If maternity ever seemed simple, it no longer does. Our madonnas look more hassled than serene, and our pietas show us gazing not at a child but into a mirror. In her subtle and moving first novel [The Autobiography of My Mother], poet and short story writer Rosellen Brown explores this ambivalence and puzzlement with cool-eyed sympathy….

Many novelists would … [be content with] pointing to the generation gap and the outlines of personality which separate us from each other. But Brown is after something more difficult to understand and describe—the recurrence of pattern within a family despite changes of style and condition, a recurrence that both women in part perceive and that explains the title….

"Autobiography" is long on character and incident, short on plot. It is clever rather than witty, sharply observant rather than satirical. Many episodes are touching; a few others, such as a quasirape, are to me unconvincing (Brown is least persuasive when most lurid). The language seems stiff at times, but then both narrators suffer from stiffness of heart.

The novel's chief strength lies in the author's delicate insistence on the contradictions within each woman. Aimless Renata is an acute observer; chilly Gerda has her commitments and a few moments of chivalrous passion ("Am I not to be allowed my paradoxes?). Brown could have made her another monstrous modern mother, and indeed Gerda is not a parent one would wish on anyone—although it is a relief to read about a mother who passes out the guilt to her daughter not with chicken soup but with exhortations to get a job. A monster-mother would be useful as an "explanation" of how Renata got that way: poor girl/ambitious mother/no love/compensation. But Brown resists the negative as well as positive simplifications we bring to each other; she allows her creations their full measure of paradox.