The beating hearts of Patterson’s characters and the directness of her voice make the grim material bearable, sometimes...
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.
When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel’s earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival.
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56202-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.
Edgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material sliced off the front pages.
The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts most of the stories in this debut collection. Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what pundits label our “ongoing racial dialogue” a deadpan style, an acerbic perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers’ expectations. “The Finkelstein 5,” the opener, deals with the furor surrounding the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five black children with a chainsaw. The story is as prickly in its view toward black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots pressing for an acquittal. An even more caustic companion story, “Zimmer Land,” is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on sight, or “problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. Such dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: “The Era,” for example, identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a controlled substance called “Good.” The title story, meanwhile, riotously reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes fear it could be in real life. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions are, there’s more in Adjei-Brenyah’s quiver besides tough-minded satire, as exhibited in “The Lion & the Spider,” a tender coming-of-age story cleverly framed in the context of an African fable.
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-91124-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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