The Spectacular by Zoe Whittall

​    Spectacular presupposes its own expectations. It would be hugely ironic and quite sad for the novel with a. title like that to turn out to be a middling mediocrity.  And sure enough, it begins spectacularly…boldly, excitingly, it promises all the spectacular things, poised on a brink of awesomeness like Missy, the protagonist (well, one of them) herself.
    It begins like this…a 21 year old musician about to set off on tour with her punk band tries desperately to do the responsible thing and have her tubes tied. Because she wants to party her way through the tour like a proper punk, because she doesn’t trust the partners she (quite indiscriminately) chooses or herself or condoms, because she hasn’t had the kind of nurturing experience with her own mother and it’s left her convinced she shall never want kinds of her own. Missy has many very reasonable reasons.
      And because it’s 1997 and because our society is then as it is now very patriarchal and sexist and because America in many ways has always been true to its puritanical ways of yore no one is willing to help her and she is constantly and consistently told she will later change her mind and give in to her biology.
     And so Missy goes on the tour with her tubes free and untied and promptly gets knocked up.
Meanwhile her storyline alternates with that of her estranged mother, Carola, whose hippieesque ways (as a form of her rebellion against her own strict and repressed mother) have led her from city life to a commune to a yoga cult. Carola is an interesting character, ebcuase although she did become a mother at a young age and in spite of her many reservations, she has never quite taken to it naturally and eventually left it altogether, her marriage, her commune, her daughter…in what seems like a profoundly selfish act which in fact for her was pure self preservation.
     And then there’s a sidebar of Ruth, Missy’s father’s mother, whose life is briefly (page percentage wise) recollected as she is getting ready to wrap it all up and let it all go. Ruth has had been married to a blatant cheater and her only joy in life has been her son and then his daughter, Missy. 
    So the first section of the novel presets the stage for a fascinating multigenerational drama of unhappy marriages and challenging motherhoods. It’s so well written and engaging that you don’t even need to like or relate to characters to completely immerse yourself in their journeys. Plus it has such a strikingly original and (it shouldn’t be but it is) bold message of…maybe not everyone is cut out to be a mother and that’s ok.
    And then the novel skips time, 16 years of it, and becomes every clichés out of the women’s fiction playbook Sure, it’s more hip, more queer, more challenging than most of those, but the bottom line is babies, babies, babies. Everyone wants then, everyone needs them, they give life meaning in the way no other thing or person can, etc.
     It’s almost as if the author just plopped her ovaries on her keyboard for the second section of the book, set her metronome to biological clock and went to town on it. All the originality of the initial premise, all the bold subversive dynamics of it…thrown right out of the proverbial window. It’s so hugely, spectacularly disappointing. And it pretty much eclipses all other aspects of the novel. Which is a crying shame, because it’s so good otherwise. There are such clever parallels between all the female characters in the book, the ways their choices sort of echo each other through the years, from abandoning pursuit of former education to finding love late in life, etc. But in the end, it’s an estrogen party through and through, with diapers all over it.
     What began as such a fun and awesome book, because yet another baby book. And this novel will work for you in direct proportion to where you are on the babies subject. Which means for me it didn’t do all that much and certainly not as much as it might have. Loved the writing, loved the character development, didn’t care for the message. But if you’re looking for a perfect Mother’s day read about imperfect mothers, this is for you Thanks Netgalley.