Of Men and Their Mothers

I loved Medwed's earlier novels, especially Mail and How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life. Maisie Grey is a classic Medwed heroine--quirky, funny, endearing and wise. Her company, Factotum, which organizes the lives of various scattered Harvard professors and Cambridge eccentrics is straight out of a screwball comedy. So is her ex in-laws family business, Pollock Pot Pies, with specialty pies that include "All-white Deluxe, Wings a la King, Drumstick Bangers and Mash." At the heart of this book is the complex relationship between mothers and sons. After years of suffering insults from her hyper-critical mother-in-law, Maisie deals with her son's Goth girlfriend and other motherless chicks with aplomb and loving kindness. As the daughter-in-law to an Ina Pollock clone and the mother of teenage sons, I found "Of Men and Their Mothers" true and deeply touching. Mameve Medwed at her best.

Of Men and Their Mothers is another first-rate novel from Medwed. Clever and funny, the novel is chock full of endearing characters and tackles a fundamental aspect of the human condition with deft and aplomb -- grappling with one's in-laws. I highly recommend it.

Amid all the horrors and stresses of contemporary life, how wonderful to find a writer whose grasp of those tensions is pointed and profound, but who is able to render up her perceptions in such a benign and funny way. I have read all five of Mameve Medwed's novels, and each one is a skillfully composed comic delight. Of Men and Their Mothers is full of vivid, even Dickensian characters, and its observations about life in Cambridge, Somerville, and present-day America are richly rewarding. Simultaneously amusing and illuminating, the novel will whet your appetite for Medwed's earlier four books. Let's hope there is soon a sixth novel as well.

Thank goodness for Mameve Medwed. With "Of Men and Their Mothers," she has given us another smart, witty, perceptive and compulsively readable novel. Margaret Atwood once said that she could identify a story by Alice Munro if it were in braille -- and she doesn't read braille. The same can be said about Mameve Medwed's increasingly impressive body of work. Her ability to deal with the important business of life (relationships, loss, love, and starting anew) in a comedic way is unmatched. I put down "Of Men and Their Mothers" between chapters (very briefly) and ran my fingers across the binding in both admiration and gratitude. This book stays with you. Mameve Medwed's great gift in "Of Men and Their Mothers" is to sweep the reader along on a comedic high, all the while exploring the complexities of the way we live with each other. Bravo!

It always makes me nervous to read a new novel by a writer whose books I already know and like. What if the new one isn't as good? But it's so wonderful when the book IS as good as the others -- and this one is. It's about a woman named Maisie Pollock and her relationships with a piggish overbearing (but believable) ex-mother-in-law, her son's rude waifish girlfriend, a young mother embroiled in a custody battle with HER horrible mother-in-law, and a new man who may or may not be overly tied to his dead mother's apron strings. The writing is somehow both cozy and sharp. It's very funny -- the kind of comedy that looks easy but must take incredible skill to write, and that makes you wince and laugh at the same time. It's about big things -- anxiety, resentment, fear, romantic attraction -- and the nutty small ways we try to hide our feelings, or channel them into socially "correct" behavior. The biggest thing of all is motherhood, and the perennial question about when do you speak up and when do you keep your mouth shut. As with all of her earlier books, reading this gave me a huge amount of pleasure and a lot to think about.