The Knitting Circle (review) The Knitting Circle (review) Lisa Hoashi The Missouri Review, Volume 30, Number 2, Summer 2007, pp. 166-168 (Review) Published by University of Missouri DOI: For additional information about this article [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] https://doi.org/10.1353/mis.2007.0106 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/217356 https://doi.org/10.1353/mis.2007.0106 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/217356 1 6 6 T H E M I S S O U R I R E V I E W / S U M M E R 2 0 0 7 Ellen tends to think in absolutes, and � e Bird Woman’s greatest strength is its portrayal of the cultural division between Protestants and Catholics, North and South. Hardie shows how politics aff ects everyone in Northern Ireland, how the political climate encourages a self-imposed divide. “Up there we were too afraid to talk face to face, so silence seemed the only way. We talked among ourselves of course, told one another what they thought, what they were after, we stoked our own fears till they blazed up and licked at the rafters. For the rest, we left it to the politicians who de- fended and accused from the safety of the television studios. We listened to our own and turned away from theirs, unable to hear, deafened by the anger that rose in our blood and beat in our eyes before they were through the fi rst sentence.” In the Republic, Ellen isolates herself from her former life. She has left her judgmental mother. Her family knows little of her life beyond her address, and they have never seen her children. Although Ellen feels that her break from her past is complete, her unwanted healing ability seems to arise from the denial of her clairvoyance. Hardie describes Ellen’s abilities with an un- sentimental physicality—there’s no melting into showy, new-age swooning. But Ellen is not truly in control of her gifts. She’s an angry woman, whose abilities work even when she does not want to engage those who come to her for help. � e novel opens with Ellen being summoned home because her mother is dying. Initially she doesn’t want to go, but the novel ends a year after her mother’s death, and in the transit of the novel, we have come a long way with Ellen. When she fi nally returns to the North, she learns a family secret that disarms her previous assumptions and sets her on the path to an uneasy acceptance of her own failings and those of others, an unsentimental and startling acceptance of the world as it is. (EO) The Knitting Circle By Ann Hood W. W. Norton & Company, 2007, 346 pp., $24.95 In the last several years, grief has become a recurring theme in the literary world. In memoir, Joan Didion wrote about her husband’s death in � e Year of Magi- cal � inking, and Calvin Trillin recently memorialized cal � inking, and Calvin Trillin recently memorialized cal � inking his wife in About Alice. In fi ction, Cheryl Strayed wrote her fi rst novel, Torch, about the devastation of losing a mother. Now Ann S U M M E R 2 0 0 7 / T H E M I S S O U R I R E V I E W 1 6 7 Hood, best known for her short stories, has written � e Knitting Circle, a novel about a mother who has lost her fi ve-year-old daughter, suddenly and tragically, to meningitis. Both Strayed and Hood drew on their own experience for their novels. In 2002, Hood’s fi ve-year-old daughter, Grace, died suddenly from a virulent form of strep. Of that experience, Hood has written, “In this time of most enormous grief after Grace died, there is no day or night. � ere is just loss.” We encounter � e Knitting Circle’s Mary Baxter at a similar place, shortly after the death of her fi ve-year-old daughter, Stella. Since her loss, Mary has been unable to return to any semblance of her life, either as a wife or as a writer for a small Providence newspaper. “What you need,” her mother tells her, “is to learn to knit.” Simply because she fi nds herself incapable of anything else, Mary reluc- tantly joins a local knitting circle. � ere, she meets Scarlet, Lulu, Beth, Har- riet, Alice and Ellen. As they spend time together talking and knitting, Mary discovers that each of the women has come to the circle with her own story of loss, using knitting as therapy when everything else has failed. As Scarlet knowingly tells Mary in the beginning, “� at’s how it is at fi rst. You knit to save your life.” Over time, inspired by the honesty and courage of these women, Mary is fi nally able to tell them her own story and begin recovering, however slowly and imperfectly. Centered so fully on Mary’s paralyzing grief, the story is a diffi cult one to dramatize. Hood uses Mary’s knitting circle to enliven the narrative, dedi- cating entire chapters to each woman’s story. While intriguing and rich in detail, these stories are mostly vignettes. � ey are also told through conver- sation, which often doesn’t work. For example, when Alice reaches a moment of tension in her own story, she tells Mary, “� e air conditioner came on noisily, as if it had to work very hard to send out cold air.” Such detail works fi ne in straight narrative but sounds improbable coming out a character’s mouth. With her last short-story collection, An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life, Hood established herself as a talented writer. Her stories often create an uncom- fortable sense that, despite all appearances, everyone has secrets. In one story in that collection, “� e Rightness of � ings,” Rachel, a young mother, learns to reshape her life after her husband has left her, having lost her original vi- sion of how things would always be. � e Knitting Circle continues to explore this question of how a woman who has become one type of person—in this case a mother—is suddenly 1 6 8 T H E M I S S O U R I R E V I E W / S U M M E R 2 0 0 7 forced by a loss to start anew. As Mary’s husband, Dylan, says to her, “With- out Stella, it’s hard to remember who we are.” Hood shows us how Mary starts over—though she does so just barely, and only through the friendship of her knitting circle. As so many writers have recently shown, the emotion of deep loss is enor- mously compelling when translated into art. Yet it is diffi cult to write about one’s own personal grief while still maintaining the necessary distance to craft a piece of art. � ough her novel lacks the toughness, independence and imagination that characterize her short stories, Hood has done remarkably well in distancing her experience from � e Knitting Circle, allowing her per- sonal story to become the stories of others. (LH) Stray By Sheri Joseph MacAdam/Cage, 2007, 444 pp., $25 Sheri Joseph’s debut novel, Stray, is a fearless examina-Stray, is a fearless examina-Stray tion of the myriad deeds and relationships love inhab- its—from charitable acts of kindness, to marriage, to sexual liaisons so unlikely that they appear to make no sense. A lover’s triangle of two men and a woman would usually be thought to consist of a wife cheating on her husband, a woman with two lovers. In Stray, Stray, Stray it’s the husband who has two lovers—one his wife and the other his boy- friend. � e husband is a thirty-year-old musician just beginning to settle into married life. His wife, Maggie, is a Mennonite lawyer of unshakable faith in her place in the world, and the lover is a college student surviving on the tired kindness of an ailing professor. It is more than the seductive storyline that drives this novel, though; it is the unrelenting mess created when good intentions overlap again and again with unavoidable physical en- tanglement. Joseph’s fi rst book, Bear Me Safely Over, is a cycle of stories that features Bear Me Safely Over, is a cycle of stories that features Bear Me Safely Over two of the characters from Stray, Kent and Paul, and describes the awkward Stray, Kent and Paul, and describes the awkward Stray genesis of their relationship. Love and how it blends and mutes the bound- aries between straight and gay are themes of both books. In Stray, however, Stray, however, Stray there are few traces of previous characters’ homophobia; rather, what occurs is a manifestation of genuine compassion through the portrayal of modern- day Mennonites and the quiet tolerance evident in daily private acts of kind- ness and pacifi sm.