Fraught for her comfort

Kate is pregnant and hovering on the edges of her new partner's other life. He is an estranged husband with two sons of his own and a nastily ruined marriage. "Matt and his wife had evolved a relationship fraught with difficulty before Kate knew they existed." His boys are not allowed when at home with their mother to even refer to Kate by name. She is treated like a thief. When she is with them, they run wild as normal and cause her to assert herself.

Trying to win their friendship while also hoping to earn their respect, Kate's attempts to make a second home for them are as forced as they are well intentioned. Jayne Anne Phillips describes the bickering and the boisterousness of the boys and, more importantly Kate's uneasy, developing possessiveness with a relentless attention to emotional nuance and physical detail. But all the relationships in this dark, powerfully realistic fifth novel are quickly overshadowed by one, Kate's rapport with her dying mother, Katherine.

While she prepares for the birth of her first child, Kate is now faced with Katherine's slow death. Motherkind is American domestic realism at its most intense and most densely textured. Gestures, chores, facts of domestic history as well as personal experience, events in the lives of off-stage characters, the tensions and casual observations are carefully recorded.

Phillips writes as if watching a domestic tableau in perpetual motion. The seasons change, hours pass. It is as routine as it is profound. "Her mother pointed at the stove. `The potatoes are boiling over. They're going to be pulpy.' " What makes her slow-moving, thoughtful book so interesting is the fact Phillips avoids suggesting that there was ever any power struggle between the women.

Mother and daughter are not rivals; there is no final reconciliation to be made, there is no need. At first, Kate is presented as a somewhat pampered individual who approaches pregnancy, childbirth and the early days of first motherhood with the deliberation of a choreographer. It is as if she finally relinquishes her own childhood only when she becomes a mother. Her self-absorption gives the impression she likens giving birth to winning a contest. The minutely described recovery from the birth will test the patience of most mothers - it did mine.

Her mother's illness supplants Kate's fears for her future with Matt, a character who virtually dissolves into the background as the novel progresses. In fact, such is Phillips's concentration on the mother and daughter's sad leave-taking, Matt seems to have obligingly stepped into the other room, emerging long enough only to deal with the dying woman's ageing dog. His apparent lack of involvement with Katherine's situation is surprising, as he is a doctor. Far more convincing is her father's detachment as a divorced husband who has retained human, if not emotional, interest in his former wife. Phillips vividly and convincing records the shifts in Kate's attention; from the wooing of Matt's sons, to her all-consuming love for her new baby, to the final helpless vigil of her mother's dying. Kate recruits various nurses and helpers along the way. "These women knew; they had listened before, all of them, in their own countries; they had crossed oceans to meet beside this bed. The qualities they possessed were surely innate rather than taught, and so they were paid less than those who did word processing, for instance, who'd completed a two-year course in punching buttons."

The strength lies in the characterisation of Katherine the mother. Kate is utterly believable and wins our support through several fine set-pieces such as when she visits a toy shop as part of her attempt at creating the definitive birthday party for one of Matt's sons and later when she is confronted by a terrifying choice during a beach rescue. Her fear of her mother's wasting body is real and understandable though no less easy, as is her resentment when, on her death-bed her dying mother mistakes Kate's baby for one of her brother's long-since grown sons. The understated Katherine is brilliantly well drawn. The dying woman never becomes a caricature, there is no sentimentality, her anger is real but controlled. Phillips has created a quiet heroine, a woman of 59 who has never forgotten that her own mother died at 56. "Her eyes (Katherine's) were so deep now that Kate couldn't always find her inside them. All her mother had been, the form she'd assumed and animated and adorned, used for childbearing, child-rearing, teaching, now seemed the powerful surface of a commingling depth more and more apparent as she grew weaker. She'd worked hard. She'd made things happen. Now she was drowning in her own eyes."

Phillips, a West Virginian born in 1952, has been described by Nadine Gordimer as the best short story writer since Eudora Welty. High praise indeed, but Phillips is good. Her first novel, Machine Dreams published in 1984, placed small-town America at the mercy of the Vietnam War and immediately established Phillips as a fine American writer possessed of an urgent, virtuoso prose style. The stories in Fast Lanes (1987) consolidated this. Both were followed by the re-publication of her earlier stories in the Black Tickets collection. A new maturity and grace entered her work with Shelter (1994), a strangely beautiful, menacing, atmospheric work concerning events at a girls summer camp in 1963. The book explores what becomes a terrifying rite of passage for several of the characters. For Phillips, it marked an extraordinary development in style as well as a dramatic shift in mood and tone.

Her new novel has all the complexity, chaos and powerlessness of real life. The narrative appears to be a straightforward account of a year in which one woman experiences the respective new life and slow death of her infant son and mother. But it is far more than that: she is watching people attempting to make sense of the impossible as well as the inevitable. The realism is juxtaposed with dream sequences; Phillips enables the reader to enter Kate's mind and subconscious self through writing of unnerving subtlety. Motherkind is no easy read, it is a plain, disciplined book that may initially irritate before it quickly engages and finally convinces with a calm insistence. It also testifies to Phillips's reputation as a mature writer of subtle genius.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times