Review of Ex Partum
Note: Thanks to Atthis Arts for sending the ARC.
At the midpoint of Emma Burnett’s Ex Partum, the exhausted mother protagonist, Panya, makes the startling realization that you can feed your baby a biscuit instead of an undefined goo called nutribulbs. In a scene that’s supposed to be serious, Panya is shocked to learn that food is a perfectly good substitute for the novella’s central nutrient-dense solution, whereupon her epiphany is interrupted by the intrusion of her neighbor-best friend. And even though we’ve only witnessed the arrival of Panya’s BFF, somehow, because the scene is so poorly choreographed and described, Panya’s mother-in-law seemingly magically arrives in the middle to dress down her daughter-in-law for basically being a terrorist by committing the unforgivable act of feeding her baby the most dangerous substance known to man, cooked dough.
Ex Partum is like Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, except the novella isn’t ever funny. Its satire, if it’s even supposed to be satire, is never winking or ironic, played totally straight. I get the distinct impression the novella is supposed to be a dystopian drama, but given the context of how outlandish the whole premise is, you easily can imagine ads for nutribulbs, the voiceover proclaiming it’s the hunger multilator and has what babies crave.
The novella, available on June 2nd from Atthis Arts Press, is the story of Panya, an overwhelmed and tired mother whose shitty husband goes away for weeks at a time to perform indeterminate duties for an indeterminate company to afford indeterminate food. She’s just trying to make it through motherhood, raising her first child in the Blocks, a suburban dystopia that requires its residents to undergo the kind of daily blood tests that would grant Elizabeth Holmes a release from prison and another 200 billion in investor funding. The blood is then used to assess a resident’s nutrient deficiencies, and a completely unclear corporation has drones deliver nutribulbs, a vitamin juicebox that has everything a growing baby needs and which you annoyingly won’t stop hearing about, that are designed specifically for them. It’s like JG Ballard’s High Rise meets Tillie Olson’s “I Stand Here Ironing” without Ballard’s droll wit or Olson’s beautiful minimalism.
And it commits maybe the most unforgivable sin a story can make, which is that it’s consistently boring.
For a book of only 116 pages, it takes nearly one-third of its page count to get to any whiff of a plot. The novella’s big inciting incident comes when Gabbi, Panya’s inconsistently characterized BFF, invites Panya to a Smorgasburg for excoms, the ostracized but freedom-loving outcasts of this future society, who feel like a very resigned version of the subterranean Scraps led by Denis Leary in Demolition Man. (But again, unlike Demolition Man, Ex Partum is not funny.) Panya, who has been shown to be reluctant to go outside for fear of getting sick, almost instantly agrees. And because Panya is so baby-brained, she doesn’t really know much of anything about these excoms, the narration even admitting, “Panya didn’t know much about excoms.” Any sense of tension or danger or mystery is completely lost on the reader because we know just as little as our protagonist. And while I appreciate that Burnett doesn’t bog her story down with needless exposition and pages upon pages of world building, some would have been nice. Imagine if, in The Terminator, when Kyle Reese is leading Sarah Connor away from the titular villain via stolen police car, he said, “Look, I don’t even know who that guy is.”
The prose on the sentence-level is generally fine though there’s little magic in the diction choices or the images that Burnett presents, never seeking opportunities to take risks or surprise us. It’s serviceable. The narrative voice, however, seems to go out of its way to constantly explain Panya’s emotional state, even when it’s made clear through dialogue and action. Not to mention, the novella is consistently on the nose like Panya’s baby girl being named Liber.
The story’s climax is as inspired as the rest of it, which is to say not very much. Overall, if you were looking forward to a novella that grapples with motherhood, late-stage capitalism, post-pandemic germophobia, or our general nutrition obsession, you won’t find much exploration of any of those themes here. The story’s treatment of them is always surface-level and at arm’s length, lacking any real philosophical depth. Ex Partum is the kind of book that makes you wish you were reading anything else.