This is the third novella I read that was among the 58 books listed by Kenneth Davis in his “Great Short Books”.  I chose it when I happened to come across it on the shelf while staying at a friend’s house outside Chicago last weekend because I had never read anything by Nobel Prize-winning Doris Lessing.

What a totally WEIRD book!!!!  Like it’s preceding two Davis-recommended novellas, it deals with the challenges of motherhood, but it goes way past the other two in the challenge and  difficulty of sticking with reading it.  At 151 pages, true to Davis’s observations, I read it in just a few sittings over a weekend of travel, but wanted to abandon it several times.

Lessing tells the story of David and Harriet, a rather conservative and straight-laced couple who met at an office Christmas party when they were standing around watching their office mates drink, dance, and be merry. David and Harriet, not being merry by nature, find their joy in their family and their home, a huge, many bedroomed Victorian outside London which they buy when they are childless and begin to fill with annual pregnancies.  Supported by David’s divorced and wealthy father, they rapidly have four children and celebrate each Easter and Christmas with a house full of relatives and friends.  Life is idyllic and near perfect until the fifth child is born after a difficut pregnancy.  The newly born Ben is described as follows: “He was not a pretty baby. He did not look like a baby at all. He had a heavy-shouldered hunched look, as if he were crouching there as he lay.  His forehead sloped from his eyebrows to his crown.  His hair grew in an unusual pattern from the double crown where started a wedge or triangle that came low on the forehead, the hair lying forward in a thick yellowish stubble, while the side and back hair grew downward.  His hands were thick and heavy with pads of muscle in the palms. He opened his eyes and looked straight up into his mother’s face. They were focussed greeny-yellow eyes, like lumps of soapstone.”  

If you’re not drawn to Ben, join the crowd.  Once again, avoiding a spoiler alert, I’ll just say that Ben’s arrival ultimately leads to the destruction of Harriet and David’s ideal family.  It’s a painful and difficult book to read and upon finishing it, I still wasn’t sure what Lessing was trying to tell me.  She herself described the book as “absolutely horrible and it has a very strong effect on  people.”  Davis describes the book as ‘jarring, weighty, and provocative…deepy disturbing that taps into a parent’s worst fear.”

I agree with both of them. It’s a tough read which takes the reader into dark territory.  Not a great beach read, but a worthwhile introduction to a Nobel prize winning author.  Your decision.