A Lyrical Novel of Mothers, Children and the Unimaginable

Review by Norah Vawter

Joyce Kornblatt’s gorgeously written novel Mother Tongue has such a juicy premise I expected the author to struggle to rein in the melodrama.  In her 40s, Nella discovers her entire life is a lie. Her mother is not her mother, so much as a woman who kidnapped Nella as a newborn from a Pittsburgh hospital nursery. But I was wrong. Not only is Kornblatt more than up to the task of not sensationalizing a sensational story—but the book she wrote is completely different from the book I expected to read. Mother Tongue is quiet, restrained, methodical. If anything it’s a little too slow. But oh, it’s lovely.

Kornblatt is not interested in action sequences or big, splashy scenes where characters yell their grievances at one another. Instead she explores the psychological ramifications of this gutting betrayal and its continuing fallout. As we follow Nella’s mental odyssey—watching her wrestle with her new identity and build up a sense of self that has been shattered—Kornblatt invites us to consider how the unimaginable happens, what “identity” means, and how our pasts, memories, perceptions, and misconceptions govern our lives. A slim volume, a little heftier than a novella, Mother Tongue is told economically with lyrical, lovely prose.

“I am the crime and the narrator-sleuth. I came upon the facts of my existence as one who returns to her home in the midst of a burglary: here is the shattered glass, the rifled drawers, the thief with the booty still cradled in her guilty arms.”

The author of Mother Tongue, Joyce Kornblatt, lived in the D.C. area for many years and taught English and creative writing at the University of Maryland. She’s published four previous novels: Nothing to Do with Love, Breaking Bread, White Water and The Reason for Wings. She moved to Australia in 2003 and teaches writing workshops along with Buddhist mindfulness. Mother Tongue is Kornblatt’s first novel in over 20 years, making this a comeback of sorts, and an impressive one. Published by the small press Publerati, the novel is blurbed by several eminent novelists including Pulitzer-prize winner Jane Smiley.

Kornblatt introduces us to Naomi Gordon, the protagonist, who is born in 1968 in Pittsburgh’s Mercy Hospital to Deborah and Paul Gordon. Her ordinary life is stolen from her when a nurse, Ruth Miller, whisks the newborn from the hospital nursery to a tiny fishing village on Australia’s southern coast. Armed with forged documents, Ruth rechristens herself Eve Gilbert and the baby Nella. The kidnapping is a high profile story, but nobody suspects Eve. She is cloaked in the anonymity of a stranger far from home: she’s never been to Australia, let alone the village of Narooma. She finds work as a nurse and is seen as quiet, pleasant, and respectable.

Decades before the internet would make it easier for her to get caught, Ruth/Eve blends into the village easily—claiming to be a recent widow who is traumatized by losing her husband and doesn’t want to talk about her past. Villagers respond with empathy, not pressing for details. Over the years, Eve remains private, even secretive, but Nella never questions her story. Nella has a happy childhood, a normal life. Eve is a caring, kind mother. But then she dies and leaves her 44 year-old daughter a detailed letter, laying bare her crime, along with names and dates. Nella can confirm the story, but she can never ask questions of the only mother she’s known until now.

“If I’d sat down to write a record of my girlhood before I knew about my kidnapping, would it be the same narrative I write now? ... Or has she stolen from me a second past—the one I lived with her erased along with the one I would have lived with the Gordons?”

Told from four points of view, Mother Tongue explores the fallout of Ruth’s posthumous confession. Most of the book is told from Nella’s perspective as she struggles with her new identity and tries to get herself into a stable enough place to meet her birth family. When the book shifts perspective, it opens up the story in fascinating ways. I won’t name the additional narrators—because I was genuinely surprised and delighted by each shift—but these extra perspectives give insight into what happened to the Gordons and give us a fuller, richer picture of the consequences of Ruth Miller’s crime. We also meet a character who was adopted, whose birth mother was forced to give her baby up. This story parallels Nella’s, allowing the book to explore motherhood, being mothered, and loss in more general terms, showing us how relevant Nella’s extraordinary bizarre journey is to all of us.

Ruth is a fascinating character because she’s so normal. She isn’t an obvious villain, she’s kind to people in general. Even after learning the truth, Nella still loves Ruth/Eve, even thinks of her as her mother, and remembers many times when she was caring, nurturing, seemingly a good mom. Ruth’s letter doesn’t fully explain why she kidnapped a baby. We don’t know if she was mentally ill and therefore not fully in control of her actions, or coldly calculating. In the letter, she does express disappointment at never marrying or having children of her own. She seems to feel like she was robbed of the life she should have had. I can imagine her working in the nursery, realizing how easy it would be to steal a baby, and fixating on the idea because she’s lonely and longs to be a mother. Having the thought isn’t that strange. Who hasn’t had a bizarre idea and imagined doing it?

Acting on the idea is strange, of course. But how often do we watch a news story about a seemingly ordinary individual who’s committed a heinous crime? And a reporter inevitably finds a relative or neighbor who says, “I don’t understand. She’s always been so normal. She’s always been so nice.”  

Mother Tongue invites us to wonder if we’re all just one or ten steps away from Ruth Miller. Maybe we are. This character is a model citizen right up until the moment she steals a baby. She’s normal. Until she isn’t. The Gordons are also a normal family. Until they’re not. Because Mother Tongue isn’t a book about reasonable people or ordinary lives. Instead, this novel imagines how the unimaginable can actually happen.

This is a shockingly well-written book. Kornblatt’s language is beautiful, poetic, and haunting. It’s also musical, rhythmic, featuring a lot of repetition that is both purposeful and powerful. The pacing does lag at times. While I generally appreciated the slow, meditative pace of the book, there were places where I felt frustrated and wanted Mother Tongue to move more quickly. A great deal of the novel’s beauty lies in the way it defies expectations, in the way that it is not a traditional novel but rather a lyrical odyssey through our characters’ minds and shifting identities. It’s told mostly in narration, with the narrator looking back on scenes rather than fully immersing the reader in those scenes. Generally this is successful because Kornblatt’s prose and character building is so strong. But writing such a nontraditional novel is a difficult undertaking, and occasionally Kornblatt’s prose is too meditative, her pace too slow, or her interest in a character’s inner life robs the reader of seeing action. So you might find yourself restless at times, or wanting more answers, or more action. Nevertheless, I wholeheartedly recommend this book. It’s one of the best I’ve reviewed for DCTRENDING.

“My own mother’s keening, ten thousand miles away in Pittsburgh, was threaded into the wails of all those mothers who cry for their lost children, calling out their names to their last breath and beyond.”

Ultimately, Mother Tongue is a story of mothering and being mothered. It’s about the power of the bond between a mother and her child. A power that is rooted so deeply in the gut and in the spirit that it’s hard to define or even understand. Motherhood is desperate. It’s howling. It’s not rational. It is an ocean of hope, longing, and grief.

Mother Tongue is published on Tuesday, September 13, 2022. Learn more about the book and where to buy a copy from the amazing small press that has published the book, Publerati. Find your copy at your local indie store through Indiebound!

An American-born novelist who moved to Australia in 2003, Joyce Kornblatt is the author of four well-reviewed novels: Nothing to Do with Love, Breaking Bread, White Water, The Reason for Wings, and now Mother Tongue. Her short stories, essays, and book reviews have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Norah Vawter is DCTRENDING’s local authors editor. She has an M.F.A. in fiction from George Mason and has published in The Washington Post, Memoir Magazine, and The Nassau Review, among others. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son. Follow her on Twitter @norahvawter, where she shares words and works of D.C. area writers every Friday.