Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Book - Book Review

Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety By Judith Warner Riverhead Books. 336 pages. $23.95.

If only Judith Warner were funnier. I could imagine her as a Roz Chast cartoon of a harried, type-A mom driving herself crazy reading parenting books and taking them way too seriously. Early in Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, Warner describes her reaction to the advice that she read, sing, and talk to her baby: "I talked and sang and made up stories and did funny voices and narrated car rides and read at mealtimes until, when my daughter turned four and a half, I realized I had turned into a human television set, so filled with twenty-four-hour children's programming that I felt as though I had no thoughts left of my own."

Warner quickly departs from the personal and launches into an impassioned and rather harsh critique of motherhood in America, filled with italicized declarations about how bad things are. Alas, comic moments in Perfect Madness are few and far between. The book, a sort of report from the front lines of motherhood among well-heeled Washingtonians, is almost unrelentingly grim.

The gist of Perfect Madness is that we (Warner says "we" a lot)--mothers in our thirties and forties--are miserable, nervous wrecks. We've turned motherhood into a ferocious competitive sport. We're destroying our lives. Our marriages suck. We've downsized our career ambitions and are now stewing in anger and resentment. We're going out of our heads overcompensating for our low self-esteem and anxiety by overprotecting and overparenting our kids. Yada, yada, yada. Nary a word in 336 long, anguished pages hinting that having children is a joy, that spending time with them, in addition to being a lot of work, might actually be fun.

While most of the buzz about Warner's book (cover of Newsweek, segment on Nightline, major reviews, interwiews, and publicity courtesy of William Morris) has focused on her endorsement of laudable, and familiar, policy goals--affordable, high-quality preschool and more Family-friendly employment opportunities--the bulk of it is a scathing cultural critique of the way we are raising our kids today. Warner came back from a plum assignment in Paris and found herself bored, restless, and miserable, stuck at home with the kids in Washington, D.C. So she set about cataloging the foibles of a certain genus of uptight, neurotic professional wives in her neighborhood and similar environs. From the sufferings of this elite group she extrapolated to produce a critique of "all that is messed up in America."

Her best anecdote comparing the United States to France is her description of how, in France, they laughed at her "guilt" over sending her child to a...