The Pumpkin Eater
Ratings5
Average rating3.8
The Pumpkin Eater is a surreal black comedy about the wages of adulthood and the pitfalls of parenthood. A nameless woman speaks, at first from the precarious perch of a therapist’s couch, and her smart, wry, confiding, immensely sympathetic voice immediately captures and holds our attention. She is the mother of a vast, swelling brood of children, also nameless, and the wife of a successful screenwriter, Jake Armitage. The Armitages live in the city, but they are building a great glass tower in the country in which to settle down and live happily ever after. But could that dream be nothing more than a sentimental delusion? At the edges of vision the spectral children come and go, while our heroine, alert to the countless gradations of depression and the innumerable forms of betrayal, tries to make sense of it all: doctors, husbands, movie stars, bodies, grocery lists, nursery rhymes, messes, aging parents, memories, dreams, and breakdowns. How to pull it all together? Perhaps you start by falling apart.
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
Written in 1962 and semi-autobiographical, I have to give The Pumpkin Eater credit for a few things. It provides a pretty unique insight into the complexities of mental illness, marriage and the desire to find oneself. The protagonist Mrs. Armitage finds herself drifting through three marriages and an abundance of children before discovering her life has been enraptured by boredom and frustration, being slowly stifled by domesticity and colluding (sometimes quite happily, sometimes feeling she has no choice) in her own oppression. A affecting scene in Harrods where she has a nervous breakdown illustrates this perfectly.
However the book meanders and the last section of the book isn't as tightly written. It made me wish that Mortimer could have achieved the richness of a narrative like Mrs Bridge a book where it felt Connell perfectly captured what he was trying to say within 117 short vignettes. Apart from a few well done passages The Pumpkin Eater didn't have the emotional impact for me unfortunately.
Written in 1962 and semi-autobiographical, I have to give The Pumpkin Eater credit for a few things. It provides a pretty unique insight into the complexities of mental illness, marriage and the desire to find oneself. The protagonist Mrs. Armitage finds herself drifting through three marriages and an abundance of children before discovering her life has been enraptured by boredom and frustration, being slowly stifled by domesticity and colluding (sometimes quite happily, sometimes feeling she has no choice) in her own oppression. A affecting scene in Harrods where she has a nervous breakdown illustrates this perfectly.
However the book meanders and the last section of the book isn't as tightly written. It made me wish that Mortimer could have achieved the richness of a narrative like Mrs Bridge a book where it felt Connell perfectly captured what he was trying to say within 117 short vignettes. Apart from a few well done passages The Pumpkin Eater didn't have the emotional impact for me unfortunately.
“Now these things have been taken from me, but not naturally. I don't know, and now I never will, but I imagine that the natural way is gradual, that you're given time, that you're old enough to accept it, even with relief. What happened to me was sudden and artificial and it was done by people–oh, and by me, of course; I did quite surely to myself what I would never have done to anyone else. But that cruel truth people tell when they're meant to be comforting someone...‘You have only yourself to blame!' It's far worse of course than being able to blame someone else. ‘Only yourself' is terrible...What are the good of such judgements, once something has been done?”
Now, I may not know what I want, or how I want it. I may not love myself enough to save myself. But that burden is mine to carry, and no one else's. The burden (which may not be a burden at all) of me is for me only. Mine. It is not the job of others to take care of me. Do not take that away from me. Do no take me away from myself. A story of a woman falling away, and in turn, apart. I don't know what else to say. Wow, such a profound book. I will be thinking about this for the next few days.
