Finishing "A Patchwork Planet"

Today we went over some of the handout on Close Reading questions - please read it if you weren't there!

We then finished going over “A Patchwork Planet”. In chapter 13, the Gaitlins have a Thanksgiving dinner during which Pop-Pop tells everyone how well they’re doing, including Barnaby: “He’s a good, good boy”. Barnaby is tempted to put his hands on his sister-in-law’s bottom – you should recognise his tendency to do inappropriate things and cause needless offence on social occasions – but is interrupted by his mother, who gives him the money back and tells him how she really felt about having to pay off his burglary victims: totally humiliated because she feels they looked down on her socially. He doesn’t really take this in at the time and tears up the cheque.

His mother then tells his father about Barnaby’s refusal to take the money and he once again snubs her – “… your tiresome fishwife act”. What other comment of his does this remind you of? Should he have said this?

Sparked off by Sophia’s mentioning her “ne’er-do-well” cousin-in-law, Barnaby produces a huge list of synonyms for scoundrels – presumably because he’s been storing them up in his mind as descriptions of himself. Does he say them as a sort of apology to his mother, maybe? Is he admitting that he was wrong? Or is he just saying that he feels he’s been made to feel like this?


His father tells Pop-Pop about the Corvette. Pop-Pop is shocked but nobly says that the car “was yours to do what you liked with”.

On the way home in the car, Sophia brings up the question of money again – she’s unhappy that he tore up his mother’s cheque, but refuses to discuss the question of her (flour bin) money. All at once, Barnaby finds her irritating: her fluffy face, her bossy hands, her silly voice, her Crock-Pot dinners and general predictability; her lack of curiosity about the passport. This is really the end for their relationship.

There is then a flashback to the circumstances of Pop-Pop’s giving Barnaby the Corvette: after he locked the family out of the house and set fire to the curtains. He gave it because “I can’t think of anyone better, son” – and this act of trust appears to have reformed Barnaby as far as burgling is concerned, anyway. We now see why the car was so important to him.

In chapter 14 Barnaby goes to Mrs Alford’s and finds that she has died. He is shown her patchwork which is “makeshift and haphazard, clumsily cobbled together, overlapping and crowded and likely to fall into pieces at any moment” but also “pretty, in an offbeat, unexpected way”. Since this is the title of the book, we have to assume that Barnaby sees this as a symbol of his life – ramshackle but all right really. (Possibly the same could be said of most of our lives?) Barnaby realises that he has come to value people like Mrs Alford who “keep their good humour and gracious manners”.

He doesn’t invite Sophia to the Gaitlin Christmas dinner and declines his mother’s suggestion that he should give Sophia a family ring, but he and his mother have reached a better understanding and he muses that “it hadn’t been much fun loving someone as thorny as me”.

He and Martine are getting on better too and when he tells her about Sophia’s money being in the flour bin, she says, “What: is she out of her mind?” She trusts him completely; in fact it turns out that it was she who alerted Barnaby’s clients to the original accusation so that they asked him to do extra work for them. Martine then takes the initiative to go and collect the money. Mrs Glynn surprises them and Martine, thinking quickly, pretends that she has asked them to come and then forgotten.

Mrs Glynn must have phoned Sophia, because she then phones Barnaby, highly indignant. He puts the phone down – almost without meaning to, “my body proceeding without me again”. You should remember other times when he mentions such tendencies.

In chapter 15, he takes Sophia’s money to the station (where he knows she’ll be) and gives her a packet for Natalie (which he knows she’ll take) with a piece of paper tucked inside (which is supposed to contain Natalie’s phone number but which is actually a message). This mirrors the station scene at the beginning and shows us the Anne Tyler’s careful structuring of the novel: this last scene wouldn’t work without the first scene having happened.

Then he goes to Mrs Alford’s to help clear up and to collect the Twinform, which Mrs Alford has willed to him. He imagines it (himself?) dressed in a suit – smartly. Is this his future self?

The novel ends just after he unscrews a figure-of-eight mounting plate from the wall. This reminds him of Martine’s dungaree clasps and when she comes in he says (quoting from the Shakespeare sonnet) “Haply I think on thee”. Remember that this means “Perhaps I’m thinking about you” – which suggests that Martine may in fact be the one for him. She seems to understand; on the whole she does understand him (and she trusts him) though she can’t possibly be recognising the quotation. Notice the structuring of the novel, though: the sonnet clue was planted some time ago, though possibly only alert readers would actually realise what happens here.

At the station (Barnaby assumes) Sophia reads the message: “Sophia, you never did realise. I am a man you can trust”. At last he feels sure of this, and doesn’t want the woman in his life to be someone who doesn’t trust him.

I will supply you with copious notes next week, but before then, please write (for homework) some notes of your own on one or two themes of this novel. The ones I suggest are trust, change, money/possessions/class, age and love, but feel free to think of other themes that you feel you could substantiate by textual reference (ie mentioning how the themes emerge in the plot / language).