Seldom does a work of fiction offer its own thesis statement, but longtime Louisiana professor, editor, and attorney (now based in North Carolina) Mary Hester’s debut, Painting Grace, comes close late in the novel: “How long had it been since someone had asked her to look at a rose?”
The book’s central character, a widowed art historian named Dr. Miriam Landry, has no trouble looking at the roses herself, but has so isolated herself in the wake of loss that she shares little with anyone else. When she learns, at the point of retirement, that she has months to live, her plan to approach death with the same no-nonsense concealment of sentimentality that has governed her middle age is interrupted by a final friendship with her last student, her home health worker, Camille.
The story could easily have become saccharine: “A cancer patient finds peace and forgiveness at the end of her life, helped by a cheerful and devout nurse” isn’t exactly a thrilling elevator pitch. But Hester has taken what could have been a sermon and instead crafted a parable. People do horrible things in this novel—including at least one that (if I were Miriam) could well have seen the end her relationship with her parents forever—but the real growth, the real plot drivers, are acts of kindness.
Grace, that most unexpected of divine gifts, cracks characters open where attacks would and do fail. Late in the book, Miriam begins to imagine grace as a big white cat barging into the room to bring comfort and affection, whether the recipient wants it or not. (This is clearly heretical, as grace is a dog, but allowances must be made for cat people.) This mechanism of grace happening through the works of others, of charity overwhelming a defense, is the recurrent motif of the book. Love is less an emotion than an action, a set of behaviors, and if it’s occasionally expressed through the time-honored cultural practice of minding someone else’s business, so be it.
Grace, that most unexpected of divine gifts, cracks characters open where attacks would and do fail. Late in the book, Miriam begins to imagine grace as a big white cat barging into the room to bring comfort and affection, whether the recipient wants it or not.
Miriam’s slow opening to others, and indeed to herself, is made more realistic by the exceptional crafting of her character. Faced with grief, she has become not bitter, but stale—operating within the parameters of what she is willing to confront. When she’s flinty or snappish, it’s because she’s guarding her privacy, which is a more interesting trait to watch than the more familiar “hurt people hurt people” scold. She’s easy to like (and to pity, though it would offend her), of a type but not a cutout, someone who has used comfort and achievement to replace joy. This development of Miriam occasionally occurs at the expense of other characters’ elaboration; for example, Miriam conspires with an acquaintance to push Camille toward a certain course of action, and I’d have loved to see this dynamic deepened to see Miriam work with a peer. Still, many writers never even craft one compelling character.
[Read another book review by Chris Turner-Neal: "The Irish Goodbye"]
Hester also handles Miriam’s decline with delicate effectiveness. There’s not a lot of symptoms and pills, and what we see instead is the gradual circumscription of Miriam’s world. Driving becomes difficult. Her clothes no longer fit, her menu dwindles, her energy fades. She triages her remaining business, donating valuables, shredding papers, and arranging her estate. Miriam destroying her most revealing keepsakes to avoid their being discovered after death is as irrevocable an acceptance of mortality as accepting the bedpan. And so, at the end, we may not be ready for her to go, but we’re very pleased for the chance to have known her.
Find Painting Grace, which was published in February of this year, at Silent Clamor Press. silentclamor.com.
