Kabak, Carrie: Cover the Butter
he last straw for Kate Fenshaw isn't so much the disgusting residue from her son's party that greeted her return home after a weekend away--the congealed egg on the wall in the kitchen, the pool of some stranger's urine by the back door--but rather her husband Rodney's reaction to the mess, to what she'd had to do to make things right: sheer indifference. TV on, Rodney barely listens to her complaints, and something inside Kate snaps. It was a long time coming, we learn, as Kate falls later into an alcohol-washed sleep, and we fall with her out of the book's prologue and into Kate's past. We land thirty years later in 1965 and watch Kate's sometimes heart-rending struggles to assert her independence from her sharp-tongued mother Biddy, a woman who doles out her love so stintingly that Kate remains hungry for more of it for the rest of her life. For the next thirty years Kate never really manages to shake off her mother's dampening influence. Her life follows the usual arc: college and marriage, friendships and motherhood. She is by no means miserable, but true happiness is precluded by her relationships with her mother and her spouse: she is smothered by the former's expectations, and virtually ignored by the extraordinarily egocentric Rodney.
Comments