A sometimes raw, always luminous exploration of motherhood, martyrdom, and women’s untold stories
By the time the unnamed protagonist of Book of Hours goes into labor, the reader has followed her through more than 100 pages of distinctly female bodily unease, from an adolescent eating disorder to adult fertility struggles sharpened by the dehumanizing realities of the modern medical industry. Thirty more pages are devoted to her experience of giving birth, in all its harrowing detail. As the novel observes, these are the kinds of stories that have traditionally gone unspoken, and it is a testament to the deftness of author Ellen O’Connell Whittet’s prose that Book of Hours never feels like overcorrection. The novel is as much about joy as it is sorrow, but it is especially about joy and sorrow shading into one another in ways that make for both uncomfortable and incisive reading.
The novel’s protagonist, referred to simply as “the woman” (or, later, “the mother”), is a thirty-something French teacher living in California with her husband, Ted. A lapsed but nostalgic Catholic, the woman has had visions of saints since she was a child and dreams of one day translating into English Le Roman du Mont-Saint-Michel—in particular, its account of a pilgrim to the abbey who, having gone into labor on the road back to the mainland, found herself miraculously shielded from the rising tide. The story fascinates the woman on multiple levels but speaks most poignantly to her longstanding desire to become a mother, and to the pain that that desire causes her even as she conceives and gives birth.
Whittet’s willingness to linger in that pain—to feel out its contours without fully resolving or explaining them—is what gives the novel its deep emotional power. Yes, much of what the woman goes through reflects the struggle to come to terms with her physicality in a society that surveils the female body. And yes, this struggle is nothing new: The woman’s eating disorder develops at the intersection of a boyfriend’s unwanted sexual advances and her exposure to the many female saints who fasted to the point of starvation. Even here, however, there is a tension between erasure and empowerment that the novel recognizes: “They learned holy women took up less, not more space—that their inner yearning was big enough to swallow their frail bodies. This was key to not being seen, and therefore not being subjugated.” This tension reaches its fullest and most complex expression in Whittet’s depiction of motherhood. There is a moment when, looking at her newborn daughter, the woman has the piercing realization that her child will one day die; the association of motherhood with sacrifice and suffering is not merely the result of societal conditioning, Book of Hours suggests.
If the novel’s comfort with ambivalence is its greatest strength, its missteps mostly reflect the urge to over-explicate: A conversation with a priest who credits his prayers with the baby’s safe delivery is a bit on the nose, and the resolution to a subplot involving the woman’s brother, who died in infancy, is perhaps too tidy. These moments are rare, however, and are vastly outweighed by the cut-glass quality of Whittet’s writing elsewhere: sharp but delicate. The woman’s characterization is similarly subtle. She functions as the everywoman her anonymity implies, but with enough mismatched edges to render her distinct as an individual; her snarky texts with her sister, Nora, jar plausibly with her generally unassuming demeanor. Easy to relate to but still very much her own person, she is a perfect vehicle for a novel that centers on an experience as common and yet particular as motherhood itself.
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