Matters of Life and Death

Kate Tateman, 31, a poet and some-time academic, discovers she is pregnant with her first child at about the same time she learns that her mother, approaching 60, has been told she has inoperable lung cancer. This juxtaposition of a birth and a death foretold offers some fairly obvious ironies and occasions for pathos, almost all of which Jayne Anne Phillips avoids in her third novel, MotherKind (Knopf; 291 pages; $24). Instead of ruminating on the metaphysical significance of her premise and the story that springs from it, Phillips concentrates on the day-to-day details of ordinary existence suddenly afflicted with extraordinary pressures and the conflicting tugs of joy and grief.

Kate's ailing mother Katherine comes to live in her Boston house; the baby, Alexander, is born after 36 hours of labor on a Christmas morning. "It's amazing," Katherine tells her daughter, "how nature slaps women with everything at once--you take care of a new baby 24 hours a day, just when you're most exhausted." For a fee, a local firm called MotherKind provides cooking and cleaning and moral support for the new mother's first few weeks. Then, "MotherKind was finished; Kate herself was MotherKind."

And her care-giving responsibilities extend beyond her infant and her mother. Matt, the baby's father and an internist at a Boston HMO, has two young sons from his first marriage, which has recently ended in divorce. Kate was not the cause of their parents' breakup, but the boys treat her with suspicion and sometimes open hostility. And then there is Matt himself, who had been her lover for only eight months when Kate became pregnant and saddled with responsibilities. They plan to marry in the June following their son's birth, but Kate occasionally wonders whether he will still want to--and why he would.

She looks back with amazement at the untrammeled single life she enjoyed not so long ago. "It was a world in which no one was dying, no one was being born; a half-life, floating world, a bubble from which she observed and recorded and made of her observations an alternate world of association and image, a world as real to her, as present, as the food she ate. She was too busy now, too tired, too occupied with taking care and keeping up, too drenched in sensation, to think about living, to draw conclusions; she ate to keep going, to stay awake, to stay competent, to be healthy, to feed her baby, to get everything done. The interior world had receded, replaced by other lives and their attendant mysteries."

Such distractions from contemplation are, of course, merciful, leaving Kate less time to brood over her mother's inevitable descent toward death. But her attention to detail can sometimes try a reader's patience. When her father, long divorced from her mother, pays a visit, Kate makes them breakfast from "a box of Shredded Wheat for her father (two biscuits carefully broken up in just enough milk to make them edible) and All-Bran for Katherine (with Sweet'n Low because of her diabetes, half a banana, whole milk to encourage weight maintenance)." This is probably too much of a good thing. For the most part, though, MotherKind marshals details in a passionate but indirect evocation of loss.