Read: Clara’s Quilt, by Doctor Gaines
Full disclosure: I know and am good friends with the author. I’m going to try not to let that prejudice this review, but I can’t promise anything.
It’s hard to know what to call this - it’s too long to be a short story, and too short to quite count as a novella. Whatever it is, though, it’s the perfect length. Before I really get to grips with this, though, I have to point out a couple of problems with the text.
The first is an objective issue, unfortunately - there are at least a handful of mistakes in here that a decent copy-editor could (or, at least, should) have been able to pick out, and while none of them are exactly damning (we’re talking about phrases that are grammatically off and commonly confused words, not outright spelling mistakes) there are enough of them that it’s noticeable. I feel like an utter bastard pointing this out, especially as I know that there’s at least one mistake in Dystopolis, but given that this wasn’t an isolated issue I feel like I have to.
The second is arguably a lot more subjective, and it’s a problem that lies in Gaines’s last work, Michigan, Ten Cents - there are a number of perspectival shifts in this story, and while for the most part they’re executed fairly cleanly, at times the narrator ends up adopting some of the cadences of the characters themselves. This might be deliberate, but it feels a little too inconsistent to be so.
Having said all of that - this is mysterious, and exciting, and not what I expected. Where Michigan focused on the pursuit of a moral ill to tragic ends, Clara’s Quilt is more about the power of redemption in a world that tends to only grant it by chance. The titular character, orphaned after each of her parents dies in turn, spends a good portion of the story stitching towels together, at first as a hobby and gradually as an all-consuming obsession, to the point where the pursuit of it even replaces her desire to eat.
The story could end here as a cautionary tale, but instead it pulls back and throws in a twist that feels both fortuitous and narratively deserved. There are a number of perspectives, as I mentioned earlier, but each of them comes in at exactly the right time - in terms of the way he constructs a story, Gaines is impeccable.
Ultimately, the quality of the plot here overrides the cosmetic issues that find their way into the nooks and crannies of this not-quite-a-novella. Consider this a recommendation with caveats, but a recommendation nevertheless.
