Mother for Dinner

by Shalom Auslander

Genres: Humor & Satire; Religious & Inspirational; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

‘Extremely funny, weirdly touching and acute about families’ – Guardian
‘Daring, provocative and controversial . . . a work of genius’ – Scotsman
‘Terrifically funny . . . Close-to-the-knuckle farce with a big beating heart’ – Daily Mail

Seventh Seltzer has done everything he can to break from the traditions of the past, but in his overbearing, narcissistic mother’s last moments, she whispers in his ear the two words he always knew she would: ‘Eat me’.

This is not unusual, as the Seltzers are Cannibal-Americans, a once proud and thriving ethnic group, but for Seventh, it raises some serious questions. Of practical concern, she’s six-foot-two and weighs over thirty stone – even divided up between Seventh and his eleven brothers, that's a lot of red meat. Plus, Second keeps kosher, Ninth is vegan and Sixth is dead. To make matters worse, even if he can wrangle his brothers together for a feast, the Can-Am people have assimilated, and the only living Cannibal who knows how to perform the ancient ritual is their Uncle Ishmael, a far from reliable guide.

Beyond the practical, Seventh struggles with the sense of guilt and responsibility he feels – to his mother, to his people and to his unique cultural heritage. His mother always taught him he was a link in a chain, stretching back centuries. But he’s getting tired of chains.

Shalom Auslander's Mother for Dinner is an outrageously tasty comedy about identity and inheritance, the things we owe our families and the things we owe ourselves.

The new book by the author of Hope: A Tragedy – ‘the funniest novel of the decade’ Sunday Times

Release date: September 22, 2020

Publisher: Riverhead Books

Print pages: 272

Sample

Mothers taste awful.
 
They’re revolting, head to toe (the head is the worst party). No amount of seasoning will change that, ask anyone who’s consumed one. You can broil them, sous vide them, dehydrate them and turn them into jerky. It won’t help. Even their smell is awful; toss one on the grill and you’ll think someone’s burning tires, which, with a bit of aioli, would probably taste better than mothers.
It’s not a gender thing. Women taste no worse than men, and often taste better; much depends on the preparation, of course, but men tend to live sedentary lives which gives them a smoky flavor that isn’t to everyone’s liking. Women, on the other hand, tend to be more active and live longer, their meat more lean, their flavor more subtle.

But mothers - specifically, women who have born a child - are a very different story. Mothers tend to live much longer, which leaves them gamey and dry, their years seasoned with disappointment and heartbreak, their deaths often precipitated by long terms of confinement to bed, which stiffens the muscles and joints.

As they said in the Old Country: When a dead mother beckons, no one wants seconds.
 
Not that fathers taste good, mind you, but men on average die younger, and often suddenly.
 
They’re no Peter Luger, but they beat the hell out of mothers.
 
‘What about mothers who die young?’ you wonder. ‘Do they taste good?’

Yes, they do.
 
They’re delicious.
 
It’s a terrible irony of which only the ancient Cannibal people are aware: The younger the deceased, the sweeter the meat.

The sweeter the meat, the more bitter the heartache.
 
•  •. •
  
Seventh Seltzer was at work in his office, high above Manhattan’s bustling Soho district, wondering how many Burger King Whoppers (double bacon, extra cheese, no lettuce) his mother could eat before she dropped dead. She had been eating them for three years now, twelve a day, every day, trying, as was the tradition, to fatten herself up for death.
A hundred? he wondered. A thousand.
Tops.
 
No way she could eat more than a thousand Whoppers, he thought. He was way off.
Seventh had been dreading his mother’s death for years, even before she starting eating Whoppers. He knew the moment was coming, approaching like a storm he could not escape but only hope to endure, to survive, in some fashion, and he knew what she was going to ask of him when her last moment arrived.

She was going to ask… that. It.

If he would… y’know.

She would say the words – she’d been waiting to say them her whole life – but Seventh could not; he would not even think them. But he knew what they were, and he knew, too, what his answer would be when she asked; that despite every promise he’d made to himself over the years, despite his burning determination to move on, despite his desperate emotional need to turn his back on her and their unique cultural heritage, he was going to weep, and wipe his tears and say, ‘Yes, Mudd, yes.’

‘Mudd?’ Doctor Isaacson had asked early in their consultations. ‘It’s what we called our mother,’ said Seventh.

‘Why?’
 
‘Depends who you ask,’ said Seventh. ‘Doesn’t it always,’ said Doctor Isaacson.

Seventh hadn’t seen his mother in over a decade. Then, three years ago, his sister Zero had phoned and told him she had begun eating Whoppers (double bacon, extra cheese, no lettuce), a dozen day, every day, in order to fatten herself up for death. Zero was concerned by her behavior, and asked Seventh to intervene. He phoned Mudd that afternoon.

‘Mudd,’ Seventh said, ‘what are you doing?’ ‘I’m dying,’ she said.

‘You’re dying,’ he replied, ‘because you’re eating Whoppers.’ ‘I’m eating Whoppers,’ she said, ‘because I’m dying.’

Doctor Isaacson had cautioned Seventh against engaging with her, pointing out that Seventh was always more depressed when he spoke to her then when he didn’t. Seventh decided to phone her regardless, and took it as a minor victory that he had resisted going to see her. Mudd took it as a major victory that he had phoned, and knew that he’d eventually come.

‘Fine,’ he had said to her. ‘Do you what you want. Eat your Whoppers. But I am not coming over.’
Implying that he hadn’t lost.
 
‘You phoned,’ she said, ‘that’s all that matters.’ Implying that she had won.

Fuck, he had thought.
 
Now, three years later, he sat in his office doing the grisly math of a dozen Whoppers a day for a year.

‘Siri,’ he said to his phone, ‘what’s twelve times three-hundred and sixty five?’
 
‘I have found what you’re looking for,’ said
Siri. ‘Twelve times three-hundred and sixty five equals four-thousand three-hundred and eighty.’
Four and a half thousand Whoppers a year? thought Seventh. No way she’s eating four and a half thousand Whoppers a year.

It was morning, but outside his office window the sky above the Hudson River was turning the dull, oxidized grey of meat left out too long. An early winter snow was approaching, catching the city off-guard, but Seventh had too much work to worry about it; his desk was buried beneath a mountain of unread manuscripts, each of them, he knew, another tedious version of what he had taken to calling The Not-So-Great Something-American Novel.

It was all anyone wrote these days, and all Rosenbloom, his boss, cared to publish.
 
The Not-So-Great Something-American Novels had a few basic elements, which Seventh, in his boredom and frustration, had taken to rigorously labeling and codifying. The Something- American Hero’s Journey – they were all journeys, God help him, and they were all heroes – consisted of a number of basic steps. Step One he named Arduous New World Journey, the dangerous, misery-laden journey from the Somewhere to the American (occasionally by car, sometime by train, usually by boat, the less seaworthy the better; rafts are a favorite ever since Twain, second only to the ever-popular Clinging To A Piece Of Driftwood) with a fifty-fifty split between those protagonists who are Victims Fleeing Some Greater Evil and those who are Innocents Propelled By Unrealistic But Noble Dreams. This step is followed by the brief but critical Dashed Dreams Leading To Utter Hopelessness – dreams of freedom, wealth, safety or love, any dream will do as long as it’s shattered (in the real critical darlings of the genre, all four types of dreams will be crushed, a technique Seventh referred to as a Hardship Royal Flush).

Immediately following Dashed Dreams Leading To Utter Hopelessness comes Step Three, Determination in the Face of Systematic Repression. This and Step Four: Fight for Acceptance, make up the bulk of these stories, wherein the main character, pure of heart and wide of eye, learns that the New World he has adopted is a filthy toilet down which he is inevitably going to be flushed. Noble these people are, though, and they do not relent, eventually reaching Step Five: Desire Revealed As Flaw, in which the main character realizes the problem is not the New World, but rather their desire to be there, a spiritual lacking within the hero that causes him or her to prefer the shallow, vacuous, superficial rewards of the New World over the deeper, more spiritual honors of the Old. This step is critical to the book’s success, Seventh knew, for nothing so assures the cultural acceptance of a book these days as the rejection of the culture that gave birth to it.
The endings of these books are the most changeable element, and they adapted with the times; for a long period, before the sun began to set on the American Empire, these stories ended with a step Seventh called Defiant Resumption of Hope, in which despite all his hardships and travails, the protagonist refuses to give up hope, for himself and for America. They were very popular in their time, suggesting as they did that all you needed was hope to make it in America (it also suggested, conversely, that if you didn’t make it in America, it was your own damned fault - but this didn’t seem to bother readers as much as it did Seventh). More recently, though, the writers of Not-So-Great Something-American Novels were opting for an ending that irritated Seventh even more than Defiant Resumption of Hope, one he referred to as Triumphant Rediscovery of Unique Cultural Heritage, in which the beleaguered immigrant comes to the not unexpected realization that America is a vast cultural and spiritual wasteland, and that the culture he was fleeing from is the one he needs to return to, Marcus Garvey-like, minus the whole supporting- the-Klan and blaming-the-Jews bits.

Seventh was repelled by every manuscript he read. It wasn’t their sameness; he was in publishing after all, he was used to sameness. For Seventh, though, identity had always been a prison he longed to escape, and yet lately, all around him, the prisoners were proudly raising their shackles overhead and cheering for their bondage. Seventh worked on thirteenth floor of his office building, and if he was certain the impact of his skull with the sidewalk would kill him, he’d have jumped out the window twenty Not-So-Great Something-American Novels ago.
He hadn’t bought a new manuscript in months, and Rosenbloom had been in to see him about it that morning.

‘But they’re terrible,’ he said to Rosenbloom. ‘All of them?’ Rosenbloom asked.

‘Yes. All of them.’
 
‘Well, we have to publish something,’ Rosenbloom said. ‘Why?’ asked Seventh.

‘Because we’re publishers,’ said Rosenbloom.

‘That’s unfortunate,’ Seventh said.
 
‘What’d you think about that Croatian-American one?’ Rosenbloom asked. ‘I thought that had promise.’

‘Which Croatian-American one?’
 
‘The Pro-Choice-Lesbian-Croatian-American one.’ Seventh shrugged.
‘It’s no different than the Heroin-Addicted-Autistic-Christian-American one,’ he said. ‘The Heroin-Addicted-Autistic-Christian-American-Hemophiliac one, you mean?’ ‘No,’ said Seventh. ‘The Heroin-Addicted-Autistic-Christian-American-Diabetic one.’ ‘The Type Two one or the Type One one?’
‘Both,’ said Seventh.
 
Rosenbloom shrugged.
 
‘We’re a tribal creature, Seventh,’ he said. ‘Division is the way of man. And women. It’s in our blood. Have you ever looked at a map of human migration? We began in Africa, as one, and got the hell out as soon as we could, braving storms, oceans, beasts, famine. Why? Wanderlust? To see Paris in the springtime? No – because we couldn’t stomach each other, not for one more minute. Hell is other people. Sartre said that, but Early Man would have said it sooner if he used language. Someday, Seventh Seltzer, mark my words, everyone will have a nation of their own.
Not every people – every person. It’s the only way he’ll be satisfied. Or she. Seltzerland. Rosenbloom Village. Abdullahville. Hernandez Town. One foot by one foot squares, evenly divided, all around the globe, surrounded by walls ten feet high, topped with razor wire and colorful flags, everyone in their own square singing catchy jingles about how their square is Number One, how God chose our square over all other squares, how this square foot is my square foot and God help the person who tries to take it from me. And you know what we’ll want then?’

‘Guns?’
 
‘We’ll already have those,’ said Rosenbloom. ‘We’ll want stories. Tales. Legends. About our square’s suffering and oppression, about our desperate journeys, about our founder’s valiant struggle to make our square the Number One square that it is, and about the evil enemies that to this very day try to take our square away from us. In Seltzerland they’ll tell stories about the dirty Rosenblooms; in Rosenbloom Village, they’ll dream of wiping the Abdullahs off the map; and Abdullah will peer over his wall, watch Hernandez move into the square beside him and think, There goes my property value. We’re obsessed with our squares, with our people, with our pasts. That’s why mankind has no future. Or womankind. That’s the bad news.’

‘What’s the good news?’
 
‘It’s a growing market,’ said Rosenbloom.
 
He picked up a manuscript from Seltzer’s desk.
 
‘Is this the one about the Blind-Alcoholic-Latin-X-Sri-Lankan-American?’ he asked. ‘Yeah,’ said Seventh. ‘It read just like the one about the Gender-Neutral-Albino-Lebanese-
Eritrain-American.’
 
‘Just find something,’ Rosenbloom demanded, tossing the manuscript on Seltzer’s desk before stomping out the door.

And then Seventh’s phone rang.
 
Seventh glanced down and saw the familiar name on the screen.
 
Mudd.

Mudd said that when First was a baby, he couldn’t pronounce the word Mother, and it came out as Mudd.
‘Bullshit,’ First said.
 
He swore early.
 
‘If I had named her,’ First insisted, ‘it would’ve been something a hell of a lot worse than Mudd.’
Second agreed with First.
 
Third agreed with Mudd, but Third always agreed with Mudd.
 
Fourth, the smartest of the bunch, stayed out of it, declaring simply that a myth becomes truth if enough people believe it.

First despised Mudd – only Second hated her as much, but he hated her mostly because First hated her – and the names he called her were indeed worse than ‘mud.’ He called her the A word and the B word, the C word and the D word, the E word and the F word, he called her every word, in fact, but the M word – Mother. He was the first to be born and the first, eighteen years later, to leave.

Don’t answer the phone, Seventh thought. He answered up the phone.

Fuck.