Mother For Dinner is an excoriating satire on the contemporary obsession with identity. It has a good deal of Shalom Auslander’s customary brilliance and wit, but has its flaws, too.
As in the brilliant Hope: A Tragedy, Auslander uses an outrageous premise to illustrate what he sees as the dangers of relying for one’s identity on a sense of both current and historic oppression and injustice. Here, he creates a Cannibal-American community living covertly in the USA having come from the Old Country (no-one remembers precisely where) several generations ago. A myth about their establishment in the USA is created, embellished and nurtured – by no-one more so than Mudd, monstrous matriarch of a Can-Am family and a parody of every over-zealous orthodoxy, who “loved her people, so much so that, as a matter of pride, she despised all others.” Seventh is one of her sons who has broken free but is drawn back as the family gathers for Mudd’s death – after which, by tradition, they are expected to eat her.
It’s a clever, grotesque device which enables Auslander to throw Orthodoxy dependent on ancient stories and tradition (of all kinds) into sharp and unforgiving focus. This passage is a good example: “...nobody remembers exactly what Remembrance Day was established to remember. Something happened— of that there can be no question— and whatever it was, it was bad. It was tragic. It was the most tragic thing that ever happened, otherwise why would they remember it, even if they didn’t? All that is known for certain is that somewhere (no one can remember where), on some particular day (no one can remember which), something terrible happened to their blessed ancestors (no one can remember what), and it is important that they never forget it, whatever it was and whenever it happened, and that they curse the names of those who perpetrated whatever it was that was perpetrated, whoever they were, and whatever they did.”
He also takes well-aimed swipes at some publishing trends exploiting ideas of identity and other targets. The message, that identity is important but becomes damaging if it is insular and wholly inward- and backward-looking, is very important and he can be very, very funny about it. However, toward the end the grotesquerie got just a bit much for me and rather obscured what Auslander was trying to say.
Mother For Dinner is often brilliant and hilarious and makes good, important points. You do need to be prepared for some pretty gross scenes, but I’d say it’s well worth it. Perhaps not the absolute gem that Hope: A Tragedy is, but still very recommendable.
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