Review
Title: The Mending
Author: Scott, R.B.
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
Genre: Fiction
Year Published: 2019
Number of pages: 283
ISBN13: 978-1-6418247-5-0 (E-book)
Price: $29.95
Reviewed by Dennis Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters
When a Russian named Semyavin asks Tyrone Slothrop what he’s come to Zürich for, and hears it’s “information,” he says “Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?” “I thought it was cigarettes” Slothrop answers. “You dream” Semyavin says. As a librarian, I hail Thomas Pynchon’s depiction of the value of information in the closing days of World War Two in Europe. Slothrop is searching for information on a mysterious component of the V-2 rockets whose trajectory gives Gravity’s Rainbow its title, a plastic unknown to Allied scientists, called Imipolex G, which appears to be involved in the guidance system of the rockets. So, strangely, does it seem, is Slothrop.
The stakes are not as high for Benjamin Adams Pratt, the main man in The Mending. But his search is the same, a search for information. Slothrop seems to lose his soul, his identity, in his search; Pratt finds his. Slothrop is caught in a web of sinister machinations; Pratt, in a web of loving family. Pratt is as undone as Slothrop in the search — but then is mended, while Slothrop is not.
Pratt has a near-photographic memory; he can recall anything, but — spoiler alert — don’t count on him understanding it. Scott opens his novel describing how Pratt’s memory works: “‘Google’ a name or an event and within seconds, his brain, usually accompanied by his mouth and expressive hands, would be hitting on, spitting out, and underscoring an array of textured data points; each nuance connected to the others by a complex network of hypertext synapses” (15) — a near-perfect example of the insanity of a world “with information come to be the only real medium of exchange.”
But Pratt is not caught in a world-wide conflagration. Rather than a ghost of Slothrop, he may seem a perfect living example of Henry James’s admonition: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost” (from “The Art of Fiction”). But that admonition from James comes in a context that is often ignored by those citing it. James begins: “The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it — this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.” In Pratt’s life, as the reader learns, it is this power, “to guess the unseen from the seen,” that is missing. Not just in his memory, but in his living.
Pratt is missing oversight, a defect on his part that must be mended. And the events he must put together indeed “occur in country and in town” as it were, the town being represented by New York and Boston, and the country by Salt Lake City. The Mending is the story of how Pratt is mended, of how shock after shock shakes the world-wide web of his cognition, leading to re-cognition. And it happens almost exclusively through the agency of the women in Pratt’s life: his mother, his wives, his sister, his niece, the wives of his friends.
It is Pratt who characterizes the two locales as “country” and “town” (though not in those words). He has left his experience of Salt Lake behind, feeling the town to be insular, small-minded and parochial, for a career in magazine writing in New York, and life in Boston. The MacGuffin of this plot is a high-school reunion that Pratt has reluctantly agreed to organize, which necessitates his contacting any number of old friends, acquaintances and nemeses in the process, catching up on their lives, discussing them with his current wife, Annebury, and beginning to see how his impressions have been wrong all his life.
Henry James provides a further characterization of Pratt’s experience in the next part of that same paragraph on writing: “If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience, and experience only,’ I should feel that this was a rather tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!'” No memory is lost on Pratt, as I indicated — but he has essentially lost his life as a Mormon because of that trade of locales. And that trade occurred, ironically enough, because as a young undergrad at the University of Utah, he accepted a mission call to serve in the New England mission, and was posted to the region round about Boston. After his mission, he can’t wait to get back to that world of the mind.
How Pratt nearly destroys that world in his mind, after destroying his first marriage; how he manages to rescue his life and his children through his second marriage; how he begins to learn the family secrets as he separates himself from the web of his misunderstanding — these form the narrative Scott spins, moving through Pratt’s memories of his life in the way he describes Pratt’s memory as working. It is a difficult task Scott sets himself, and any reader willing to persevere will be rewarded with a remarkable vision of mending, of family coming together.
And that task is made more difficult by the depth of Pratt’s alienation from his family and his friends. The first element Scott uses to indicate that alienation is Pratt’s fantasy of people pissing on his grave — nay, lining up to piss on his grave. Pratt develops this fantasy in great detail, and returns to it again and again throughout the novel, and keeps adding people to the line-up he imagines. It becomes a leitmotif in the novel, one Pratt uses to track his feelings as he re-vivifies his old relationships. It would be funny, if Pratt recognized how much it indicates his alienation — but Pratt is not that self-aware, despite his tremendous self-absorption.
His wife, Annebury, is. His mother, Anneleise, is. Even his niece, Penelope, is. Even his men-friends are. Benjamin Adams Pratt is not. A good deal of good-natured fun is poked at him about this, but even up to the final scenes of the novel he is a little stuffy, a little alienated, a little unable to join in the fun. But, on the other hand, we as readers are. The journey he makes is entertaining, and was enlightening to me as a normal, active Mormon.
Thus it is with a certain amount of sorrow that I feel compelled to point out that this novel needs a good, competent editor. Normally, I would consider that to be the publisher’s job, since the author is often too close to his or her text to see the minor flaws that like it, as fruit flies like a banana. But the text is rife with typos, with poorly-considered punctuation, or with punctuation missing entirely. I still wouldn’t bring it up but Austin Macauley is a vanity publisher, and the book I received is published as a paperback in a hard-to-hold-and-read hardback binding. And it was not sent as an advance uncorrected review copy. The verso of the title page indicates that the novel is available in hardback, paperback and as an “E-Book” (and Amazon has it in Kindle format). You might save yourself a lot of trouble, and enjoy the reading experience much more, by reading it on a tablet. By the time you download it, someone may have remedied the typos.