Ann Patchett is a master. The characters are absolutely believable. The scenes are impeccable. The tiller of this novel is steady in the firm grip of the captain.

She brings us to a place of deep and beautiful insight, too. There’s a chapter in which the same tragic event surfaces in two ways. First, through a novel and film depiction. And then in the recollections of a dying woman. The two characters who are forced to recall the tragedy react in different ways. They walk out of the theater. Watching their own tragic past played by unwitting strangers is too much. But the reaction to the parental figure’s retelling is totally different. It brings up compassion. Sadness, but tenderness. It’s bitter, but not unbearable.

Lifting the tragic event up into aesthetic perfection and glory is nice. But it doesn’t help those who went through it. There’s a way art has of taking the thing out of the world.

That’s interesting to think about. It’s one thing to say, “Artistically immortalizing trauma doesn’t help the victims heal. But opening up and telling the story can.” I might believe that and I might not. I believe in art, that it has some kind of power for good.

But if you put that junction of reactions into a novel like this, an utterly convincing novel, I have to consider it. Maybe pulling an Ode to a Grecian Urn on something isn’t always the best way to deal with it.

I have to say. I didn’t understand why Patchett told the story in the order she did. It was not possible to figure out what the novel was about. That’s okay; literary fiction doesn’t need to be about anything. The scenes aren’t in chronological order, so I have to think they were arranged to prevent me from perceiving a single central conflict. Because it could have been ordered such that the tensions that led to the tragedy would have been the central conflict. Or the tension between art and life. Or any of the other tensions.

Like, I want my mom to read this book. She’d like it. But what am I supposed to tell her it’s about?

This is a very small complaint. It’s not like life comes equipped with a central conflict. Or at least not an obvious one. So maybe Patchett is just holding up a mirror to life. That’s fine.

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