HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT

by Whitney Otto ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1991

First-novelist Otto has created a study--intricately arranged and historically ambitious--of the lives of several women who are all part of a weekly quilting circle in a California town. The Joy Luck Club comes at once to mind--a comparison apt at the start, although Otto's book tends to labor and grow thin past midpoint. The start is strong, even so, with the life stories, economically and vividly told, of the sisters Glady Joe and Hy (""The Flower Girls""--their full names are Hyacinth and Gladiola Josephine), including the death in mid-life of a husband and the resulting infidelity of one of the sisters with the husband of the other. These lives are cunningly stitched together with others--the episode ""Sophia Darling,"" about a whirlwind courtship circa WW II, leading to a later life of modified sorrow; and the touching ""String of Pearls,"" about a woman who marries unusually late in life. In between these narrative sections are interchapters cast under the heading of ""Instructions,"" in which the book's narrator (a young woman named Finn who--it's slowly revealed--is related to the others in subtle and varied ways) is free to talk not only about history in general and the history and technique of quilting in specific, but also--always in the metaphor of quilting--about life, marriage, and love (""Do not be hasty when deciding on a border, as you will have to live with this choice the rest of your quilt's life""). Only later in the novel, after ""Umbrellas Will Not Help At All"" (troubled love between a woman and her artist-husband), do the wit and sinew of Otto's inventiveness begin to slacken, especially in the hasty and hackneyed ""Outdoors,"" about parent-and-offspring divisiveness in the Vietnam-and-hippie years, and in the earnest but topic-driven and psychoologically prefab ""Tears Like Diamond Stars,"" about a young woman of mixed race (black and white) trying to find her identity. The symbols of unity amid variety (as in quilts) are still in place, but aliveness of narrative declines toward the perfunctory as threads are pulled together. A bright and talented effort that, even so, leaves the reader by the end feeling that enough--for Otto, too--was a bit earlier.

Pub Date: March 1, 1991

ISBN: 0345388968

Page Count: -

Publisher: Villard/Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1991

Categories: FICTION