One very conflicted mama

Journalist Danielle Crittenden explored the dissatisfaction she believes plagues contemporary women and how this discontent may be the result of feminism’s success in the nonfiction book “What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman.”

Feminism has turned women away from the female desire to nurture as wives and mothers, she contends, and they are reaping unhappiness as a result.

With her new book, “Amanda Bright@Home,” Crittenden employs storytelling techniques and the power of fiction to get this perspective across. As the name of the main character implies, Amanda, 35, is a bright young woman, a graduate of Brown who’s left a career at the National Endowment for the Arts to care for her two young children, Ben and Sophie.

Her husband, Bob, is an attorney working for the Department of Justice who pulls down a modest government salary on which the family must get by. Bob has agreed to shoulder the family’s financial burden so that Amanda can leave her job to become the nurturing mother she’s wanted to be. But once she’s home with the kids, she isn’t quite sure it’s what she wants.

Amanda is conflicted in just about every way. She misses the money and prestige her job provided, but she’s not pining for a return to the office. She doesn’t take much joy in being home with her children either, parking them in front of television sets as often as possible and envying her friends who employ nannies. Much of the time she finds herself competing with the upper-middle-class women who make up her social circle. (Their appreciation for plastic surgery, good shoes, exclusive schools and gossip is the binding ingredient in their relationships.)

Like all children, her kids make messes throughout the house, but Amanda, who doesn’t want to be viewed in the same light as June Cleaver, leaves the stifling clutter in place as an announcement: “I am not a homemaker. I am ‘at home’ to care for my children -- not to ‘make a home.’ ” By purposefully shunning the traditional housewife role, she is seldom organized enough to put dinner on the table, which aggravates Bob. Amanda must also put up with her mother, a rabid feminist who constantly tells her she’s throwing away her life.

The story is at times humorous, poking fun at the adversity harrying today’s young mothers. Her son, Ben, for example, is almost denied preschool admittance because of his “poor scissor skills,” a deficit for which Amanda is urged to seek occupational therapy. Ben is later suspended when Amanda packs him a lunch that includes a peanut butter cookie, inadvertently violating the school’s “peanut-free” policy. “Ben took this highly dangerous cookie and waved it under another boy’s nose,” the school psychologist vehemently explains.

Bob, meanwhile, has been pursuing the unsavory business tactics of Megabyte, the largest computer-software manufacturer in the country, and Megabyte’s eccentric owner, Mike Frith (scarcely fictionalized versions of Microsoft and Bill Gates). This could be Bob’s big chance to prove himself and cement his future, yet as he gains recognition, Amanda is filled with jealousy and unwittingly injures his progress.

On its surface, the book’s main question revolves around Amanda’s self-image: Can she find a way to be a mother without losing herself? “Had other generations of women doubted themselves like this?” she wonders. Below that is a question of economics: If only Amanda could afford a nicer home, household help and a nanny, one surmises, her every conflict with motherhood would evaporate.

There’s little narrative surprise when Amanda is led to the promised land of contented motherhood and is rewarded for staying the course. It’s too coincidental that this realization occurs just as Bob goes to the private sector, earns a massive salary increase and the family reaps the benefits. For as polemical as the novel is, it’s interesting that Crittenden elected to soften the reality of Amanda’s decisions, because there’s a very real price to be paid by educated women who choose to stay at home and care for their children. By giving Amanda’s story a fairy-tale ending, Crittenden disguises that price, minimizing her own argument.

Besides which, it seems to me we read novels to watch characters genuinely tussle with the issues of life. Crittenden approaches “Amanda Bright” not looking to limn the mucky, gray areas of motherhood and to excavate the complex layers involved, but as a crusader trying to get her point across. Even if we agree with her point, the novel is missing much of the depth we look to fiction to supply and it rings hollow.