The Push by Ashley Audrain

Page-turner! What it lacks in substance it makes up in entertainment value.

What if you felt incapable of loving your own child? The Push examines the narrator’s conflicted relationship towards a daughter with whom she never naturally bonds and who she suspects might have a satanic streak. Against the narrator’s intuition that her daughter is a psychopath stands the pressure from her husband, and the world, for her to love her unconditionally. She notes that, “We all expect to have, and to marry, and to be, good mothers,” and blame is heaped on her for any failure to do so.

A similar theme is also explored in the 2021 film The Lost Daughter, a screen adaption by Maggie Gyllenhaal of Elena Ferrante’s novel by the same name, available on Netflix. I highly recommend it.

The Push takes place mostly in real time, however there are brief flashbacks to the narrator’s childhood, as well as the childhood of her own mother – all riddled with traumatic mother-daughter dynamics. This chain of abuse raises the question - is the narrator accurately perceiving her daughter, or is she herself the unhinged one - reenacting the neglect and cruelty she experienced in her own childhood? This unresolved question propels the narrative forward and the author does a fantastic job of keeping it tantalizingly unclear until the end.

By portraying the wounds of prior generations, the plot taps into fascinating themes of inherited trauma and how unhealthy emotional practices pass through generations. The capacity to bully, maim and murder are coming to be understood as manifestations of a person’s unresolved mental health issues, rather than markers of an “evil” disposition. The Push does not, however, offer a sophisticated analysis of these phenomena. Instead, the book falls back on horror story tropes, failing to achieve its full potential as a social or psychological commentary.

That being said, the more sophisticated book might be less purely entertaining and fun.