Walt Ruding

An Evil Motherhood is a client's tale retold by a lawyer, (etc.), of a young man, ostensibly shanghaied by his legacy-coveting mother's agents and confined to a lunatic asylum. But there is more to it than that, both in the story and the method in which it is told. I gave it three and one half stars because, while a very good book, it is not a great one - but there are moments in it where the potential of its author shines. It certainly is not the overblown, overwritten "yellow nineties" show more relic I thought it might be. In short, anyone interested in modernist literature would not have to consider this curious and entertaining book a guilty pleasure. It is an odd and well-written novel. A sort of Bildungsroman of psychic collapse (He rots before he ripens), it prefigures the phenomenon of idealistic youth fallen victim to the cynical realpolitik of social institutions (as banal as that sounds now). show less