Daily Times, May 25th 2019

It is a truth universally acknowledged that other people’s children are only interesting to the extent that they remind you of your own. This being so, Marie Darrieussecq’s exploration of motherhood will resonate with each person differently depending on the correspondence between her story and theirs.

Part diary, part love letter to her first-born child, The Baby is closer in form to an extended prose poem than a novel. In a series of vignettes and meditations based on notes made after her son’s birth, Darrieussecq captures the fleeting, endless drift of life with a small child and explores the difficulty of retaining one’s individuality in opposition to the self-effacement of maternity;“[T]the dreamy absence of self in the character of the mother, the first-person narrator.”

Observations range from the highly specific to the general, from her unnamed boy’s first attempts to turn over, speak, and crawl, to the way a newborn graduates from stranger to baby as its gaze focuses and moves out of its body, a physical and emotional transformation that (ideally) corresponds with the mother’s own ability “to find childcare, to start work again, to heal the body…to turn towards the world again, to be happy again.”  

Other sections veer into the confessional in a way that is both distancing and disturbingly intimate (is she overly obsessed with her son’s genitalia, or is her incestuous desire for him mitigated by her ability to satisfy it through writing?). Although the book is as much about the humour and wonder of motherhood as its difficulties, it is the latter that I identified with most strongly: The boredom and suffocation of living day after day in a world where everything revolves around the baby’s needs. The conflict between the desire for time and space of one’s own and the anguish of being parted from this tiny, helpless being for a single moment. The fear of all the things you cannot protect them from. And the guilt for not loving one’s child unconditionally as a good mother should.

These are feelings that Darrieussecq understands only too well and about which she is unflinchingly honest. Still, they deeply coloured my response to The Baby as a whole, as did my jealousy that she had the foresight to record the good memories whilst I did not. I also found many of the anecdotal sections less interesting than the philosophical and reflective ones, although this was tempered by their brevity.

These criticisms say more about my own state of mind and what I bring to this book than her ability as a writer, however. A selective re-reading for quotes and thoughts for this review was much more satisfying than the initial, immersive experience. It is also interesting to consider how this work relates to later novels; first published in 2002, it contains echoes of works to come, including a brief synopsis of White and a haunting line on the final page that she will later develop into Our Life in the Forest. As the author herself observes, “a book only becomes necessary in the actual writing…its ability to make us aware of the world”. For her, it obviously satisfies the first requirement. Whether it achieves the second will depend upon the reader.