Remembrance of puzzles past

As she explains in the book’s foreword, she intended her 2006 novel, “The Sea Lady,’’ to be her last, believing that its writing had helped her achieve “a state of calm and equilibrium,’’ and left her “at peace with the world.’’ So she thought she would enjoy writing about jigsaw puzzles, remembered fondly from childhood, “something that would take me away from fiction into a primary world of facts and pictures.’’ It would be pleasing, “a harmless little book that, unlike two of my later novels, would not upset or annoy anybody.’’ But of course, “it didn’t work out like that.’’

Drabble’s husband, biographer Michael Holroyd, is diagnosed with advanced cancer. As she supports him, she sinks into paranoia and depression, illnesses with a long history in her family. She also stews, with barely controlled anger, on the hurtful reactions of family and readers to her use of autobiographical materials in recent novels. Desperate for time-killing, mood-enhancing activities, Drabble plunges into jigsaw puzzle assembly, and soon her harmless little book morphs into something more personal and complicated.

Research into the history and social significance of jigsaws compels her and - along with working on puzzles in her home - triggers a cascade of memories. She is soon led to consider board games, card games, crossword puzzles, novels of puzzle-like structure, mosaics, map-making, children’s literature, all of which come to comprise a “jigsaw model of experience and of the universe’’ in which “scattered pieces from the first dispersal are reunited at the end of time.’’ It is clear why a person in Drabble’s emotional circumstances would gravitate toward materials suggesting that cohesion and happy resolution were possible.

Formally, “The Pattern in the Carpet’’ is meant to follow the jigsaw model as well. Drabble seeks to make bits of memory fit into recognizable shapes, and incorporate them into her findings about the historical development, social significance, cultural import, and value of puzzles and their associated activities.

The memory segments cluster around Drabble’s maternal Aunt Phyl, a character influenced by “a lifetime of schoolmistressy propriety and younger-sister, maiden-aunt syndrome.’’ Drabble and her siblings spent holidays at Aunt Phyl’s home, and many hours there doing puzzles. These memories lead to others about her immediate family, childhood visits to London with Aunt Phyl, Drabble’s schooling or reading or travels or researches. Apparently still anxious about giving offense in the use of family materials, she writes cautiously, limiting the book’s memoir elements to those that link most directly with puzzles, games, and related activities. So while “The Pattern in the Carpet’’ does incorporate autobiography, this is only a small part of the overall picture. Besides, while memory-as-jigsaw-puzzle is a neat metaphor, life tends not to be so neat: “Now that I am old I recognize that I may be condemned to live with an unresolved story and an incomplete picture.’’ Nevertheless, she “cannot resist continuing to try to piece things together.’’

The bulk of the book is devoted to Drabble’s research into puzzles and related activities, often at great, digressive depth. Writing about jigsaws leads to writing about an early British board game - The Royal Game of the Goose - which leads to writing about Jules Verne’s use of that game in one of his novels, and how that novel’s train journey mimics the game’s design, which leads to writing about her own train journey through the United States. Writing about Aunt Phyl leads to a hyperextended description of décor and the complete ingredient list for Hovis, a bread product served by her aunt. As Drabble notes late, “I have strayed far from my plan, which was to write a brief illustrated history of the jigsaw puzzle. I find myself with a bucket full of leftover tesserae, some with jagged and uneven edges encrusted with old mastic and resin, which do not fit into my original design.’’

Depending on your taste and patience, reading through the resulting hodge-podge will be fascinating, tedious, or both. For Drabble, writing this book provided a chance to see whether her fragmentary materials might “come together and make a picture.’’ And if all the pieces did not fit, if the writer’s effort “to make order from chaos’’ did not fully work, she knows that for most writers it seldom does. “The admission of failure is the best that we can do.’’

Floyd Skloot’s recent books include the memoir “The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer’s Life’’ and the poetry collection “The Snow’s Music.’’ His “Selected Poems: 1970-2005’’ won a Pacific Northwest Book Award earlier this year.