After birth /

"A BABY OPENS you up, is the problem," explains Ari, who feels she didn't actually give birth to her 1-year-old son because he was delivered via cesarean section. "There's before, and there's after," she observes. "To live in your body before is one thing. To live in your body after is another." Which might be the simplest way to communicate the impact of Elisa Albert's brilliant new novel. "After Birth" cuts open the body of literature on mothering, birth, feminism, female friendship, female hateship - whether academic treatise or poem or novel - and wrenches out something so new we barely recognize it. Wet, red, slimy, alive: a truth baby. Ari's unrufflable and devoted husband, Paul, useless as a household handyman and totally out of his depth as a post-partum partner, teaches at a college in a depressing, postindustrial ghost of an ungentrified town in upstate New York. But he's exquisite in bed and an ideal father: "He got up with the baby every single morning at dawn. That kind of man." Ari takes little Walker to day care so she can sit in a cafe and not finish her women's studies dissertation, simultaneously aching to retrieve her child and luxuriating in every minute that isn't commandeered by a baby, "of which even the best are oppressive fascist bastard dictator narcissists." Mina Morris, visiting poet and former riot grrrl of obscure/cult-band fame, moves to town and, immensely pregnant, soon becomes Ari's lighthouse. Desperate to wrestle some meaning into or out of being a mother, desperate to still be a person, not to have disappeared into a role, Ari sees in Mina her perfect woman: never desperate, unafraid, uncaptivated by anyone's idea of the perfect woman. What begins as Ari's Internet-fed idolization of Mina becomes, after Mina gives birth at home, a rapturously intimate friendship of a kind rarely captured in novels. And perhaps rarely experienced in life. If feminism is at all gestational and is at all about how a collective consciousness endeavors to assemble a theory of equality and then birth it into practice, then we ought to have been in labor long enough. If our feminist waves are trimesters, our baby ought to be ready. Is this the moment we make the call, that we decide it has to come out, if not by sheer will then by the blade of a knife? Albert's novel poses that question as a shriek of a carnival ride inside a spinning antigravity chamber, the ultimate trippy trip. It's an underground punk show, a zine of irreverent how-to-be-a-mother koans, an app for dealing with the imaginary voice of an abusive, long-dead mother. Its language is not only the scalpel but the flesh - it hurts, in both senses. It's obscene, reckless, vicious, hilarious and above all real. Albert has inherited the house Grace Paley built, with its narrow doorways just wide enough for wit and tragedy and blistering, exasperated love. And no one is better suited to manage that estate, to keep it unapologetically going, to keep its rooms of inquiry open. Paley found the seam where the important and the madcap are stitched together on the underside of life, and here is Albert working that same territory. Her Ari is bold enough to put motherhood up on a pedestal because its sanctity is as undeniable as it is dangerous. But she also wants to be sure you know the pedestal is made of excrement and tears and vomit and breast milk and the very selves of a billion unknown women. No doubt "After Birth" will be shunted into one of the lesser subcanons of contemporary literature, like "women's fiction," but it ought to be as essential as "The Red Badge of Courage." Just because so much of mothering happens inside a house doesn't mean it's not a war: a battle for sovereignty over your heart, your mind, your life - and one you can't bear for the other side to lose. Albert has inherited the house Grace Paley built, with its blistering, exasperated love. MERRITT TIERCE is the author of the novel "Love Me Back."

A year after giving birth to her son, Ari is struggling to find her way in the world of mothering. Sleepless nights and long, taxing days leave her exhausted and suffering from depression. She no longer fits in with the academic crowd she and her husband once called theirs, but she is not comfortable with most other mothers, either. Already lonely, she is left feeling even more bereft when her only two friends go away for a year. That changes when she meets the woman who is subletting their apartment. Mina is older and more self-assured, and she's nine months pregnant. The two women strike up a friendship, and when Mina's son is born, they find in each other the support they need to get through those tough early years. Irreverent, hilarious, and honest, Albert's newest novel loudly decries the isolation of new mothers in today's world. Her opinionated protagonist is sympathetic, if not entirely likable, and will pull readers along on her journey toward a new normal with great humor and wit.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2014 Booklist

Albert (The Book of Dahlia) applies a blistering tone to modern motherhood in this cri de coeur of a novel. Six-months-pregnant Ari couldn't wait to leave Brooklyn for the faded glory of Utrecht, N.Y., and its affordable four-bedroom Italianate with her supportive professor husband, Paul, 15 years her senior. Now, Ari has one-year-old Walker, a C-section scar, and an unfinished dissertation in women's studies. Faculty life isn't the "deranged orgiastic laser show" she dreamed it would be. About the women in her C-section support group she says, "A chore, trying to talk to these women." So Ari pins her hopes for friendship and connection on Mina Morris, former bass player for the Misogynists, a late-'80s all-girl band. Mina is now a poet who is subletting from Ari's friends while they're on sabbatical. Into this thinly plotted story, Albert interweaves insightful portraits of Ari's extended family, childhood friends, and frenemies. Our sarcastic and self-aware heroine never spares us her anger, her epic takedowns ("It had an addictive flavor, hating her"), and her attempts to parse her own internalized misogyny. In lesser hands, Ari might be unlikable, but Albert imbues her with searing honesty and dark humor, and the result is a fascinating protagonist for this rich novel. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.