Blood Ties: On Vigdis Hjorth’s “Is Mother Dead”
Is Mother Dead | Vigdis Hjorth | Verso Books | October 2022 | 352 Pages
I picked up Vigdis Hjorth’s third novel in the days after another Christmas spent with my family. We had watched Love Actually over the holidays, a story in which love exists in every iteration with no significant motherhood story; sweet, young Sam mourns his dead mother and grows closer to his stepfather, and Emma Thompson’s role as mother is secondary to her role as wife-to-unfaithful-husband. We watched The Family Stone (she dies from breast cancer!) and the new Will Farrell and Ryan Reynolds musical comedy Spirited (cancer! again!). I read Lynn Steger Strong’s Flight, a novel about a holiday gathering after the passing of the family matriarch. And, of course, we watched our handful of Hallmark movies and Netflix originals featuring orphaned or half-orphaned protagonists.
Relationships between dead mothers and their children seem to attract writers and audiences, especially around the holidays. They tug at the heartstrings but allow for saccharine resolution as family members band together to overcome their grief. If not wholly simple, loss is at least concrete (and one-sided). When, on the other hand, the mother is alive, there’s the potential for a relationship that falls outside the expectations of compassion, selfless love, and cookie-baking during a holiday season when conflict, miscommunication, and familial strife are that much more taboo.
Vigdis Hjorth’s Is Mother Dead, in a vivid translation from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund, takes place in part around Christmas and New Year’s. The protagonist’s mother is not, in fact, dead, and as a result, there are no rose-colored glasses through which to look back at their relationship. The two have been estranged for thirty years, ever since Johanna left the marriage and career her family expected of her. She traveled from Norway to Utah, where she married an artist, became an artist, and raised a son. The sporadic texts and birthday cards she receives from her mother and sister, Ruth, cease when she decides not to attend her father’s funeral. “My presence would seem intrusive,” Johanna ruminates. “I didn’t even think of travelling back or of going to the funeral. Nor did they ask me. Ruth wrote that he would be buried at such-and-such time and place, and that was it.” The absence solidifies the estrangement, and the day after his funeral, Johanna receives one final message from her sister that says she had symbolically killed her mother. “That was how they phrased it, as far as I recall,” she writes. And at that moment, a mother and daughter who had already been on fraught ground became, to Johanna, “actual enemies.” Neither can step outside their own insular narrative; stubborn and egotistical, both believe themselves to have been irredeemably wronged by the other.
Like Hjorth’s previous novels (also translated into English by Barslund), Is Mother Dead is told through unnumbered chapters in an intimate first-person. Sections vary in length, from one sentence to one paragraph to five pages, each jumping from one vignette to the next without leaving the reader time to catch their breath. The narrator might move from a fond recollection of her childhood Advent calendar to an observation of the elk outside her window to a series of increasingly desperate, accusatory texts she sends her sister, whom she believes is preventing their mother from answering her calls, and then back to a tranquil description of her studio and surrounding forest. With its stream-of-consciousness speculation, insecurity, and confession, the occasionally dated passages read like diary entries of the sort that would be hidden under mattresses or buried in the backyard.
A fresh start wouldn’t be possible even if I could make her listen to and somehow acknowledge my story, we’re too old for that, but perhaps we could reach a kind of truce. A muting of what I imagine is her constant internal tirade against me, which must be tiresome, also for her; ungrateful, disloyal, attention seeking, heartless.
When Johanna moves back to Norway for a retrospective of her work, she ceaselessly considers the pros and cons of repairing her relationship with her mother. She analyses her own intentions and emotions and doesn’t ever reach a conclusion. In these sustained meditations, question marks are more abundant than periods: “I’ve come to terms with losing my mum, but I can’t come to terms with Mum coming to terms with losing her daughter?” In another, she wonders, “If I were to learn that Mum was dead or terminally ill, how would I react?” And, “What does Mum say about me to her hairdresser? Should I find out where she goes and make an appointment there?”
After hundreds of pages of obsession, when Johanna does finally act, it is unexpected. In an early entry, Johanna discovers her mother’s address: “I could drive to Arne Bruns gate 22 to see where she lives. I wouldn’t dream of it.” Twenty pages later, she reconsiders: “What if I were to go to Arne Bruns gate 22 and ring her doorbell? The thought terrifies me.” Then, on an unassuming autumn day, Johanna narrates actions she had previously considered unthinkable: “Mum doesn’t know what kind of car I drive, Mum isn’t interested in cars … Yet I don’t want to park too close…” Johanna’s mother is Schrödinger’s cat; to her daughter, she is both alive and dead until seen with Johanna’s own eyes.
Hjorth builds suspense through tedium and repetition interspersed with increasingly frequent bouts of her main character’s unpredictability. Johanna’s one-sided account of her childhood and estrangement from her mother invites skepticism only after she begins wildly crossing boundaries, each more serious than the last. In the novel’s final act, Johanna’s reality converges disastrously with the dreamed-up lives she imagines her mother and sister living just miles away. In a harrowing series of scenes, she steals and sorts through her mother’s garbage, stalks family members for hours on end, smashes her mother’s window, and breaks into the apartment. In a violent confrontation with the terrified elderly woman, readers are thrown into a new narrative, one in which Johanna may not be a timid victim nor her mother a benevolent matriarch eager to repent or forgive. All of a sudden, reconciliation is impossible.
And yet, not all is lost. In the midst of this matrilineal strife, Johanna contemplates her most prominent work, the painting that significantly widened the rift between her mother and herself, “Child and Mother 1,” and for the first time sees herself in the “mother [who] stands in a corner wrapped up in herself with dark, introverted eyes.” She wonders if she has never shown this painting to her son for fear “that he might recognize [her] as the mother turning away.” The characters of Is Mother Dead captivate in a way made possible only by Hjorth’s unrelenting commitment to exploring the shameful contours of a charged mother-daughter relationship. And if she were dead, Johanna’s mother could not complicate her daughter’s version of events. Readers would make their way through a very different story, one in which the divides between Johanna and her mother maybe weren’t so wide after all. Yes, maybe their relationship had always been warmer than she remembered. And in the final scene, snow would begin to fall. Johanna would make hot chocolate. She might lay flowers on her mother’s grave, and readers would consider it a happy ending.