by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws, by Margaret Drabble, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010,
ISBN 978-0-54-738609-6
Available at Powell's Books

When stuck between a rock and the sheer high face of a seemingly insurmountable problem, there are a number of ways that I cope. These include watching quality television, reading and working puzzles. I'd like to cry, but I'm not good at it.

Sopranos and Mad Men
One year, to redirect the anger I felt about unfair treatment at work, I visited the library to check out DVDs of the entire, breathtakingly violent Sopranos TV series. My husband and I were comforted that Tony and Carmela Soprano’s hellish lives were not our own.

Last autumn, we found respite from the  not-so-great depression (GD II) in similar trips to the library for DVDs of Mad Men. We were sucked into the dark of Don and Betty Draper’s 1960s home and propelled into the brightness, creativity and corruption of Madison Avenue as we blended a crazy cocktail of old episodes with the new season.

Margaret Drabble
More often, I seek a different kind of fiction therapy at the library, bringing home piles of novels. I admit to being what I think of as a lopsided reader. Except for the endless factual research I do for my writing, I seldom read non-fiction.

 Yet I have been drawn to a number of non-fiction books in the past year, including Margaret Drabble’s unusual The Pattern in the Carpet, A Personal History with Jigsaws, which I discovered — where else — at my local library.

Drabble wanted to create a glossy, harmless history of jigsaw puzzles and other games that would avoid painful family controversies. She reasoned that thinking about puzzles and games would aid her escape from the anxiety and cabin fever of helping nurse her husband through cancer.

It did, but not before transmuting into a difficult memoir, involving recollections about an eccentric but beloved spinster aunt devoted to jigsaw puzzles.

Puzzle therapy
Previous to discovering The Pattern in the Carpet, I theorized that people are drawn to puzzles, in part, as a form of therapy — a way to sooth themselves by succeeding at putting together the pieces of a picture, reorganizing the letters in a word jumble or decoding a cryptic message.

Drabble validated my thinking, while at the same time showing that any topic can lead to turmoil. However, as she wrote, “Jigsaws are a useful antidote to anger.”

Similarly, solving a crossword puzzle can help one avoid cross words and completing the daily Sudoku can lend a feeling of logic to the illogical, disturbing days of GDII. A walk to the library doesn’t hurt either.