The past collides with the present in The Mending as the iconoclastic Benjamin Adams Pratt prepares for a milestone school reunion that inadvertently becomes a poignant and rollicking homecoming for a prodigal son who forsook the Mormon Zion for Manhattan. Snapshots from his past emerge to form a refreshingly nuanced and complex portrait of an achingly self-conscious man of remarkable devotion and awkward loyalty. In free-flowing narratives resonant of John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, Scott merges riotously humorous storytelling with malingering regrets about half-formed relationships and missed opportunities. He vividly reconstructs Ben's transformation from an astonishingly independent and footloose child in Salt Lake City into a sophisticated New Yorker, by turns seduced, bemused, and repulsed by the privileges of class and pretentious erudition while remaining harshly and haughtily dismissive of the culture and people he abandoned. His accidental journey of self-discovery traverses the borderlands of inheritance, religion, ethnicity, and humanity.