Review: 'Adult Onset," by Ann-Marie MacDonald

Approaching 50, writer Mary Rose McKinnon is the late-blooming mother of two young children. Her partner of a decade, Hilary, is on the road directing a play while Mary Rose is obsessing, imagining her wife is cheating or — worse — tiring of her.

She has attained some notoriety with her young adult novels and her readers are queuing up for the next in the series, but procrastination and the grind of parenthood surpass simple writer's block to brew something nearly toxic, awakening the ache of bone cysts suffered as a child. The Advil she increasingly reaches for can't salve the anxiety.

Do the root of both start with her mother? Something she did? Everything she did?

Her mother, Dolly, a gregarious Lebanese immigrant, can barely speak to a barista without her daughter's fuse smoldering. Having had her own trials, Dolly saddled Mary Rose with a name originally meant for her stillborn older sister, Dead Mary Rose, who, along with a dead infant brother, still shadows the family.

Her father is without reproach, mostly — both parents were ardent homophobes until they ran out of energy for it, and now embrace their daughter-in-law and grandchildren. Once Mary Rose finally sits down to write her next book, she can manage only one short chapter and a few fragmented, inchoate pages.

A gifted writer, Ann-Marie MacDonald captures the melancholy of watching parents dodder, as well as the tragicomic drudgery of child rearing in a culture that prescribes hysteric standards of safety, organic everything and inside voices when, really, some trailer park screeching and muck are in order.

The quiet triumph in this novel is its portrayal of a lesbian marriage being as mundane as any other, no drama — just the daily domestic normalcy. MacDonald's turns of phrase can be clever to a fault, perhaps to illustrate that Mary Rose is not completely unproductive — her humor at least has teeth, but the bite is deep, rendering her an unsympathetic character.

To follow up a bestselling novel such as "Fall on Your Knees" with one of equal distinction is a tall order, but the question remains: Why is this a novel at all, when MacDonald's own biography aligns identically with her protagonist's? The book would certainly have resonated as a memoir. Given the pressure of contracts and marketing in current publishing, it's safe to assume a novel was expected. And so it is a novel we get, one that fails in its guise of fiction.

Sarah Stonich is the author of "Vacationland" and "These Granite Islands." She lives in Minneapolis.