The Art of Mending: A Novel
Laura Bartone anticipates her annual family reunion in Minnesota with a mixture of excitement and wariness. Yet this year's gathering will prove to be much more trying than either she or her siblings imagined. As soon as she arrives, Laura realizes that something is not right with her sister. Forever wrapped up in events of long ago, Caroline is the family's restless black sheep. When Caroline confronts Laura and their brother, Steve, with devastating allegations about their mother, the three have a difficult time reconciling their varying experiences in the same house. But a sudden misfortune will lead them all to face the past, their own culpability, and their common need for love and forgiveness.
Readers have come to love Elizabeth Berg for the "lucent beauty of [her] prose, the verity of her insights, and the tenderness of her regard for her fellow human" (Booklist). In The Art of Mending, she confronts some of the deepest mysteries of life, as she explores how even the largest sins can be forgiven by the smallest gestures, and how grace can come to many through the trials of one.
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Laura also wonders what lies beneath her mother's often-distant persona:
"My mother, smiling brightly, looking directly into your eyes before she embraced you tightly, would feel a million miles away. My father, averting his gaze before he took you into his arms, would be the one who felt close."
Overall Berg did a splendid job of painting the characters: Laura, who married late and is happily married with two children; her mother, a former beauty who wavers between emotional stiffness and bursts of warmth; Caroline, wearing her emotional damage like an expensive and showy necklace that she wants everyone to notice. I liked Laura's unapologetic embracing of motherhood as something that fulfills her to the max.
A few quibbles: Laura is supposedly a professional quilter, and in a few scenes she is in the store where she buys her materials, chatting up the gay manager, a character drawn in shocking gay stereotypes: he is preening, self-important, easily out of patience with other customers who don't share his artistic taste. How did Berg get away with this in a modern novel? There is a single scene describing Laura's home workshop, with a level of detail about the tools of her trade out of balance with the attention given in the book to her work. I think Berg was simply trying to make the "mending" theme carry from the family drama to Laura's own profession.
Overall, I enjoyed how Berg teased out the family drama, when we are not sure of who was completely telling the truth.
While not my favorite book she has ever written, The Art of Mending tells a great story that touches the heart and makes you think about how you are with your own family.
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