THE SECRET HABIT OF SORROW

Name: THE SECRET HABIT OF SORROW
Author: Victoria Patterson
ISBN: 978-1-64009-052-1

by Victoria Patterson ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 17, 2018

The beating hearts of Patterson’s characters and the directness of her voice make the grim material bearable, sometimes...

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The West Coast characters inhabiting these 16 stories from Patterson (The Little Brother, 2015) vary in age and socio-economic status, but all are caught in an acute struggle against emotional loss and personal failure.

“How To Lose”—about an infertile woman experiencing the intense anxiety of maternal love for her orphaned 8-year-old nephew as he learns to swim—sets the bittersweet tone for the stories that follow. In “Vandals,” a lonely, long-divorced attorney finally faces the fact that his ex-wife and son have “moved on.” The wife in “DC” accepts responsibility for torpedoing a decent 23-year marriage with a meaningless affair, unlike the philandering but still devoted ex-husband in “Paris.” Bad choices and addiction are common here, but Patterson’s unfussy prose draws the reader into her complex, sometimes even convoluted relationships. For instance in “Confetti,” a fired lecturer who has degenerated into an alcoholic bum upends her former lover’s quiet professorial life one way after another. The earnest young single mother of "Half-Truth,” who finds herself inexorably drawn back into a perilous relationship with her 6-year-old son’s worthless, drug-addled father, exemplifies Patterson’s ability to create characters whose abilities to feel deeply make them sympathetic despite their emotional and ethical failures. Patterson sometimes plays with the importance of secrecy in relationships. In “Johnny Hitman,” a heroin addict and a born-again Christian maintain a guarded friendship without directly confronting the childhood sexual trauma that has shaped their twisted intimacy. A similar secret besets the multigenerational family in “Visitations.” Optimism flickers in “Fledglings,” “Dogs,” "Parking Far Away,” and “We Know Things,” as young women show signs of growing beyond their traumas. The final two stories return to bittersweet territory. "Appetite” follows the faltering friendship between a former ballerina and a secretary who is discovering her own creative voice; “Nobody’s Business” focuses without sentimentality on a teenage boy learning to accept outside support and possible love while caring for his dying mother.

The beating hearts of Patterson’s characters and the directness of her voice make the grim material bearable, sometimes almost hopeful.

Pub Date: July 17, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-64009-052-1

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Counterpoint

Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BROTHER
by Victoria Patterson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE PEERLESS FOUR
by Victoria Patterson

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.