Review: The Push by Ashley Audrain

It’s always difficult to separate the quality of a book from your own instinctive, emotional reactions to its contents. The Push certainly pushed – if you’ll excuse the pun – my buttons on two issues: finding motherhood difficult, and the fragmentation of a relationship once children become a part of a couple’s lives. It’s worth noting I don’t have children of my own, but these are two themes which have always produced a strong emotional response in me.

With that said, there’s plenty of other thematic material which could unsettle a reader. The central premise of the book is that Blythe, who comes from a line of women whose mothering skills are negligent at best and abusive at worst (the absence of any kind of trigger warning about this content is something I hope remedied in the non-ARC versions of this text). Blythe gives birth to a daughter with the immense trepidation that she will fulfil the prophecy established by her mother and grandmother as a parent, and struggles when she is unable to form any connection to Violet. However, as Violet grows, she becomes increasingly concerned that she isn’t the problem but rather that Violet is, as the avoidant, and the outright hostile behaviour she exhibits around Blythe is absent around Fox, Blythe’s husband and Violet’s father. One wonders if the nomenclature of Violet is deliberate, as it is only a consonant off ‘violent’. Perhaps that’s just me, though.

From pretty early on, it felt as though this book were simply an update of the 2003 novel (and subsequent film adaptation) of We Need to Talk About Kevin. Obviously there are differences; the gender of the child in question is switched from a boy to a girl, but the similarities struck me immediately.

A key element to books labelled as psychological suspense and thriller – as is this one – is that they sow uncertainty within the mind of the reader. In The Push, it felt as though that uncertainty was supposed to come from of not knowing what Violet would do next, but more overwhelmingly, whether what Blythe was seeing was real, or all in her head. It felt as though the lack of clarity – and again, this is conjecture on my part – was supposed to be generated by the fact that Blythe comes from a familial history of women whose personal demons make them abusive mothers. It feels as though Audrain wanted to use the neglect and mistreatment Blythe suffered from her own mother in order to cast doubt over whether what Blythe sees is real, or heavily warped by her abuse-riddled experience. Is Violet putting on an act around her father, or is it that Blythe’s discomfort with motherhood generates hostility from her child? Is Violet actually a little psychopath, or is Blythe so accustomed to seeing abuse that it’s a pattern she sees everywhere?

That, at least, is how I understood the book was supposed to unfold. Except it seemed pretty obvious from the get-go that Violet was in fact a psychopath and was more or less behind whatever Blythe feared she’d done.

I imagine that the layers of uncertainty around what Blythe was or wasn’t seeing were meant to be further built up by Fox, the husband. In the way of many recent thrillers that place women at the forefront, Blythe’s claims are entirely dismissed by her husband, heightening her self-doubt about what she thinks she’s seeing. It’s part of a trend exploring how women are ignored or made to doubt themselves by the structures and norms of a patriarchal society.

Except Fox is a caricature of an asshole husband figure. From the moment Blythe becomes pregnant, he expects her to fulfil certain obligations of motherhood, and when she fails to conform to that role (for example, she struggles to breastfeed Violet), he blames her rather than acknowledges the difficulty many women experience in motherhood. It’s truly infuriating to read. Of course, men like this do exist, and the expression of female rage at such unsupportive chauvinistic male expectations and behaviours via stories is an important one to draws attention to it. However, I’m not sure that someone so two-dimensionally horrible adds complexity to a novel like this, nor does that absence of any nuance lend itself to furthering any ambiguity in the narrative.

I suspect this is experience for me was enhanced by the narratorial voice. The style of the book is unusual in that it’s written to Fox. The ‘you’ form of direct address holds its own accusatory sense throughout the novel. Certainly, it feels as though Audrain holds Fox indirectly and directly responsible for a significant amount of the way events unfolded. However, right near the novel’s conclusion, there’s a strange scene between Fox and Blythe in which Fox recounts a basically psychotic incident that he hid from Blythe and the two of them have a good chuckle about it!? I understand that part of Blythe’s journey is letting go, but this seemed entirely out of place given that the incident in question would serve as a huge piece of evidence to the suspicion she harbours about her daughter through the whole book.

I read the book quickly, as I was desperate for Violet’s psychopathy to be determined by other people, and for there to be some kind of consequence to the torment she unleashes upon her mother. For that at least, it should be noted that the book slips by and has a certain compelling element. However, I found this a hard read, leaving me unsettled and frustrated in turns, not simply because of the actions of the characters, but because it felt at times like the story was trying to do three separate things rather than bring those disparate elements together in a way that told a compelling and genuinely chilling piece of narrative in which the unreliable narrator, marginalisation of women’s voices, and psychological aspect lead to a good piece of storytelling.

The Push is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.

Will you be picking up The Push? Tell us in the comments below!

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Synopsis | Goodreads

‘The women in this family, we’re different . . .’ 

Blythe Connor doesn’t want history to repeat itself.

Violet is her first child and she will give her daughter all the love she deserves. All the love that her own mother withheld.

But firstborns are never easy. And Violet is demanding and fretful. She never smiles. Soon Blythe believes she can do no right – that something’s very wrong. Either with her daughter, or herself.

Her husband, Fox, says she’s imagining it. But Violet’s different with him. And he can’t understand what Blythe suffered as a child. No one can.

Blythe wants to be a good mother. But what if that’s not enough for Violet? Or her marriage? What if she can’t see the darkness coming?

Mother and daughter. Angel or monster?
We don’t get to choose our inheritance – or who we are . . .

The Push is an addictive, gripping and compulsive read that asks what happens when women are not believed – and what if motherhood isn’t everything you hoped for but everything you always feared?

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