Mothertime - Softcover

Gillian White is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan.

From British journalist White, a wacky, well-written comic novel in which a narcissistic mother is imprisoned in her posh London home by her five young children. Alcoholic ex-actress and divorc‚e Caroline Townsend is a mother from hell. Christmas Eve finds her on a drunken rampage, ripping off the tinsel that her children have lovingly draped about the tree after Caroline's married lover, Bart, has ditched her. When she collapses into unconsciousness, the children, led by the eldest, 12-year-old Vanessa, lock her up in the basement sauna, explaining that they will free her when she becomes a proper mother. They keep her there for three months, inventing artful ruses to explain her absence to the au pair and the housekeeper as well as to Bart, who might want Caroline back, and their father, successful television talking head Robin Townsend, and his new young wife Suzie. All the adults are too self-absorbed--Robin and Suzie are trying desperately to get pregnant--to question the children's alibis except Bart's schizophrenic brother Lot, who decides, after his beloved brother's marriage breaks up, to hunt down the evil home-breaker Caroline. Lot, who proves as winsomely inventive as the children, breaks into the basement of the Townsend home, frees Caroline and then, in an unlikely twist, falls in love with her. Equally improbable is the finale in which new mother Suzie and newborn mother Caroline repair, sans Robin, to the English countryside with Lot and Caroline's five children to embrace a cheerily rustic bliss straight out of Beatrix Potter. Blessed with the gift of fashioning clever metaphors while delivering pungent pronouncements on men, marriage, and motherhood, White is best when she resists trying to make nice to her characters and sticks to skewering them. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.