The Knitting Circle (review)

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Reviewed by: The Knitting Circle Lisa Hoashi The Knitting Circle By Ann HoodW. 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 The Year of Magical Thinking, and Calvin Trillin recently memorialized his wife in About Alice. In fiction, Cheryl Strayed wrote her first novel, Torch, about the devastation of losing a mother. Now Ann [End Page 166] Hood, best known for her short stories, has written The Knitting Circle, a novel about a mother who has lost her five-year-old daughter, suddenly and tragically, to meningitis. Both Strayed and Hood drew on their own experience for their novels. In 2002, Hood's five-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. There is just loss." We encounter The Knitting Circle's Mary Baxter at a similar place, shortly after the death of her five-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 finds herself incapable of anything else, Mary reluctantly joins a local knitting circle. There, she meets Scarlet, Lulu, Beth, Harriet, 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, "That's how it is at first. You knit to save your life." Over time, inspired by the honesty and courage of these women, Mary is finally 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 difficult one to dramatize. Hood uses Mary's knitting circle to enliven the narrative, dedicating entire chapters to each woman's story. While intriguing and rich in detail, these stories are mostly vignettes. They are also told through conversation, which often doesn't work. For example, when Alice reaches a moment of tension in her own story, she tells Mary, "The air conditioner came on noisily, as if it had to work very hard to send out cold air." Such detail works fine 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 uncomfortable sense that, despite all appearances, everyone has secrets. In one story in that collection, "The Rightness of Things," Rachel, a young mother, learns to reshape her life after her husband has left her, having lost her original vision of how things would always be. The 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 [End Page 167] forced by a loss to start anew. As Mary's husband, Dylan, says to her, "Without 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 enormously compelling when translated into art. Yet it is difficult to write about one's own personal grief while still maintaining the necessary distance to craft a piece of art. Though her novel lacks the toughness, independence and imagination that characterize her short stories, Hood has done remarkably well in distancing her experience from The Knitting Circle, allowing her personal story to become the stories of others. Copyright © 2007 The Curators of the University of Missouri