Small Town, Big Heart, Up Down, Fresh Start

For the most part, I'm drawn to three kinds of fiction: cozy mysteries, romcoms, and heartwarming dramas.  That said, I write about the mysteries and romcoms a lot.  But when it comes to the dramas, not so much.  I think it's because they demand a little more from me.  Yet that's also why, more often than not, they touch me the deepest.  And that was the case with Elizabeth Berg's The Confession Club.

The Confession Club is one of Berg's Mason, Missouri novels and revisits some of her characters from Night of Miracles.  Local ladies of different ages meet weekly to take turns spilling secrets over coffee and cake.  Sometimes the confessions that seem the most mundane prove to be the most cathartic.  Because this club -- and this book -- aren't about shock value.  They're about letting go and embracing the world.

For example, when the heroine, Iris, meets a man with a sad past, Berg describes the moment with wistful wisdom:

"It's beautiful outside.  It's as though the edges of the world have been lightly erased, and everything is infused with a violet light: the sky, the droplets that hang from the tips of leaves, the mesh of tall weeds at the side of the road, even the road itself.  Then, as the color begins to fade, she realizes it was a trick of the eye, a kind of saturation that occurred from looking so deeply at all those purple lilacs.  But it was wonderful, that false vision, an unconscious surrender to seeing things another way." (73)   

I like to think that this is what Iris and the other women learn -- that "tricks" are sometimes trails to the truth, and that beauty can be our salvation.

No wonder I didn't want to leave Mason.  Luckily, Berg has a few more books set there, so it'll be a bit before I have to.