Normal Women is a novel about a depressed and unfulfilled new mother who seeks meaning in sex work that is spiritually designed to heal wounded men and restore their “crucial feminine”. It’s an outlandish and laughable premise, and that’s before you get to a possible murder – our protagonist, Dani, investigates the disappearance of Renata, the brothel owner. Ainslie Hogarth’s previous novel, Motherthing, was a mashup of horror and humour about a woman being haunted by the ghost of her mother-in-law, so the tone and subject matter of this new work perhaps come as no surprise.
It seems to be set in the present day, but there’s a Black Mirror-esque dystopian filter, alongside the kind of cynical, alienated account of female experience so common in recent North American fiction (Hogarth is Canadian; the action takes place in a fictional town that could be either there or in the US). Like many of her fellow heroines, Dani is what critic Jess Bergman in 2020 described as a “remote avatar of contemporary malaise”, bored with marriage and motherhood but with seemingly no real drive to do anything about it other than offer critique. But then potential liberation arrives when she discovers The Temple, a brothel-cum-yoga studio that has managed to escape the attention of the authorities by classifying itself as a religious organisation.
This is a darkly satirical novel about 21st-century motherhood and women’s labour, full of waspish observations and the kind of caustic epithets that had me underlining chunks. Hogarth is very funny on motherhood’s modern mores, such as the lauding of unmedicated birth and “You got this, mama!” influencer culture. “And on some days the momfluencers even cried. Yes, cried! Real tears! Just like you! A deliberate crack in their perfect image: cheeks and lips dewy, swollen. Because being a mom is hard, you guys!” She is especially hilarious on the balance of domestic – and sexual – labour within Dani and husband Clark’s marriage: “Afterward they both felt better, Clark from having orgasmed and, in his own mind, delivered another stunning series of orgasms to Dani … She might have felt the same way after cleaning both bathrooms.”
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Dani hates Clark, a property developer with nefarious plans for gentrifying their home town. She is certainly merciless about him. He stacks the dinner dishes in a tower “next to the sink, like a little boy with blocks”, but also loves her “in a way that other women were hardwired to envy”, with “the gratuitous devotion of romance novels”. Neither of them is happy. Dani, a stay-at-home mother, feels “enslaved by him. Indebted to him. Paying him back in wretched, unconscious ways that made her feel ashamed and ugly and insecure (blowjobs and braised meats!).” No wonder prostitution – a “trade built right into her biology, pure profit for the penetrated, capitalism at work!” – doesn’t feel like such a leap.
This, really, is where the book falls down. You sense that Hogarth has insightful things to say about capitalism and labour and gender, but she never really gets there. Instead, the novel hangs on a strangely paced and unsatisfactory plot, the central mystery of which gets going far too late, and is then wrapped up too quickly and neatly to offer any profound conclusions. The result is oddly bloodless. There are hints, including a graphic, funny riff on vaginal mesh, and a moving but largely unexplored subplot involving a neonatal death, that Hogarth could have ventured into some real, uncomfortable darkness. Moved us, even. Dani’s postnatal depression and relationship with her baby daughter remain a mere sketch, yet for dark comedy to truly soar it needs a counterpoint in the form of pathos. Without it, Normal Women is a curiously unsatisfactory experience. A shame, considering this is a writer with far more wit than most.
• Normal Women by Ainslie Hogarth is published by Atlantic (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. From Friday 8 December 2023 to Wednesday 10 January 2024, 20p from every Guardian Bookshop order will support the Guardian and Observer’s charity appeal 2023.
