This Gouda novel rides the wheel of American cheese

The Founding Fathers didn't need Freud to grasp the psychodynamics of their conflict with the British Empire. Around 1765, Benjamin Franklin wrote a little ditty called: "The Mother Country":

We have an old mother that peevish is grown,

She snubs us like children that scarce walk alone;

She forgets we're grown-up and have sense of our own.

Speaking in the House of Lords five years later, William Pitt picked up the same metaphor but, alas, not the implications (or the humor): "This is the mother country, they are the children. They must obey."

Then, as now, across the Atlantic Ocean or the kitchen table, it's the same battle - enough to ruin an inflexible parent's tea.

Sheri Holman has written a robust, witty novel that captures the comedy and tragedy of the struggle for independence that inevitably separates colonies and children from their parents. It's called "The Mammoth Cheese," and it's a giant wedge of Americana.

The story takes place in Three Chimneys, Va., a small town clinging to tattered remnants of its august heritage. Pastor Vaughn hopes a recent miracle will restore his community's dissipated glory: With the help of the latest fertility drugs and the minister's encouragement, Manda Frank has just given birth to 11 children.

A mountain of gifts roll in. A dealer gives them a new van. A builder gives them a new house. "If she'd spaced her children out and had 11 babies in 11 years," Manda thinks wryly, "she would have been no better than her own mother and sisters: irresponsible, a welfare cheat, another bit of Sawdust Lane white trash. But as luck would have it, she'd had them all at once and now she was, overnight, middle-class. And respectable."

The media frenzy reaches a pitch when presidential candidate Adams Brooke swoops into the hospital to extract whatever publicity he can from this questionable medical triumph. "It's an American's God-given right to have as many children as she likes," he proclaims.

Manda, battered into this fame by her husband and her pastor and her doctors and her own passivity, stares in terror at her sickly litter and the exhausting future ahead of her.

Of course, she has no interest in the presidential campaign, but for her neighbor Margaret Prickett, Brooke's success is everything. Margaret is a single mother whose ancient cheese-making farm has so far avoided foreclosure only because she's stopped opening her mail. Adams Brooke with his promise to pass a debt amnesty bill for small farmers is now her only hope, and she focuses on his election with a fervency that blinds her to all else.

For instance, she doesn't see that her middle-school daughter feels abandoned by her - and is falling under the spell of a seductive history teacher who encourages students to rebel against adults' tyranny. And she doesn't see that her hired hand, the pastor's son, August Vaughn, who dresses up as Thomas Jefferson in his spare time, is hopelessly in love with her. And she doesn't see that her efforts to avoid all the trappings of modern farming and technology are turning her into a Luddite freak.

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