The Art of Falling by Danielle McLaughlin

Published by Random House on January 5, 2021

The Art of Falling is a domestic drama mixed with an art drama. The domestic drama involves spouses who have been dishonest with each other, although the wife’s transgression involves a kept secret she arguably had no duty to reveal. Just as their strained marriage seems to be mending, their teenage daughter takes an interest in an older boy whose actions cause mild tension in the family dynamic. Like most domestic dramas, the family’s mundane issues are likely to be of more interest to the participants than to outsiders. Readers who are not fans of generic soap opera plots are likely to be among the outsiders who don’t care much about this family’s dysfunctions.

The art drama is more interesting. It involves a sculpture that (according to one theory) was made from a porous stone so that it would decay with time. Nessa McCormack is negotiating on behalf of a gallery to acquire the Chalk Sculpture from the family of its creator. Robert Locke has been dead for nearly twenty years, but Nessa has done her due diligence by researching his life and art, including interviews with Locke’s daughter, Loretta. The sculpture is believed to be of Locke’s pregnant wife, modeled on a photo of her taken sixteen years before the sculpture was created. Locke’s wife is still alive, but Loretta keeps her sheltered from the world, ostensibly because of her delicate health.

Nessa is surprised when a woman who didn’t come up in her research suddenly claims to have helped with the Chalk Sculpture’s creation. The woman, Melanie Doerr, would like some credit for the role she played. She is both persistent and annoying as she presses her claims. Loretta tells Nessa that she knows nothing about Melanie, but as events unfold, the reader will suspect that Melanie, while possibly daft, might be telling some version of the truth and that Loretta might be shading it, if not telling outright lies.

Most of the characters in The Art of Falling have been untruthful at some point. Sorting out the lies from the truth is a challenge. Did Melanie create the Chalk Sculpture, perhaps while sleeping with Locke? Did Stuart Harkin have just one affair (as he told Nessa, referring to his affair with her) or multiple affairs, as he apparently confessed to his wife Amy. Or was Amy lying when she recorded those affairs in the diary that nobody knew she kept?

Amy's son Luke reads the diary and suspects that Nessa was the cause of his mother’s suicide, fueling the soap operatic nature of the plot. Nessa frets that Luke will reveal the truth to her daughter Jessica when she isn’t fretting that Jessica will sleep with Luke. The affair occurred before Nessa’s marriage to her husband Philip, but her own transgression doesn’t deter her from judging Philip for having his own affair with Cora Wilson (whose daughter Mandy happens to be Jessica’s best friend). That affair isn’t surprising because it is the duty of a husband in a domestic drama to have an affair so he can complain that his wife never lets him forget what a rogue he is.

The Art of Falling is the kind of novel in which characters make a mess of their lives, burst into tears, and spend the rest of the book wallowing in their self-inflicted misery. Stories of that nature tend to overwhelm the reader with melodrama. While The Art of Falling doesn’t overwhelm, it repeatedly serves up scenes that are overly familiar, including Jennifer’s trite response to her mother’s parenting: “I hate you. I’m never going to speak to you again. How could you do that to me?” Nessa worries that “I don’t seem to have charge of her anymore” but since Jennifer is 16, what does she expect?

Danielle McLaughlin is a talented prose stylist. She creates characters in satisfying depth, even if the characters in The Art of Falling are unappealing. The mystery of Melanie Doerr’s claimed contribution to the Chalk Sculpture holds the novel together, giving the reader something more interesting to think about than Nessa’s first-world problems. The virtues and faults of The Art of Falling are in equipoise, resulting in a recommendation only for dedicated fans of domestic drama and, perhaps, for readers who are really into stories about art.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS