Mother's Got a Whip by Robert Smart ( Publish America) $17.95, 161pgs.

This first novel by Robert Smart shares one thing with thousands of unpublished novels -- it should not have been published. I don't want to denegrate the author wholesale. My criticism is mitigated by the fact that this novel has been published by a known vanity house. I also hold the hope that the author may one day write something worthwhile as some bad first novelists eventually do.

Now let's address the problems with this tale:

The plot involves the routine torture of a teenage boy named Robin by his religious fanatic parents. From the build-up the author provided me in his cover letter, I expected something more ambitious than this -- something along the lines of a Shirley Jackson or maybe an Ambrose Bierce. However, this story never achieves the cool creepiness of Jackson or the bitter irony of Bierce. Rather, it is a tale beset by deficiencies. The story takes place in a house in a rural area in an unspecified historical period. I presumed that the story takes place sometime in the late nineteenth century, but this is a guess on my part. The lack of a concrete setting is the first and most noticable flaw. Smart alludes to the existence of a town surrounding the house, but we don't really get to know the town. What were the townspeople like? What is their relationship to this family? Do they belong to the same religious sect as Robin's people? If Smart had fleshed-out some of these minor characters who must inevitably live in this town with this family it would have made for a richer reading experience. Secondly, the title of the story is a bit of a red herring. The "mother" in the title isn't the main abuser in the story. If fact, as much as I was able to even understand the point of her in this story, I'd say she is as much a victim of Robin's father as Robin is. The most interesting character in this is probably Uncle Hiram -- at least he is the only character which borders on complexity. Cut from different cloth than Robin's father, he is much more kindly desposed toward the boy than his parents.

However, Uncle Hiram's passive-aggressive tendencies bring more contradiction than genuine conflict to this story.

The biggest shortcoming in this book is Robin, himself. The boy is being tortured and we just don't care. The author doesn't do a very good job of making him likable or interesting. Add to this the fact that he is old enough to fight back, yet up until the very end of the story, he is fairly complicit in his torture. So much so, that when he does fight back it leaves the reader thinking, "Why didn't he think of this before?" The story's resolution is pointless and anti-climatic.

My feeling is that the author doesn't even understand his own story. This was a tale written, as a former professor of mine once said, "in the writer's head." It doesn't come across on paper. Yet, I got the impression Smart is capable is telling a better story. He is not whole inept in his command of language. I've read worse dialogue, and the story, despite it's flaws, was nicely paced. He simply misses too many opportunities to make this novel a fuller, more layered reading experience.



-- Reviewed by JCE