The Sugar Mother by Elizabeth Jolley
Fremantle, Western Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1988 ISBN 09494206296
What to make of this book... As part of my little project to read more Australian fiction one writer who has been on the radar for some time is Elizabeth Jolley, who was one of the major Australian novelists of the 1980s and 90s. I'm not sure that The Sugar Mother was the best place to start, as I found this book to be quite insipid.
The plot of this book is relatively simple - Edwin, a literature professor, is married to Cecilia, a gynecologist. Cecilia goes overseas for a year for work, and Edwin is left to fend for himself. His next door neighbours - Leila, a 21 year old plump ingenue, and Leila's mother (not sure we ever learn her name), a bustling lower-middle-class lady - find themselves locked out of their rented home and Edwin lets them stay the night. This turns into a longer-term arrangement, and Leila's mother notes that Edwin and Cecilia are childless. One thing leads to another and Edwin fathers a child via Leila, under a surrogacy arrangement (Sugar Mother, as Leila's mother calls it). Edwin doesn't tell Cecilia, and falls in love with Leila...once the baby is born, Leila and her mother are due to return to England, but find they can't leave the baby. Edwin is dreading facing his wife, and wonders if in fact he has been taken for a ride and that it's not his baby after all...
In between times we see snippets of Edwin's milieu - his friends, expats like him with the rounds of dinners, tennis and casual affairs (picking up each other's keys at the end of the night). We also understand that Edwin is seen as the old out-of-date academic at the University, while his wife is much more of a go-getter. Edwin initially wanted the baby so that he and Cecilia could have a family, but he realizes as time goes on that it is Leila that he wants - her youth and her passivity.
I had lots of problems with this book. Firstly, none of the characters are very likable. Edwin is a fussy neurotic, Cecilia is childish, Leila's mother is a snobby know-it-all, and Leila herself is a cipher. Edwin's friends are stereotypes of British middle-class. The only sympathetic character is Daphne, Cecilia's best friend from school, who dreads losing Cecilia and Edwin and sees that perhaps Edwin is being taken for a ride both financially and emotionally, by Leila and her mother.
So, if the plot is simple to the point of unbelievability, and the characters are unlikable or ciphers, is the writing any good I hear you ask? No, not particularly. It's not clunky, but there is no style to the prose at all - it's nondescript, and I'm not sure if that is an effect Jolley was aspiring to or not.
It's fair to state that I often have a problem with middle-class stories such as this one, so the premise of this book is not one to which I'd naturally be drawn. That said, I found The Sugar Mother particularly disappointing. Edwin's character, which is so prissy and insecure, doesn't meld with what he does with his friends; he just doesn't make sense in who he is or what he does. It was very hard (for this reader) to become engaged in who he was and what he was thinking and feeling, especially when the story became more and more absurd.
I'll be reading some other reviews and pieces about this book - if this is a typical Elizabeth Jolley work, I do wonder what all the fuss was about. Not recommended.
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