BACKSTITCH

In this debut novel, a walk through an art exhibition slowly reveals the history of the artist.

Seven years after Alice Snyder’s death, her daughter Violet is back in Washington, D.C., for a posthumous exhibition of her brilliant but complicated mother’s work as put together by her beloved younger sister, Marigold, who’s also an artist. As Violet wanders through her mercurial mother’s artworks, exhibited mostly chronologically, author Mitchell Donahue inserts museum labels describing each one, and follows them with snapshots of Alice’s life. The chapters set in the first room, with Alice’s paintings of her young daughters in classical style, focus on the girls’ memories of that time, as they carefully tiptoe around their mother’s moods, doing their best to keep the peace with their ever-patient father as Alice struggles to juggle being an artist and a mother. The second room, with the three-dimensional fabric pieces that defined Alice’s later work, shifts to a time before the girls’ birth, as college-aged Alice; her future husband, Arthur, an astronomer; and Gabriel Grant, her then-boyfriend, a rich artist, dance around each other in a precarious web of relationships that create the off-balance family the girls inherit. As the novel moves ahead, even as it goes backward in time, each character becomes more human. Mitchell Donahue weaves a tale that will make the reader want to flip back and reread, as details later in the book clarify earlier moments in new and interesting ways. Despite knowing from the very first pages how Alice’s story will end, it’s almost impossible not to be drawn into the complicated, slowly unfolding chaos of Alice’s life as each artwork—each chapter—adds another dimension to her character. Still, her many faces—muse, artist, wife, and mother—can’t encompass all of her. Her daughters can never fully know her and neither can the reader.

A thoughtful, complex exploration of art and womanhood.