MOTHER COUNTRY

EXPLOSIVE NOVEL EXPLORES POWER IMBALANCE BETWEEN PARENTS AND STATE

One mother commits the grievous error of letting her five-year-old daughter start kindergarten without the required vaccination.

Another is in trouble for letting her two-year-old play alone in the yard. A mother with purple streaks in her hair loses custody of her three youngsters on grounds of inadequate childproofing in their apartment. Then there’s the young mother whose three-year-old authorities removed after the mother posted a video of one of the youngster’s tantrums on Facebook.

We read about such cases on page 85 of Jessamine Chan’s explosive debut novel, The School for Good Mothers. So it seems reasonable to ask — could such things happen in the real world? Chan is quick with the answer.

“Oh yes,” she says. “People can even get in trouble with their social media posts.”

In fact, when it comes to laws governing child protection, parents can get into trouble for a heap of things — a point underscored in this story of a mother at the end of her tether emotionally and what happens when, in the course of a very bad day, she takes an action that will have shattering consequences.

The novel, the movie rights for which actress Jessica Chastain’s TV production company have already snapped up, is sparking comparisons with Margaret Atwood’s dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale. But Chan is cautious about such comparisons, and such flattery.

“I’m thrilled beyond my wildest dreams to have any comparisons at all to The Handmaid’s Tale,” the 43-year-old author says by phone from her Chicago home.

“To me, (Atwood’s is) the perfect novel,” Chan says. “But what I think is different about my book is that it’s much more minimalist. I didn’t examine the system of government as Handmaid does. My world-building is much more rooted in real life.”

Meaning that, despite its vaguely futuristic nature, there is a recognizable culture in place in her novel — and it’s one that could run amok. Chan doesn’t deny the necessity for child protection services. There is no grey area, she emphasizes, when it comes to incidents of child abuse. Nevertheless, a “kernel of rage” had been planted in her mind when she began investigating case histories of “bad” parents whose children had been removed by child protection services. She became convinced of wrongs being done. This book, both unsettling and sometimes darkly satirical, is the result.

It became major industry news when it triggered a fierce bidding war within the publishing trade. But Chan, a former Publishers Weekly editor, maintained a measured approach to the hype, carefully telling early interviewers that although she wanted readers to be entertained by her story, she also wanted them to close the book asking questions — “about the right of governments to take children from their parents, about the incredible pressure we as a society, and we as women, place on mothers.”

The novel tells the terrifying story of Frida, a stressedout single mother who makes the mistake of her life when she leaves her toddler Harriet in an Exersaucer while she makes a quick visit to the office. “What could happen in an hour?” she asks herself. A lot, as it turns out. Frida’s absence is reported, a Family Court judge rules that she is an unfit mother, Harriet is deposited with Frida’s ex-husband and his new girlfriend and Frida is sentenced to a government-run reform school where she has a year to learn how to be a good parent.

Chan allowed her imagination free rein in creating an institution in which a new arrival is greeted with the school’s guiding mantra — “I am a bad mother but I am learning to be good” — and is assigned a robot doll for mothering. Frida’s doll Emmanuelle, bristling with artificial intelligence and programmed to monitor the extent of Frida’s devotion to her, is crucial to a satisfactory outcome.

How far-fetched is all this really?

“Parenting classes do exist,” Chan says. “If you get in trouble with child protective services, you may be required to attend parenting classes. You may have to pass a number of tests to satisfy child welfare. So I took these elements of truth in an insane, terrifying direction.”

The book happened at a critical time in Chan’s life. “My partner and I were wrestling with whether or not we should have a baby and I was certainly feeling the pressure of the biological clock. For me, it was a very intense decision — probably the biggest in my life. I was thinking about motherhood and what kind of mother I’d be and freaking out about it.”

At the same time, she was becoming more aware of the unpleasant things that contemporary society could inflict on parenting. A controversial New Yorker article shocked her with its account of the “cold and clinical” treatment meted out to a mother who had left her son at home for several hours. To her, it read like science fiction, not a real parenting situation — and her subconscious seized on it.

“I just felt so angry on that mother’s behalf. What was terrifying about that story and really pierced me emotionally was that she never got her son back. So that planted the idea in my mind that the actions of one day can change your whole life.”

She would find further reasons for her novel. “I was startled to learn about a case, I think in the Washington suburbs, where older children were allowed to walk home from school by themselves and their parents got into so much trouble.” There was also the experience of a friend who had left her children very briefly in the car while she dashed inside a store to retrieve a wallet she’d left on the counter, and returned to find a passerby on the verge of calling the police.

Recently, Chan was reading a popular children’s book from the past to her five-yearold daughter and having to explain to the bewildered child that “in the olden days of the 1970s, children were allowed to walk to school by themselves — so that’s why the kid in this story is walking alone.”

Chan knows that when it comes to the child protection system, there are no easy answers, and that she’s entering murky waters with this book. But she believes there are issues that should be addressed.

“It only takes one case where child protection makes a mistake and sends children back to parents who end up killing them, which of course, is the greatest tragedy of all,” she acknowledges. But such incidents can affect the fate of other parents being investigated — sometimes in a way that may lead to gross injustices. “So I think I was also interested in the larger issue of government intrusions into family life.”

So what does she want a reader to take away from the novel?

“I think of it honestly as a story about a mother struggling to win her child back,” Chan says simply. “But I also think it can read as a cautionary tale just because of where our society is headed at the moment.”