The Push by Ashley Audrain

Book Review by Colleen Lutz Clemens

“Page-turner.” When I press The Push into people’s hands, I use this phrase to describe Ashley Audrain’s first novel. The novel’s frame story has the reader wondering why Blythe is watching a family she seems to know but cannot approach. The rest of the narrative is Blythe’s manuscript she hopes to present to Fox, the man she is watching through his living room window on Christmas morning, that explains how she ended up exiled from the perfect Christmas scene of the novel’s introduction. From that moment, Blythe takes the reader into the darkest recesses of her psyche, and while the story seems fantastical in some ways, in others it seems completely quotidian. But never is her psyche boring.

I appreciated the honesty with which Audrain draws the experience of being a new mother. Though to the rest of the world Blythe seems like a mother who is managing to hold it all together, her inner narrative shows the reader what a new mother may truly be experiencing: confusion, grief, resentment, and distrust.  It is challenging not to despise Fox during this time in their lives—and perhaps that almost-caricature of the clueless husband is the novel’s sole blemish. While Blythe doubts her ability to mother Violet, she takes the reader through the backstory of the terrors her mother suffered at the hands of her grandmother. This trauma is mirrored by Fox’s perfect-looking upbringing and the presence of his mother in their lives.  When Sam is born, Blythe no longer doubts her mothering abilities and starts to see that perhaps the problem is those around her—including Violet. The violence and trauma of mothering only escalates when the unimaginable happens on an ordinary weekday.  

The big question revolves around “the push” that drives the plot—revealed halfway through the story—but the novel explores many kinds of pushing:  the push of labor, the push of mothering while trying to be a writer, the push of society’s expectation on new mothers, the push of marriage and the strains it endures when parenting, the push of aging as a woman in a culture that sees women’s bodies as disposable once they have been “used” by children, a sentiment Blythe articulates succinctly: “You used to care about me as a person—my happiness, the things that made me thrive. Now I was a service provider. You didn’t see me as a woman. I was just the mother of your child.” Audrain’s exploration of all of these pushes compels the reader to push past one’s bedtime and to push away all other work so they can finish the book—and then gasp aloud at the last page, as I did.Don’t pick up this book unless you can clear your calendar, because once you start it, you will have to finish it.  

Colleen Lutz Clemens is a professor of English at Kutztown University where she also directs the Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities program. She is the mother of one and the teacher of many. Her musings and publications are housed at her blog.