Motherhood Meets Lust and Violence in Ariana Harwicz’s “Die, My Love”

Ariana Harwicz’s début novel, “Die, My Love,” is narrated by a new mother whose madness is part of her appeal.Photograph by Sally Anderson / Alamy

The unnamed narrator of “Die, My Love” has a baby, a husband, a widowed mother-in-law, and a lover, but she feels alone in the world. The novel is like a one-woman show, the other players mostly offstage presences. But our narrator rises to the occasion, because she’s got star power. “Die, My Love” is the début novel of Ariana Harwicz, an Argentine writer now living in France. It was first published in 2012, but an English translation, by Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff, has just been released. It’s a welcome addition to the very particular subgenre of motherhood horror; I thought of Helen Phillips’s most recent book, “The Need,” and of “Fever Dream,” by Samanta Schweblin (by coincidence, another Argentine writer living in Europe). All three of these writers have arrived at the insight that conveying fright and confusion is a most effective way to capture what it is to be a mother.

Harwicz’s narrator is, if not mad, at least maddening: irritable, irrational, impatient. When her family gathers around the dinner table, she prefers to go outside and kick at the air. “From out here, I can see it everywhere and that’s why I don’t go in. Death is present in the fire, in the carpet, in the curtains, in the stuffiness of the old furniture and the silverware. In the flowerless vase. Death seeps out of the umbrellas piled up near the door,” she says. It’s a portrait of a young mother that’s more Francis Bacon than Mary Cassatt. The narrator tells us, by way of introduction, that she is “A nutcase. A foreigner. Someone beyond repair.”And her behavior—setting ants on fire, swearing at her infant, screaming for no particular reason, leaving a doll in the back seat of her car so that her neighbors believe she’s left her baby unattended—does indeed seem deranged. The depiction of motherhood as a trap—of having one’s self subsumed by another human’s needs—is a well-established trope, and the reader might wonder if the narrator suffers from a postpartum disorder.

But psychiatric pathology is not exactly Harwicz’s gambit. The author’s accomplishment here is conjuring not a mother struggling to be good but a woman struggling not to be bad. The narrator’s infant son is not an antagonist so much as he is a symptom of her state of mind. She naps beside his stroller and dreams: “I leaned forwards to look at my baby and forgot that he’d come out of me. Good morning, child of the forest. He looked at the capybaras mating and copied their motions right away with his tiny pelvis. My baby was screwing, an animal like the rest.”

The narrator’s preoccupation isn’t maternal feeling; it’s lust. She sees violence everywhere—she lies on the lawn, ripping out the grass; wildflowers break through the asphalt of the road—and, as the book progresses, that violence begins to feel inescapably sexual. The narrator wants her husband, but he just wants to go to bed. I don’t know that domesticity must always preclude satisfaction, but Harwicz is unforgiving. “I need a buffalo and all I get is a porcupine. He shoves me away from the bathroom door. I hear him defecate, the sound of his shit dropping into the water,” she says. Rather than sublimate her urges into housekeeping, which would be the acceptable thing to do, she has an affair. In one of a handful of perspective shifts in the book, the woman’s lover spies on her house at night: “There, in her space, I could feel the hatred that dug at her womb and I begged not to be infected by the depression she felt at having to live. Because she’s infectious, the bitch.” Her madness, if we need to give it a name, is more than just a consequence of an unhappy marriage or demanding baby; it’s an essential part of her appeal.

I found each of these perspective shifts confusing, which I suspect would please the author. “Die, My Love” meanders, intentionally it seems. Though most scenes are short and the chapters are disjointed, somehow the over-all effect is exacting. The narrator’s infidelity raises the story’s central questions: Will she leave her affable husband and little son? Will her lover abandon his wife and their daughter, who is profoundly developmentally disabled? And yet “Die, My Love” isn’t truly beholden to plot. The thrill is in the human as animal, and even as parasite. A man preparing to fight “smells his armpits to work up the courage.” When the narrator nurses her child, “The baby chokes on my milk and I lean him against my chest to burp him, ridding him of the air that gets trapped in his stomach, air from my milk, air from my chest, air from my insides.”

Harwicz deploys the conventions of horror: nighttime settings, characters glimpsed through windows, animals as portent. The narrator dozes in the front seat of the car and wakes to find a blackbird hopping toward her. A stag appears in the woods and seems to mean something to the narrator, though just what remains elusive. It’s right there in the title, isn’t it? You cannot but fret over which of her loves—husband, lover, or, horribly, child—might be the one to die. The book suggests it’s a different kind of death the narrator needs: la petite mort. Finally, she does find it, with her husband. “The exorcist. I go blind. A rock to the forehead. He screws me and screws me and it’s all destruction.” It might sound like bad pornography, but maybe that’s apt; sexual satisfaction is fleeting, and a satisfied life is harder to get.

The title contains a promise and a threat. It’s fitting that “Die, My Love” concludes with the narrator throwing a party. “Banners with little bumper cars on them, the table set with mini plates of finger food, a party bag for each guest and the birthday boy all dressed up.” It all looks like a happy ending, but somehow it’s the most horrific turn in the book.