The Mother of All Things

An art history professor gets initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries in Landau’s uneven tale of Greek antiquity and modern-day female rage (following Those Who Are Saved). At 45, Ava Zaretsky is drowning in household chores and has too little time for the book she’s writing about a woman’s life in 415 BCE Athens. Kasper, her film producer husband, is in Bulgaria filming an action movie, and Ava visits him in Sofia for the summer with their two young children. There, Ava reconnects with Lydia Nikitas, her former mentor at Columbia University. Decades ago, Professor Nikitas destroyed Ava’s chance to join Yale’s art history graduate program after she chose to write her thesis on a different topic from the one Nikitas advised. Their bond is shaky, to say the least, but Ava confides nonetheless in Nikitas about her struggles, and Nikitas invites her to join a ritual for worshipping Demeter and Persephone in Greece. Landau lays bare the challenges facing a working mother, but the novel’s climax, which is teased in a prologue where a group of angry blood-spattered women form a circle around a man and pelt him with stones, isn’t quite coherent. Novels like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History have tackled similar material to greater effect. Agent: Alice Tasman, Jean V. Naggar Literary. (May)