A Mother Deals With Tragedy
Norton. 346 pages. $24.95.
By Beth Schwartzapfel
January 28, 2007
Stella had brown hair and a “killer smile,” and was partial to unlikely clothing, such as stripes with polka dots and orange earmuffs indoors. She chose winged creatures — dragonflies and fairies — as her Halloween costumes each year. She was 5 years old when she died, of bacterial meningitis, and left her stricken parents to make sense of their life without her.
In The Knitting Circle, the newest book by Providence novelist Ann Hood, Stella’s mom, protagonist Mary Baxter, finds solace and companionship through knitting. Even as she feels increasingly disconnected from everyone else in her life — her husband, her mother, her kindly, if doofy, boss — she draws close to the six women who are regulars at the Wednesday night Sit and Knit circle. As she learns the various techniques — casting on, casting off, making scarves and socks and hats — she learns, too, the life stories of Scarlet and Lulu, Ellen and Harriet and Alice and Beth. And along the way, she learns that no one, no matter how perfect her life seems, is immune from tragedy.
Five years ago, Hood herself lost a daughter, Grace, at age 5, to a rare form of strep, and Hood, too, found comfort in knitting during her darkest hours. So it is not surprising that her portrait of Mary’s grief is so real and so raw. The unpredictable arc of it — how Mary rallies for a time, and then slides backwards into her loss, how she avoids Stella’s room for the first few months, and then insists on sleeping in Stella’s bed every day — gives Mary’s grief a three-dimensional humanity that a less familiar portraitist might have missed.
Mary herself is a compelling and multifaceted character, one who emerges from the years of her mourning with unexpected revelations and a tentative sort of hope. The other characters, however, are disappointingly monotone in comparison. The particulars of each woman’s tragedy are unique, but the fact of their tragedies becomes predictable, such that as each woman’s history unfolds, it almost becomes a guessing game — a sort of “name her heartbreak” for the reader. The characters ultimately collapse into the sum of their personal misfortunes, rather than taking shape as new people who are wiser and stronger, albeit sadder, than they were before — as Mary eventually does. One revelation toward the end is particularly disappointing; it’s as if this character, who had been satisfyingly elusive and hard to pin down, didn’t have a place in the book unless she, too, had a terribly heartbreaking story to redeem her in the end.
The prose of The Knitting Circle is clear, even as Mary’s perspective is clouded by heartbreak, and the pace of the story is just right. And little Stella, with her Macarena and pasta with butter, is both present and absent throughout.
