THE MOTHERS

A convoluted account of the women in a womanizer’s life, recounted by Botsford (Out of Nowhere, not reviewed) in a rambling narrative that goes nowhere ever so slowly.

If there’s any truth to the old saw that women flock to men who are bad for them, Jim Mount must be irresistible. A true mama’s boy (with an Italian mama, no less), Jim spent part of his childhood in Sicily but grew up in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. His mother, Felicità, never fully adjusted to life in America, especially after her older son Tony died, her husband abandoned her for the West Coast, and she concentrated all of her affections on one thing: young Jim, whom she adored. From his earliest years, possibly because of this maternal devotion, Jim seemed phenomenally capable of inspiring affection and trust in women—from his childhood sweetheart (and sometime lover) Aissa Knoblauch to the four great amores of his life (each receives her own section here). There’s his first wife Louise, a Chicago painter and intellectual who introduces Jim (a lawyer) to the city’s bohemian set and gives him six children before leaving him for another man. After Louise comes Maria, Jim’s great love, whose marriage to him is short and full of turmoil and regret. After Maria there’s the beautiful, rich, bored, married, and self-destructive Natasha, whose suicidal manipulations eventually make her as distasteful to Jim as she was to her own husband. Francine, Jim’s last, is cold and dispassionate and unsatisfied with Jim after years of matrimony and more children. Aissa, the main narrator, seems to be the only woman both fond of Jim and under no delusions about him. Perhaps that’s why he does her so little harm.

Relentlessly focused on an impossibly opaque character, Botsford’s tale becomes too dense and impenetrable to hold interest for the whole of its length.