Review of “The Sucking Fish” by Ashani Lewis – The Trials of Having a Difficult Mother | books

WWhen it comes to attempted suicide, Kolya’s mother is a “repeat offender.” Lalita, a human rights lawyer about to be disbarred, craves the attention of her now adult daughter with such ferocity that, when denied, she throws herself into the river, lies down in the middle of the road or drinks cleaning fluid. “She told me it was my fault,” says Kolya, now in her 20s and teaching upscale children in London while hoping to go to art college. “I only did it because I didn’t talk to her.”

Kolya left her mother’s house a long time ago, “because there were often broken dishes… Clothes were cut, wrists were grabbed or pulled.” But Lalita’s two young sons from a second marriage are still at the mercy of their mother’s chaotic parenting, which is at best inappropriate, and at worst abusive or downright cruel. When she was a teenager, Kolya once complained that her breasts were too small; Her mother showed her a picture of a woman whose breasts had been cut off by soldiers.

The fact that Lalita could also be charming and “hypnotized,” with a “wild and bright” soul and lots of “passion,” made it difficult for me—and I’m sure for any reader—to shake off suspicions that she was suffering from some kind of mental illness, if not mania. But here’s where things get confusing: Although there’s a brief reference to “this kind of bipolar parenting,” it’s hard to know whether the author means for us to take it literally. Although I generally don’t care much about how a novel is described on its cover, it’s starting to bother me that this novel is described as “a haunting love letter to childhood, innocence, and imagination.” Love letter? truly? Am I missing something?

Yet Lewis’s writing is endearingly feisty and lively, full of verve and excitement, full of crunchy observation and a wry kind of energy, even if it sometimes falters under the weight of too much detail. Although every situation and character is drawn intelligently and convincingly – Kolya’s toothless, unloving grandmother who runs the orphanage is particularly memorable – it becomes a problem that more than two-thirds of the way through, most of what happens is still firmly in the past. Simply put, there is a limit to how many flashbacks a reader can take. You begin to look forward to a present where things are changing, where people have to make choices, where something—anything—is at stake.

Another small complaint is that the novel seems every now and then to undermine itself in confusing ways. Lalita has tortured her children and repeatedly lied about it, yet we are told that “Kolia is frankly unsure who to believe: her bewildered adult mother or her two children” – surely a nonsensical remark coming from someone who ran away from her mother’s home as a teenager to live with her father?

I’m not a completely unbiased reader: although there’s nothing sinister or dramatic, there are painful reminders here of my relationship with my mother. It left me unsettled and I also felt that what Lewis had offered was not a “love letter,” but something much more interesting: a meditation on self-annihilation, that particular and terrible damage that narcissistic or mentally ill parents inflict on their children. Far from having much to do with “innocence” or childish “imagination,” it is certainly a cry of pure rage, rage and helplessness. Or it should be. Perhaps the most honest moment of all is when Kolya, walking around her childhood home, feels that she is “not even a girl, just an angry, little thing, trying to understand her mother’s actions.”