Exploring the Cycle of Motherhood in Catherine Newman's "Sandwich"

Ian MacAllen

June 20

The family vacation is an iconic tradition of summer. Parents and adult children living together in close quarters for extended periods of time provides an ideal vehicle for exploring family trauma. In Catherine Newman's latest novel, Sandwich, the family vacation becomes a deep examination of the trauma of motherhood.

The novel unfolds over the course of a week during an annual family vacation on Cape Cod, a sandy peninsula extending into the Atlantic Ocean. Matriarch Rocky and her husband, Nick, have been renting the same cottage year after year since before their children were born. Their children are now young adults. Willa is still finishing college, and Jamie lives in New York. He's brought along his girlfriend, Maya. As though the five adults are not enough, Rocky's elderly parents join them, too, at the end of their week-long trip. And they bring their cat.

The family arrives at the familiar cottage and quickly slides into their vacation routines–shopping for bathing suits, eating candy from the candy shop, and dining on overpriced fried seafood. Newman offers a portrait of a way of life all too familiar to anyone who regularly vacationed on the Cape, or for that matter, any beach town. Newman leans heavily on a specific kind of nostalgia to create a connection to these characters, and largely it works. Other than their brief worry about encountering a shark, conflict in such an idyllic environment is hard to find.

This summer paradise is the ideal location for Rocky, who narrates the novel, to ruminate on her life, with motherhood at the forefront of her thoughts. She's entered into menopause, and her hot flashes pepper the narrative, along with observations of how her body has changed. But she also recognizes the changes happening to her family. She and Nick have become empty nesters, but are just coming to terms with it. For more than two decades, they've been parents raising children, and now they are parents of adults who have their own lives. The change is unsettling, and leads her to examine many of her choices.

The drama builds slowly, with Rocky's own internal strife driving much of the conflict. The pace of the novel follows a summer vacation where the first days seem endless and the final days pass too quickly. There is little immediate tension between the characters. On the first morning, the family decides to make sandwiches for the beach. Rocky admits that she will "complain about this part of my vacation life, but I love it, and everybody knows this." The sandwich making is an important part of how she demonstrates her love, and a throwback to a moment in her past when her children still needed her. Rocky makes the sandwiches, customizes them for each of the children and for her husband, but by the end of the week, they buy their sandwiches from the deli. It signals immediately, though, that coming to terms with the changing nature of motherhood is the focus of Rocky's concerns.

Through flashbacks, Rocky transports us to when she first became a mother, and in these memories she reveals having had an abortion and a miscarriage. Newman teases this information out slowly, and the pacing is meant to build drama around her choice to terminate one pregnancy and the trauma of miscarrying the other. The primary conflict here is that Rocky has kept the abortion a secret for all these years, including from her husband, but her decision to confide the fact to Willa leads to her accidentally reveal it to Nick.

Parallel to her introspective journey, Maya, Jaime's girlfriend, is in the early days of pregnancy. From the first morning on the Cape, she is throwing up in the toilet, and the family notices since there is just one bathroom for all of them. Newman tries covering this up with Rocky recalling a summer long ago when the children had a stomach virus while on vacation. Nobody is buying it, including Willa, who says, "that one summer when I was, like, four?" This leads Rocky to inappropriately ask Maya if she's pregnant, which she denies. Surprise, she is. It's a shell game disguising the pregnancy, but only moderately successful sleight of hand.

Rocky is the first to know the secret, further triggering her own examination of motherhood, but otherwise these secrets have little power in the narrative. Secrets are the foundation of drama, and Newman has layered several into the novel to create plot. However, the secrets themselves have very little consequence. If there is a weakness in the storytelling, it is how these progressive, well-adjusted, caring, and open-minded people are unaffected by the reveals. Secrets need to trigger people when they are revealed to have power, but here the power was in keeping them. Rocky's interior struggle was in holding onto the secret rather than the consequences of revealing it.

While the central conflict is Rocky's burden to bear, we also see a broader picture of motherhood. Willa, who identifies as a lesbian, makes light of the heterosexual sex act, and how two people can casually end up creating a child. When Rocky makes a similar quip, Willa is quick to remind her mother of the possibility she might fall in love with a transwoman. Either way, for Willa, motherhood exists as an existential question years in the future, uncertain whether she wants to ever be pregnant herself.

We see yet another side of motherhood in Alice, Rocky's elderly mother. Mort and Alice arrive on their own, though neither is good at driving, at the end of the week. The family reconfigures their sleeping arrangements to make room. Mort and Alice are codependent on each other. It's a portent to the future Nick and Rocky have; their children grown, nobody but each other to care for. Then while at the beach, Alice passes out from dehydration–and contributing to her condition, diagnosed heart disease. Motherhood has a natural end, we are reminded. Nobody wants to admit it while Alice recovers, but the diagnosis means she has limited time ahead of her. Newman has summed up the life cycle in a week of summer vacation.

There are many pieces of this portrait of motherhood, and at times Sandwich feels as cramped as a summer cottage. But that density is necessary to provide the full picture: of successful motherhood, of terminated motherhood, the beginning, the end, the in-between. Newman's success is in delivering this treatise through an entertaining summer read, relatable to anyone who's had a summer beach vacation.