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Book Review
By Kris Kolk
May Contain Nuts, a Novel of Extreme Parenting by John O’Farrell
At first the story seems to be a farce and an exaggeration of the lengths parents will go for their kids to have the best in life. In this story, the goal is an upper-crust secondary school. The parents use their children to compete with other parents’ children in a sick advanced game of recognized success.
The thoughts of the main character, Alice Chaplin, narrate the story. Some of her thoughts seem like caricatures, but upon closer (honest) inspection, we can recognize them as unchallenged, everyday views of the upper-middle-class.
The book has quite a few hilarious moments, like when Alice decided to slow traffic in front of her home. She created a life-sized, stuffed child to put on the end of a stick to replicate a child darting into traffic. The best face she could figure out for the doll was a Tony Blair mask purchased at a Halloween store. Alice unintentionally created an accident by sticking her prime minister-doll-boy in front of an oncoming car. The driver of the car reported her as screaming, “See what happens!” “See what happens!” and the policeman believed she was making some kind of political statement. Alice’s endeavors are done with the best intentions but most lack common sense. Fortunately for the reader, all are funny.
The story has quite a few morals. After reading about mothers running behind their children in races (coaching them) only to overtake them and then start dragging their poor kids behind them, desperate to have their children win at everything—even playground games--and after reading about the “entitlement” and “me first” attitudes that I can find so effortlessly in my own community, the last bit of the book was quite refreshing.
The silly story throws in a blessing in disguise and actually ends up tackling status, race and happiness issues. Alice grows up in this story, paralleling her eleven-year old daughter’s maturity. One of my favorite of Alice’s thoughts is about the number of self-help books there are and she wonders why there aren’t more help-other-people books.
May Contain Nuts invites us to let go a little bit and challenge the people and establishments who put themselves in charge of our life paths.
I highly recommend this book, especially if you are a parent navigating the path for you and your children.
I was thrilled to find May Contain Nuts at the Kisker Road branch of our library system. It can be found under the call number F O’Farrell John.
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The book cover cartoon of parents tangled with a soccer ball, a loaf of gluten-free bread, cell phone and video camera implies May Contain Nuts is about normal family life. The story is about the lives of a few extremely obsessive parents and their kids. Are their lives normal? I guess it depends on your circle of friends, but I certainly see similarities in the characters with actual people I know. |
