Raw Content by Naomi Booth review – those difficult newborn days

The Guardian

26-03-2025

Nine months is not long enough to grow a physiologically robust human being. Newborns enter the world vulnerable in ways that might be avoided if the gestation period were longer. Scientists long held the belief that this foreshortening was due to an evolutionary trade-off between the brain size of the child and hip-width of the mother. More recently, research has suggested that the explanation lies in energy, not geometry. When the energy demands of a foetus reach roughly double those expended by a mother at rest, a threshold is passed and the upper limit of a pregnancy is reached. As a result, we humans meet our children ahead of time, their bodies assailable and exposed, ours exhausted and hypervigilant.
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.