Reviewed by Keith Rawson
Smother is the story of mother and daughter Lydia and Alva Ulrich. Alva has spent most of her transitory adult life working as an “artist” and as a barely functioning drug addict. Alva self medicates due to heavily buried memories that come to her as raw sensations and emotions. These memories have wrecked her as a human being who is unable to develop any type of emotional connection with others.
While sitting as model for a life study art class in Mississippi, Alva is flooded with memories and suddenly passes out. A couple of days later, she glances at a newspaper article detailing a 20 year-old cold case of a murder in Pennsylvania which the media has dubbed “the pink bunny baby” murder, and suddenly all of Alva’s buried memories come to the surface when she realizes the child was her infant sister. Alva then contacts the police investigating the murder.
The Pennsylvania police contact Lydia. Much like Alva, Lydia has spent most of her adult life not being able to connect on a personal level with other human beings, but instead of smothering herself with drugs as Alva has done, she at first immersed herself in being a wife and mother, and then with pursuing her professional life after the death of her domineering husband, Lars. The police investigating the “pink bunny baby” murders arrange an interview with Lydia to substantiate Alva’s claims. Lydia is furtive through out the interview, denying all of Alva’s story.
By the end of Smother, both Alva and Lydia are highly suspect as narrators. Alva, because of her long history of drug abuse and mental illness and Lydia because of her near maniac recitation of her and her daughter’s convoluted history to the investigating detectives and because of a scene near the end of the story where Lydia excuses herself to go to the bathroom during the interview and thumbs through a collection of expired medications in her medicine cabinet as if she’s contemplating a way out
Like most of Oates longer short fiction, Smother is a masterpiece of writing. The individual voices of Alva and Lydia are rhythmic, near manic in tone and the prose takes on the verve of a tightly wound prose poem. In my opinion, Smother is the strongest entry in this very intense collection of crime stories.
