Call Me Mommy by Marshall Frank. Harlan Publishing, 2005. $15 — 284 pp.

In his first line to Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoi wrote that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Although I’ve never agreed with the first part of this proposition — happy families, it seems to me, are as unique in their happiness as any other sort of family — Tolstoy, himself the head of an unhappy family, was absolutely on target with the second part of his statement. Though the usual human frailties like greed, lust, envy, sloth, and so on lie at the bottom of unhappiness, the devil is in the details in terms of families. A man who lusts after women may create unhappiness by this lust by chasing females left and right while another man ruled by the same demon focuses his attention on his wife, perhaps not always to her happiness but to the satisfaction and even praise of his family and society.

Marshall Frank’s latest novel, Call Me Mommy tells the story of a young family torn apart by a father’s lust and greed. Lloyd Ramsey, looking for a way out of his marriage to Laura, allows her to catch him in bed with another woman. He then forces her into a closet while he calls the proper authorities and informs them that his wife has suffered a breakdown. Screaming that she saw Lloyd having an affair — a charge that Lloyd denies — and calling for her infant son Bowen, Laura is thrown into a mental institution, leaving Lloyd to pull the strings that will give him custody over Bowen.

These events, which take place in the first few pages of the book and which are apparently based on a true story, form the underpinnings for the rest of the novel. The next 30 years become a battleground for these three characters: Laura struggling for the affections of her son and warring against her hateful husband; the wealthy Lloyd conniving, cheating, and breaking the law as he scrambles after political power; Bowen fighting first for survival and then to figure out his true nature.

Frank introduces his novel with an aphorism from Virgil: “As the twig is bent, the tree inclines.” One of the great strengths of Call Me Mommy is the reminder that children can be caught up and damaged by the demands of selfish parents. It is a truism that mothers and fathers play tremendous roles in the development of their children, and that children like Bowen, whose parents are such opposites in their affections toward him, will pay an enormous psychological and spiritual price for these misdeeds and resultant conflicts. In many ways, Bowen is a sort of prototype for thousands on thousands of children born in the last 40 years whose unstable adolescence led them into failure as adults.

Franks paints his descriptions of these family struggles with strong, broad strokes. His style enhances the often-melodramatic events of the novel. Here Frank describes Laura’s feelings toward the man who courts her following her divorce from Lloyd:

For Laura, her need for lust or romance was a thing of the past. Blind passion rendered her totally incapacitated once and she no longer trusted these kinds of feelings. He was twenty-one years her senior but it didn’t matter. He was gentle and kind and needy, though not inclined toward physical gestures of affection. But he genuinely loved her. It was though she had been rescued from a pit of quicksand, no longer having to struggle and scrimp, pinch pennies or cater to the drooling wolves at a hoodlum bar. She reveled in a new sense of pride, of standing in the community and the challenge to share her heart with the motherless little Cynthia.

Though our sympathies in Call Me Mommy are supposed to lie with Laura — Lloyd is too big a creep, too much a drunk and a bully, to elicit even faint praise — she too is flawed in some major ways. That she was attracted to Lloyd in the first place, slept with him (they were married because of her pregnancy), and was fooled into thinking he was a wonderful husband for their brief marriage seems beyond the acting powers of Lloyd, which leaves us to conclude that Laura was somewhat of a fool. Throughout the book, despite her supposed attractions to “intellectual stimuli,” she is in some ways as clearly enamored of money, possessions, and material gain as Lloyd. In fact, power for both of these characters has much to do with wealth, whether it be the ability to fix judges, hire detectives, or fly to California every two weeks.

The absence of a spiritual life in any of the characters of the book — we are told that Paul Rosenthal, Laura’s second husband, is an agnostic and that Laura herself is a fallen-away Presbyterian — is telling. From the hateful Zena, Bowen’s lover, to Yvonne Rappaport, his surrogate mother, the characters in this story don’t think to look for any sort of god beyond themselves, no philosophical consolation beyond a vague sense of right and a big bank account. Near the end of the book, when Lloyd is under arrest, Laura approaches him and then spits continually into his eyes until the police restrain her. As Lloyd is then driven away, she taunts him again, then thinks, in a bizarre allusion to a deity, to herself ‘Thank you, Lord.’ In regard to spitting at Lloyd, she tells police “It was something I had to do,” not realizing that she sounds exactly like Lloyd.

Call Me Mommy is a stark reflection, perhaps not wholly intentional, of the values of our materialistic and ego-centered society, and of the enormous damage done by our adherence to those values.

(Jeff Minick is a writer and teachers who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com.)