This novel centers on a mysterious legacy, a medical discovery named the Magnum Bonum, left by a dying father to his most deserving son. It exerts a normalizing force on the younger generation, suppressing daughter Janet ’s lesbian desires and feminist activism, and disciplining son Jock’s iconoclastic and anticapitalist performances. The only person empowered by the Magnum Bonum is Mother Carey, who becomes its guardian, exalts it into a near-religious icon, and finally acquires a voice of her own through being ventriloquized by her dead husband’s wishes.
