In Rachel Yoder’s wily and unrestrained début novel, “Nightbitch,” a mother’s body begins to betray her, or so it appears. A scruff of rough, dark hair rises on the back of her neck. Her teeth sharpen to “ferocious points that could cut a finger with a mere prick.” A hot, seeping vesicle bubbles up on her tailbone, and when she slices it open with an X-Acto knife, a tuft of hair pokes out. “The only word she could think to describe it was tail.” She feels the urge to wag it.
The pregnant body is known to go rogue in all sorts of unforeseen ways: foot arches drop and ache because ligaments are loosening for labor, hair thickens and falls out when estrogen levels roller-coaster. But the hirsute bumps and meat-ready incisors in “Nightbitch” are a little too canine to be written off as vague yet common women’s ailments. The unnamed protagonist searches the Internet for “humans with dog teeth,” which leads her to “human animal hybrid,” and ends in the territory of so many maternal novels of yore, with “hysteria” and “rest cures” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
At first, “Nightbitch” presents as a novel about whether mothers can handle their lot—as another response to Gilman and the stagnant grievances of shackled mothers across the ages. The mother is thirty-seven, a lapsed artist and curator, stuck at home with a two-year-old. She bemoans “the dreaded Schedule” of park visits and snack times and Book Babies at the local library with mamas/mommies/mamans who name their children Aubergine, as in “eggplant, but French.” Her husband is a “good sport,” the sort of man about whom you tilt your head and say, “He’s nice”; he is also perennially out of town. All she wants is to walk alone in the grocery store with a coffee in one of those little drink holders.
The DNA of “Nightbitch,” it turns out, is more Angela Carter than Rachel Cusk. It sees the past decade’s cerebral fictions of motherhood and raises them several murdered forest creatures, a shit on a lawn, and a pack of M.L.M. moms stoned on trippy drugs watching another mom scarf raw steak. Writers like Cusk, Sheila Heti, Elisa Albert, Lynn Steger Strong, and Heidi Julavits have kept within the bounds of realism in delineating maternal experience. Their books—definitive and genre-spawning, like a Jane Mount Ideal Bookshelf painting for a Rachel Comey-wearing mom in Carroll Gardens—form the contemporary canon of white urban motherly malaise. The mother in “Nightbitch” doesn’t mention them, but I imagine she read them and appreciated their candor, right before she found four extra nipples growing on her abdomen.
Yoder sees motherhood as a force so unfathomable that it can’t really be written about using the physiological rules of our universe. So the mother reads “A Field Guide to Magical Women,” a (sadly fictional) ethnographic catalog from 1978 by an academic named Wanda White, who was “interested in the ways in which womanhood manifests on a mythical level” and in the identities women turn to “when those available to them fail.” White writes about “Bird Women,” childless singletons in their sixties who grow feathers and prance about the treetops in harmony with their sistren; mothers who turn transparent after bedtime and then flicker back to their opaque selves; and the “WereMothers of Siberia,” “a particularly evasive species . . . the gentlest of creatures.” These aren’t metaphors. “After all,” the book says, “what is more unbelievable than pushing a small human from a hole between your legs, or having a masked, robed stranger slice open your belly and pull from it a mewling, bloodied babe? Both are absolutely preposterous propositions, not able to be believed and yet undeniable in the presence of the child, a factual reality.” And so the mother is Nightbitch, she is a dog, roaming the thin suburban woods at night. As White writes, “Who is to say what feats and follies, what absolutely not-able-to-even-be-imagined modes of existence women have accessed since the dawn of human history?”
The two predominant strains of maternal commentary in the twenty-first century can be summarized as “Mothers cannot possibly do all that is asked of them” and “Mothers are capable of anything.” Each affirms the other: mothers simultaneously cannot live up to both maxims, and they have little choice but to try. And round and round the mommy psyche goes. Yoder believes both, and neither, and her novel happily occupies a floating realm between them. Nightbitch’s embrace of her new life as a werewolf lite explodes with joy. (Any dash of Kafka in here is squashed by the sensual pleasure she takes in her new form: “She likes the idea of being a dog. . . . She can revert to a pure, throbbing state. She had that freedom when she gave birth, had screamed and shat and sworn and would have killed had she needed to.”) Women in fiction have worried for centuries that they’re morphing into beasts beyond their control, but Nightbitch is jubilant. “She loved her body, loved being a body, and loved the boy, another body she had made.” As I read, I kept thinking of the unbelievable promises of orgasmic birth, that pleasure might writhe free of pain.
This is Mary Shelley territory—mother as inadvertent creator of monstrosity. While Dr. Frankenstein transfers his longings into his innominate monster, and inadvertently sets it loose to prowl the woods and learn about the goodness of the Lord, the mommy monster of “Nightbitch” licks the blood off her new fangs with satisfaction. Rage, violence, and broken bunny necks aren’t crimes; they’re exhumed artifacts of our animal selves. We’re all monsters anyway, so why not recognize what forms we take?
And, oh, what divinity exists in a novel that escapes the confines of the yellow wallpaper! The obligation to play with one’s child—the biggest zit on the nose of parenthood—goes from begrudging and exhausting to romping and roaring. Nightbitch and her son fetch sticks and lap each other’s hair and wrestle on all fours. You can feel Yoder breaking loose, too, like she’s just self-injected a serum mixed with her protagonist’s blood. The second half of “Nightbitch” trots down a path into a magical forest, where Yoder relishes her job as tour guide, introducing readers to the glowing phenomena lurking among the bushes. Look, Happiness! And, over there, Delight!
That glee is due in large part to Nightbitch’s reawakening as an artist. As a graduate student, she hunted for roadkill, stripped the meat and bleached the bones, inlaid gems and gold plate, and assembled the bones into mythical skeletons—a fantastical act of revivification. In pregnancy, she envisioned setting up a pool in a viewing theatre, where she could give birth in front of a live audience. In her new, feral state, she considers a performance piece in a similar vein, a celebration of the body, her body, in all its hirsute glory: she’s the product and the performance and the experience.
With its endorsement of a magical text as more cathartic than any mommy memoir, “Nightbitch” makes the case for itself, and for fiction that expands motherhood into new, surreal dimensions. I’ve seen myself in all the clever, recondite novels of beleaguered mothers. The moaning and groaning, the searching and yearning are real. Yoder sees a new way into the baser kinks of our animal selves, the ineffable bodily transformation of a woman into a mother. What is fiction for, if not blowing life up into the freakish myth it appears to be? “The unbelievable,” White writes, “while perhaps not communicating straightforward truths, can communicate deeper truths if a person is willing to be patient, to listen, to contemplate.”
