Review: Mother for Dinner

Mother for Dinner by Shalom Auslander
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is relentlessly offensive and in sustained bad taste…and thank goodness it is.

Our first-person protagonist, Seventh, is the middle child of 12 – or 13 – in the last Cannibal-American family. Their mother, aka Mudd, gave birth to as many sons as possible in an effort to restore her fading people. And now Mudd, who could not have been a worse mother if she tried (though perhaps she did try to be terrible), is dying. She summons Seventh and all the others for the final ritual of her life (or death).

They assemble in order – by Cannibal custom – to eat her.

Yes, that’s disturbing. But Auslander is so funny, so incisive throughout, that it’s inspired.

So, read this just for the laughs, and you’ll find it worthwhile. There are knee-slapper one-liners and there are hysterical scenes.

And then there are the details of Cannibal culture – their rhyming lessons about how to eat their dead, the legends of their forebears tricked by Henry Ford, and their communal disappointment with Jack Nicholson.

But this is ultimately more than just a very funny novel. It’s also a sensitive critique of identity culture, of the impulse to understand our individual lives as linked to – literally “chained” in one of the central metaphors – a communal history. For all that it’s an absurd tale, it’s also a not-so-lightly veiled Jewish-American novel. (And that puts it in the tradition of Catch-22, another deep satire that uses a non-Jewish protagonist to make its cultural point.)

Seventh (Mudd has named her children in ordinal numbers to make it easier of future historians to recount the generation that restored Cannibal-Americans to their full glory) begins the novel hostile to his heritage and angry at Mudd. He tells himself he won’t take her calls…but he does. He tells himself he won’t go back to her home…but he goes. He tells himself he will leave soon into the ceremony…but he stays.

(view spoiler)[Then, around the time I thought I saw where it was all going – that we’d get what I think of as an easy ‘screw all this history’ conclusion – Seventh develops a surprising pull toward everything his generally awful mother tried to inculcate into him. She’d long ago assigned him the task of writing the great Cannibal-American novel, something he determines at the end of the novel to publish…to little fanfare.

That is, he becomes an ambivalent spokesperson for the power of tradition, even when that tradition is constraining and crippling. Most of his siblings walk away in disgust, but he sort-of remains. He never reveals his family history to his wife and daughter – among the joke motifs is that he constantly changes the country he’s supposed to be from – but he advocates for performing the ritual for more than the money they’re promised for doing it. He inherits the ritual objects of his people and then throws them into the East River…as an earlier Cannibal-American called on their people to do. (hide spoiler)]

All of this happens in the professional context of Seventh’s work as a publisher where he explicitly complains about novels that turn on identity narratives. It works as part of the novel, but it’s also catnip to an academic. He’s aware of literary trends, and he’s mocking them – with “he” meaning both Seventh and Auslander.

In other words, this is a novel that tells us the literary questions that it’s asking, and that it goes on to answer in complicated and conflicting ways.

And, given that it’s also a veiled inquiry into communal narrative in general – and Jewish-American narrative in particular – it’s a deeply thoughtful work...

Whomever it might offend along the way.


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