‘Night of Miracles’ offers a sweet slice of comfort
How about a nice slice of cake? Caramel, maybe? Or yellow, with milk chocolate buttercream frosting?
The characters in Elizabeth Berg’s new novel, “Night of Miracles” (Random House), frequently sit down to lovingly described treats fresh from the oven. Lucille Howard, 88, is a master baker and baking teacher who begins every class with samples served on a cut-crystal pedestal.
Lucille was introduced in the first volume of Berg’s Mason (Missouri) series, “The Story of Arthur Truluv“(2017), as a lifelong spinster who is given one brief chance at true love.
In this second installment, she’s alone again, but only for a moment, as her fate entwines with Lincoln, the little boy whose family buys the house next door, and Iris, a childless divorcee who has just moved to town from Boston.
Having heard about Mason from her college roommate years ago, Iris imagines it the perfect refuge: “One river, one cemetery, one department store, with wooden floors and a ribbon department.” After striking out at the day care center, where she ends up crying too hard to fill out the application, Iris takes a job as Lucille’s assistant. As Lucille gets a website, a direct-deposit system and custom pastry boxes, Iris becomes adept at the alchemical uses of butter and flour.
Take your cue from her and find refuge in Mason, a place blessedly free of the political chaos we now know as “real life.”
In Berg’s charming but far from shallow alternative reality, the focus is on the things that make life worth living: the human connections that light the way through the dark of aging, bereavement, illness and our own mistakes.
Lincoln’s parents, Abby and Jason Summers, are hardly yellow-cake people — they drive two hours every other Saturday to buy their tofu at the Whole Foods in Columbia. But after Abby is diagnosed with cancer they overcome their fear of refined sugar to take Lucille up on her offer to help with their son — a brave one, since she has never taken care of a child.
The power of food plays a role in each of the plot lines in “Night of Miracles.” At Polly’s Henhouse, waitress Monica Mayhew carries a torch for her frequent customer, taxi driver Tiny Dawson.
Tiny, who is anything but, enthusiastically returns her affection but is too humiliated by his weight to ask her out. When he stops coming in for his usual double order of pigs in a blanket, she mistakes the calorie-cutting for a loss of interest and sadly begins dating another customer.
As her legions of fans know, Berg likes to help her characters solve problems with a touch of magic realism — a prescient dream here, a ghostly visitation there, a fortuneteller who really knows what she’s talking about.
As the endearing, odd-lot characters of Mason, Missouri, coalesce into new families, dessert is served: a plateful of chocolate-and-vanilla pinwheel cookies for the soul.