Mommy, Clearest

After a seven-year avalanche of single-girl novelettes, an alternative to "chick lit" is overdue. We suffered through their thongs, little dogs, annoying cubicle-mates and dating disasters. Publishers have beaten us over the head with cartoon stilettos on countless covers, determined to wring every penny of profit out of the trend, until readers suffocate under the literary equivalent of reality tv.

Now the girls have grown up, snared a husband, had kids and figured out that it sucks. The fact that any female born after 1950 could have told them this is beside the point. Depressed women are suddenly white-hot.

The trickle of antidote is quickly becoming a torrent. Books such as I Don’t Know How She Does It, about the mutual exclusivity of careers and babies, have become bestsellers. A movie based on The Hours, featuring a hari-kari-prone mom and her role model, Virginia Woolf, won an Academy Award, and a biopic of Sylvia Plath, unhinged mother and writer, is forthcoming. A remake of The Stepford Wives, the creepy 1970s film about Connecticut housewives transformed into Tupperware-loving automatons by their husbands, is in production with Nicole Kidman. The Bitch in the House, an anthology of essays, dedicates 300 pages to rants about the raw deals of motherhood and marriage.

Studies show that up to 80 percent of new mothers go through the "baby blues," a form of postpartum anxiety, and that 10-20 percent develop serious postpartum depression. Approximately 1 in 1000 experience postpartum psychosis, a life-threatening affliction. Depression in general occurs in women twice as often as in men. Modern life is clearly not working for a large segment of the population: women who are pursuing careers and juggling families.

Amy Koppelman’s melancholy debut novel, A Mouthful of Air, is thus a sign of its times. It doesn’t address why so many women are in despair, but it does create a vivid portrait of one such woman in the throes of serious mental illness. Through Koppelman’s elegant writing, we are introduced to Julie Davis, a 25-year-old recovering from a suicide attempt and obsessing over cooking peaches for her son’s first birthday. She flutters around her park-side apartment like a caged bird, where every simple task requires a Herculean effort. She is constantly talking herself down off a ledge. And we’re right there with her.

With the aid of pills and therapy, Julie gets through her days: waking up, visiting the doctor, attending a Knicks game. Then Julie learns that she’s pregnant again and will have to go off her medication—a terrifying prospect. Her decision to move to the suburbs with her husband and embrace Tupperware culture is the ultimate act of self-sabotage. She is a Stepford Wife-wannabe.

The novel’s unanswered questions can be frustrating. Did Julie go to college? Does she have any hobbies, other than self-criticism? Why did she marry Ethan, who made her watch a "prize fight on their first date, the Super Bowl on their second"? She sits at home, with no outer life or aspirations. This is understandable since her breakdown, but what about before that? It never occurs to Julie that her complete isolation, save for interaction with various strata of hired help, is exacerbating her problem. She fantasizes that the Latino concierges in her building spend breaks huddled around the boiler, eating bologna sandwiches and wondering, "Why she not happy, the girl in 5B?" (One suspects they have other things to talk about besides the happiness of their wealthy employers.)

The book jacket, promotional material and the text itself insist that Julie Davis is leading the "perfect" life, has everything and is the envy of all. But is being married to a corporate lawyer and living in a fancy co-op really the universal idea of happiness? Being well-groomed and landing a rich husband might be the end goal in the single-gal genre, but many of us entertain broader ambitions. This is where Koppelman’s novel diverges from its depressed-chick cousins. While those women complain of having too much to do, Julie has too little. It’s unclear if this vision of the ideal lifestyle is the author’s, or simply the pathological narcissism of the character.

At its best, A Mouthful of Air evokes two classics of pre-feminist writing from the late 19th century: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Awakening by Kate Chopin. In the former, a woman is trapped in a country manor on permanent convalescence from some undetermined neurological disorder. Her mental state deteriorates as she obsesses over the bedroom wallpaper patterns. In The Awakening, a well-to-do wife and mother agonizes under the constraints of her social class; her only escape is to wade into the sea until the current pulls her under.

Julie’s story fails to represent the universal female experience of its time or make the kind of devastating cultural indictment that it aspires to. Women do have more serious problems than dating and shopping; A Mouthful of Air shines a spotlight on one of them by telling the tragic tale of a mentally ill person who did not get the psychiatric care that she needed. As a harbinger of a new wave of fem-lit, it should be greeted with open arms. Anything but Bridget Jones again.

A Mouthful of Air By Amy Koppelman MacAdam/Cage, 212 pages, $23.00