Infertility Rites

Kelly L. Green is a freelance writer living in Ajax, Ontario.

Italian-born, Montreal-based writer Mary Melfi’s first novel takes
readers on a dark journey through a young woman’s psyche as she tries
to become pregnant.

Italian immigrant Nina DiFiore is a talented painter who is married to
an untenured WASPish university professor. After years of believing that
she did not want children, her biological clock goes off like a siren.
We travel with Nina through several miscarriages, complete with marital
discord, and trips to the psychiatrist and the infertility clinic. There
are sidetrips along the way to visit with a pregnant, fertile cousin,
and philosophizing with a successful, childless, childhood friend.

Melfi is an able writer. Her prose draws one into the story and holds
the reader’s attention until the end of the book. Her allusions and
conceits are ironic and clever. Unfortunately, the reader may feel like
a hostage rather than a willing participant in the story. One finds
oneself feeling rather sorry for a baby whose mother thinks “the baby
was supposed to come and save me from focusing on myself, on my sex
appeal...to open up new possibilities, save me from drunkards’
fuckability tests . . . to reduce men’s importance in my life, allowed
me to love without fear of rejection [sic].”

The book’s other characters are similarly unsympathetic or
unpleasant. Nina must cope with a demanding, selfish husband; a sexist,
philandering boss; Diana, the goddess-like office secretary of many
abortions; an unloving, unsympathetic mother who speaks little English
and cripples Nina with her immigrant expectations; and a stupid
psychiatrist who says things like, “If you want a baby, Nina, and you
say you do real bad, then any hope is better than none.”

Finally, the book fails in that it does not strike a realistic chord.
Most people are not as unmitigatedly unpleasant as Melfi’s characters,
and most women do not spend all their time either fixating on children
or attempting to have them, as Melfi implies. Interestingly, the only
happy woman in the book (although portrayed as selfish and
self-absorbed) is a successful, childless lawyer. Intentional, or not?