Vika Mujumdar
Jenny Xie’s Holding Pattern is always concerned with intimacy—what it means to share space, to share selves. In this debut novel, Xie explores the intricate relationship between mother and daughter Marissa and Kathleen, complicated further by Kathleen’s recent return home. After a breakup, Kathleen takes a leave of absence from graduate school. Struggling with her current self when returning home, Kathleen navigates the now differently complicated dynamic with her mother, who is in the midst of planning her wedding. She is both recognizable and unrecognizable to Kathleen. Moving back and forth in time between the tense household dynamics of Kathleen’s childhood and the present day, Holding Pattern is a nuanced, thoughtful novel about what it means to see and understand the self of the mother, with compassion that only distance and time can allow.
Kathleen, after her time in graduate school studying touch and haptics and now unemployed at home during her leave of absence, finds a job working as a professional cuddler, and in the process, is forced to reckon with what intimacy means to her. A relationship with a client, Phil, becomes a complicated blur of personal and professional, propelling Kathleen into new understandings of her parents, their marriage, and her mother. And of her return home to Marissa, Kathleen says: “It wasn’t that the nose had grown or that the lips had migrated, it was that I was seeing her from the perspective of a stranger, as if for the first time.” (4) Here, intimacy is reversed, forcing us to reconsider motherhood and daughterhood. Kathleen documents intimacy and absence with precision and sharpness and kindness as the novel progresses, moving from her parents’ marriage to her own familial relationships to her own professional and personal relationships.
Xie’s writing is moving and exacting, always anchored in the mother-daughter relationship at the heart of the novel. Holding Pattern is about the ability to see anew motherhood and daughterhood; it is about compassion, even in the limits of fully recognizing the selves that we are. She writes of Kathleen: “Maybe instead of dwelling on my resentment I could get back to what I wanted all along, which was to make Marissa happy, which was, in other words, to feel like an adequate daughter.” (45) Kathleen even in her tense dynamic with her mother, even in her realization of the incompatibility of their desires for her life, still remains rooted in a desire to understand her mother now, with this greater distance.
In a scene where both Kathleen and Marissa sit down with the makeup artist for Marissa’s wedding, Xie writes of their makeup: “Lacking mirrors, my mother and I looked at each other to see the effect.” (108) Here is Xie’s greatest strength—even in the perspective of the daughter, the ways in which Marissa and Kathleen are reflected in each other are always present, haunting the text and each other’s lives. Xie also writes of Kathleen and Marissa: “What could I have said that she didn’t know already?” (262) Ultimately, even in the tense, fraught dynamics of their relationships, worsened by Kathleen’s leave of absence and Marissa’s new selfhood, there is always the undercurrent of being known, and understood, in many ways, by someone else.
Holding Pattern is a heartwarming, compassionate novel that writes a limited and boundless motherhood and daughterhood, always asking how we can be generous to those that shape us, in all their cruelties and kindnesses and presences and absences. Xie’s prose is precise, always kind to these tense relationships, and is always concerned with what it means to be a self in relation to home, whether that home is mother or geography.
Vika Mujumdar (she/her) was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India. She received her BA in English and History from the University of Illinois Springfield in 2021, and is a graduate student in the MA program in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Liminal Transit Review 