Raw Content by Naomi Booth review – those difficult newborn days
Raw Content, the latest novel by author and academic Naomi Booth, exists in the psychological and social hinterlands of new motherhood; heart ablaze, nerves frayed, a mind willing itself to do the impossible, namely, to make the world safe. The book centres on Grace, a legal editor who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. She denies the impending reality of her situation until the last moment, before hastily setting up house and playing families with her boyfriend and her newborn baby. At which point, the stage is set; Grace, alternately brittle and open-hearted, is thrust into a new unreality of alien bodies, uncomfortable proximities, needs, flesh, insatiable hungers.
What follows is a stylistically elegant, emotionally astute, but ultimately somewhat limited exploration of Grace's descent into postpartum psychological distress, most notably OCD. It's an important topic that Booth treats with due care and seriousness, but there remains a challenge in how to effectively render the associative, hypnogogic quality of a mind in the process of glitching and fixating, grappling with a love so intense that it begins to edge toward psychosis. Booth is excellent on the anatomical uncanniness of the newborn, the peril incumbent in a body so small and exposed: 'Skin so thin … tiny veins rising close to the surface … the soft spot on her head, pulsing.' Where the novel is less successful, however, is in its attempts to portray the existential otherworldliness of new life, the ways in which it seems to have emerged from an eternity of nonexistence, to remind us of our own fleeting finitude. In this regard, it is hard not to draw unfavourable comparison with Claire Kilroy's Soldier Sailor, a recent novel that more successfully captures the ways in which the quotidian and social demands of early motherhood can coexist with the preternatural.
There are issues, too, with the framing devices Booth deploys. Grace's work as a legal editor requires her to skim read criminal cases without fully apprehending the gruesome details, while at the same time demarcating the content into discrete and comprehensible sections. As a metaphor for how we so often compartmentalise the combinatorially infinite and chaotic risks of being alive, it is both fair enough and also quite heavy-handed. Similarly, the evocation of Grace's Colne valley childhood, replete with ghosts of the Yorkshire Ripper and the traumatic child protection cases witnessed by her police officer father, are functionally evocative of the role social violence plays in shaping our individual psyches, but come across as fuzzy and ill-defined, the mechanisms of transmission undertheorised.
Raw Content is most successful when it is most rooted. Booth observes the hundreds of small, repetitive actions that are required when caring for a newborn with admirable precision and wry detachment. There are moments of acerbic and witty insight. The novel is also rightly critical of the ways in which we have individualised and privatised the task of parenthood, building a social model that is increasingly atomised and isolated and then acting shocked when there is no mythical village left to help raise the child. Booth knows that too much is asked of too few, in spaces that are too small, and in lives that have too little headroom for care and community.
She also raises the idea that in having a child, one often unwittingly jump-starts the process of 're-parenting' a version of one's younger self. This means that far from the healing, cathartic experience some new parents might imagine, what actually happens is that older, unmet needs and traumas can begin to reassert themselves. A complex and often life-altering experience, it is one of many that Raw Content touches on but stops short of truly exploring or presenting to the reader in new or striking ways. In this sense, it is emblematic of the book as a whole. It's a strong, well-written novel, but one that attempts to take on a clutch of the heaviest, most psychospiritually and socioculturally freighted things a human can experience. In doing so, it inevitably sacrifices the depth of its insights for the breadth of its gestures.
Raw Content by Naomi Booth is published by Corsair (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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Today, it's the opposite. According to the most recent figures, Quebec's child poverty rate was 44% lower than all other Canadian provinces. Fortin estimates that poverty in Quebec decreased by more than 60% in two decades, but points out that universal childcare wasn't implemented in isolation, but alongside other important social policies, such as enhanced parental leave (now up to 55 weeks of paid leave), high rates of education and employment and pay equity legislation. Scaling up the non-profit daycare network to meet the immediate explosion in demand is where things got tricky. 'We had a big problem – we were victims of our own success,' said Marois. Waitlists became so long that kids could age into kindergarten before getting a spot. Marois had imposed a moratorium on licenses for for-profit daycares in order to prioritize the CPE network's expansion. In 2000, the more conservative Liberal party of Quebec came into power in the province, and ended the moratorium, instead favoring tax credits to parents over public investment. This led to a surge of poorly regulated private centers that often failed quality checks. A former minister called this shift the province's biggest policy mistake in 25 years. While the long-term positive effects of CPEs have been especially impactful for children from poor families, access remains unequal – low-income families are underrepresented in CPEs and overrepresented in the low-quality for-profit centers. In urban centers like Montreal, disadvantaged neighborhoods have fewer CPE spots available than affluent ones. Still, the successes of CPEs became a model for the rest of Canada. In 2021, as the pandemic decimated childcare centers across the country, Canada committed more than C$30bn to build a universal childcare system in partnership with provinces, territories and Indigenous governing bodies, aiming for C$10-a-day care and 250,000 new spaces by 2026. By mid-2024, six of Canada's 13 jurisdictions hit the C$10-a-day goal, and others cut fees by half, according to the Childcare Resource and Research Unit. In March, days before stepping down as prime minister, Justin Trudeau committed another C$37bn in funding to federal childcare until 2031 to 'lock in' his flagship policy as 'a foundational building block of what it means to be Canadian'. Asked if she thinks the US could build up a universal childcare system like Quebec, Martha Friendly, executive director of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit and lifelong advocate for universal high-quality childcare on both sides of the border, is blunt. 'No,' she said. 'There isn't even healthcare.' 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And in recent years, Massachusetts, Vermont, Washington and other states have implemented new taxes to help fund early learning, childcare and pre-K. Just as Quebec's proof-of-concept influenced the creation of Canada's C$10-a-day system, Haspel sees these states as 'interesting testing grounds' for funding early learning and childcare. 'The tricky part is the upfront cost is a lot. You have to identify a funding source' that will last years, Haspel said. 'You can't do this by half measures … there's a lot of goodwill, but not a lot of campaign contributions coming.' If Quebec can teach the US anything, it's that a mass mobilization of people demanding paid family leave, universal childcare and high-quality early education can work. Lawmakers need a crash course in the broken market math of childcare and how to turn it around: public investment pays off when parents can work, put food on the table for their kids and pay taxes and when today's toddlers become tomorrow's taxpayers. 'I'm convinced that the more women we have in politics, the more we'll move towards public policies that promote gender equality and the fight against poverty,' said Marois. After all, it was feminist lawmakers like herself, and Chrystia Freeland, the former Canadian finance minister, who successfully reframed childcare as essential economic infrastructure and made such policies a reality in Quebec and now Canada. Quebec also shows that to get the quality that will reap long-term rewards for children, investment must be sustained over decades and into a public system and its educators rather than a for-profit market. Even in Quebec, this is still a work in progress. In March, the union representing the largest number of early childhood education centers – nearly 13,000 workers – voted to go on strike. It's the only province that has unionized educators, but like elsewhere, there's a shortage, and high turnover, due to low pay and grueling working conditions. On a freezing Tuesday in early April, snow blanketed the picket line of Les Trottinettes educators in Verdun as cars zipped by honking. The following Saturday morning, hundreds of parents with strollers and children took to the streets of Montreal, in solidarity with their beloved educators. Families marched through the streets with bobbing placards that read: 'The diaper is full,' 'Kisses don't pay the rent,' and 'We're forming tomorrow's adults, so consider us today.' A spokesperson from Quebec's ministry of families said the province had invested C$5.9bn into the early learning and care network since October 2021. Trudel, who runs Les Trottinettes, worries that his cherished network of CPEs is on the brink due to the high staff turnover and low pay. 'We found out the other day that our food produce delivery guy makes more than our educators,' he said. But the cultural shift in Quebec means that parents and the public consider universal childcare to be a core part of the social contract and their Quebecois identity. In early June, after 13 days on strike this year, the unionized educators agreed in principle to a renewed collective bargaining agreement with the Quebec government. Looking at the childcare crisis south of the border, Trudel is struck that all the US research that once inspired Quebec hasn't led to similar change there. 'When we have ample data documenting best practices to help children to thrive and have better life outcomes,' he said, 'when there's such clear evidence and we don't act, it's an ideological decision.'
