The Art of Mending – Elizabeth Berg

Quilt maker Laura always thought she’d be the first of her siblings to get married – her childhood games most often revolved around domestic chores like cake making in her Easy Bake oven. Instead it was black sheep youngest Caroline who married first, when she was just twenty; Laura met her husband, widowed Pete, when she was forty, and he and her two children are all the more cherished for the wait. Their somewhat withholding brother Steve is up to his fourth wife, and his only children all have engines.
Every year the Bartone’s gather at the family home in Minnesota for the state fair, an event Laura anticipates with both excitement and dread. Her memories of the fair are happy, and she enjoys seeing the same love of rides and cotton candy in her children, but seeing Caroline is always hard work. This year promises to be more difficult than ever when Caroline calls the night before Laura, Pete, Hannah and Anthony leave for Minnesota – she wants to meet with Laura and Pete separately some time during the visit, to talk. Though Laura doesn’t know exactly what it’s about, she sound intense, and Laura knows it won’t be good.
Like all Berg’s books, the writing is superb – immediately engaging, detailed but not overworked, with characters that are complex and real. Unlike the writing of, say, Picoult, who tends to use large events (like school shootings, parental abduction, sibling organ donation, or infanticide) to examine the intricacies and contradictions of the human condition, the scale of The Art of Mending, like all the other books of hers that I’ve read, is domestic and relatively mundane. Yet it is this very ordinariness that illuminates the pivotal matters of significance in individual lives.
Few of us will be personally touched by the big events, but many of us will be fascinated by the different ways our friends or spouses grew up compared to our own upbringing, as Laura is by her Italian American husband’s – how different it would be, she thinks, to have been surrounded by the kind of open love her beloved parents-in-law radiate, compared to the distant love of her beautiful but removed mother and tentative father. Even closer to home, and at the centre of The Art of Mending, is the different memories our own siblings have of a shared childhood.
All families, all people have secrets, even the family Laura and Pete have created. Pete, for example, has a strong aversion to all epithets – he won’t tell Laura why, but even the use of “damn” makes him angry and sad. When Laura discovers why Pete reacts so strongly to swearing, it alters her view of things she had taken for granted, and allows some room for her to accept that not everything is as she assumes. As Pete says, “nobody knows what goes on in other families, because families lie about themselves to other people. Not only to other people but to one another. And to themselves.”
Interspersed between every few chapters are word pictures of family photos, pictures that not only describe what’s visible in the photo but what lead to that moment and with memories interwoven, that give hints about the secrets yet to be revealed.
When Laura, a maker of quilts, tells architect Caroline that their careers are similar – that they both make things out of raw materials, differing only in their composition, wood and cloth, Caroline has a different outlook:

I think it’s very different, I think I focus on seeing the actual substructure. You take things as they are and chop them up to re-create a new whole. And then you say, ‘See? That’s what it is!’… I want to know the truth of what’s beneath. You want to transform things into something comfortable and beautiful, but not what they are.

One of the beautiful things about discovering a new (to you) author is gorging on their back catalogue. I’m trying to dole out the Berg oeuvre slowly, but so far every one’s a hit, and The Art of Mending is something of a favourite. - Alex