THE GOOD MOTHER

What makes a mother unfit to raise her own child? That's the surface issue in this often engrossing first novel. Accessibly and attractively told in an easy confessional style, Miller's very current conundrum examines the baggage of guilt one can carry into sex and motherhood. Anna Dunlap, who narrates, is a conscientious divorcee feeling her way toward an independent new life for herself and three-year-old Molly. The scene is Boston, where Anna is just settling in—piano pupils, part-time laboratory job, day-care for Molly—when she becomes involved with Leo Cutter, a loose-hanging artist who lives in a loft and doesn't own a suit. Experiencing sexual fulfillment for the first time, Anna's commitment to life with Leo is total (at his insistence she has an abortion). And she sees no obstacle to bringing Leo into her life with Molly—a home life that includes casual nudity, showers together and Molly's occasional hops into bed with Mom. . .and Leo, who seems to be getting all of mother's attention. Then, Anna's former husband, remarried and properly middle-class, learns from Molly that she has physical contact with Leo that seems to go beyond permissible boundaries. The case goes to court, and Anna sees her life picked apart by others. Throughout, Anna remembers some early family relationships, underlining repression and distance, and her failure to achieve distinction as a pianist—a failure that propelled her into adolescent sex and its "Nauseous sense of falseness in myself." With Leo, there's a "boundless Eden." But after the custody battle, Anna drives Leo away with "an irrational hatred," and—embarked on a tentative and solitary life—she will, for moments of pleasure, return to the piano: "Other instruments require a kind of connection and exposure I am incapable of." A Kramer vs. Kramer custody fight; a most convincing tot; and an appealing confidential style that points up some matters of current controversy (what are the legal and societal boundaries of child abuse?): a potential winner.