The work of Southern California-based writer Victoria Patterson gives noirfiction new life, limning the lives of those trapped by addiction, caught between the twin perils of wealth and poverty, as observed by the envious “losers’’ who serve the lost plutocrats of the O.C. or marry into their families.
Her remarkable new short story collection The Secret Habit of Sorrow underscores the virtues of looking at the world plain, with deep respect for the painful choices each of us make every day for incalculable, if often unjustifiable, reasons.
Although Patterson’s prose fiction has been compared to Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson, the analogy is inexact: Carver’s work seems, on re-reading, to resonate disturbingly with unresolved anger against women, and Johnson’s later fiction feels unmoored, a sensibility in search of a subject.
In a recent interview in Tin House magazine, the author quoted Frank O’Hara: “Attention equals life.’’ Her characters are closely observed, unjudged, as she allows us the negative capability to engage in their struggles.
In “How To Lose,’’ Natalie assumes custody of her nephew, AJ, after her sister dies of an accidental overdose. Afraid to swim, but more afraid to be banished to the “Guppy’’ pool for toddlers at school, he practices breathing underwater in the bathtub. Patterson captures the subtle psychological dynamic between them as she drives him to school:
“They’re on time and AJ tells her not to park the car, meaning he’ll get out at the drop-off on his own, she shouldn’t walk with him today. He has his look – I’m going to be brave, it says, I’m trying, I’m doing my best, because I love you and need you and need you and love you – and she feels herself clenching as she pulls the car to the curb. He steps out – resolute – and gives her a grim look. There’s something wizened and sad in his expression, some finality, acceptance and incomprehension, and she feels the equivalent blooming inside her.’’
In “Half-Truth,’’ Kelly cares for Owen, her six-year-old son after his junkie father, Nick, has flown the coop. She knows it’s wrong, but just can’t quit him, reconnecting when he sidles up to her as she works the register at Vons. Before she knows it, she’s hooking up with him in the alley behind the market and giving him money to help support his habit. It’s all a big mistake, by objective, 12-step standards – or the judgements of her parents, whom she imagines saying: “You’re risking everything, all your hard work, for a nobody, a nothing. Hasn’t he done enough to ruin your life?’’ But Nick provides the emotional ballast – and yes, the risk – she needs to navigate the confusing demands of parenthood and her own uncertain path.
When she confides doubts about keeping the death of her parent’s dog a secret from Owen, Nick catches her out by saying, “That’s not lying…There’s a bigger honesty in making a person feel better.’’
This is not “Me Too’’ fiction, let alone The New Yorker’s cult “Cat Story,’’ but there’s a quiet strength in Patterson’s work; the characters she depicts may be lost, but can’t be discounted.
A tale called “Confetti’’ provides the book’s title, taken from a Henry James passage citing “the secret habit of sorrow, and the sharp pain of missing opportunities.’’ The narrator is a creative writing instructor who can’t shake a former girlfriend and colleague – she’s the one who provides the challenging quote – who’s gone into deep alcoholic decline. He confides in Father Bill, an A.A. counselor he meets outside a poetry reading:
“I told him about how, not long ago, I’d gone to open up my office and found Zaqar lying face down near my desk, her skirt hiked up…I had a young student with me – a wannabe punk rocker with a half-shaved head and black eyeliner all around her eyes – who plugged her nose because Zaquar smelled like booze, rotten eggs, bananas, and shit. ‘You should go,’ I told my student, while kneeling to pull Zaquar’s skirt down … The next thing I know I’m nudging Zaquar with my foot, but she’s not budging. I knelt next to her. She’d gained more weight, and her stomach was spread on the floor pancake-like. But it was probably her liver ballooning from her body. Her pink scalp shone beneath bristly hair, and her face was scratched and dirty.”
He calls security, as the story, and Zaquar, head to their inevitable ends. Small dreams, indeed.
There are echoes of Flannery O’Connor here, with more compassion. The lines between success and failure, sanity and societally defined madness are thin, growing less discernible every day.
It’s tempting to quote each of the sixteen stories here, packed as they are with knowledge of our suffering souls. There’s humor, too, albeit unavoidably dark, as in “Fledglings,’’ when a Riverside grad student connects with a too-handsome-to-be-true classmate when they each decide to ditch their free counseling session, and they bond over psycho-active pharmaceuticals:
“I hate those ads,’’ he said, “where the woman’s wincing in physical pain until after the drugs, then she’s laughing and swinging her groceries.’’ He paused and then changed the subject: “You ever date dumb people? It’s the worst.’’
“I dated a dumb trust-funder named Edmund,” I said. In those years I was only sexually active with men who couldn’t challenge me. The sex was bland, but it felt safer.’’
“The worst is dumb with attitude,’’ he said. “Sassy dumb. They’re the type,’’ he said, looking at the fish tank, “who tap on the glass and go, ‘Hey there, fishy-fish.’ God, I hate that. Stay away from glass-tappers.’’
Patterson’s eye and ear are pitiless but passionate, sometimes caustic but never chilly. The depths beneath her tales, like Hemingway’s iceberg, are hidden but unavoidable. Her work reminds me of Robert Stone in its understanding, and forgiveness, of human nature. Mavis Gallant comes to mind, too, in the portraits of lonely women and their hopelessly unsuitable mates. Patterson is a strong novelist, too – The Little Brother, a 2015 fictional account of a true crime rape saga in Newport Beach – is riveting if sometimes uncomfortable reading.
“Appetite’’ deals with the dysfunctional friendship between two young mothers, Lauren and Claire, their unequal writing ambitions, and unspoken rivalries. At first, Lauren, who’s just moved to Los Angeles from Colorado, feels overwhelmed by the more successful, affluent couple – Claire’s husband, Richard, is a professor who’s published an experimental novel. The meme about academic politics being so fierce because the stakes are so small proves true, as Richard mocks Lauren’s literary taste (“Bukowski? Drunk, sloppy.’’) and Claire starves herself in an elaborate act of self-punishment.
But the power dynamic shifts after Claire reads Lauren’s notebook, and complains that it violated her privacy. “I felt like she’d sucker punched me,’’ Patterson writes. “The notebook was mostly blank, thankfully… I’d scribbled a few sentences about what I’d eaten and described some plants and the sky – and one small detail about Claire’s wedding ring, which she’d masking-taped around the rim to stay on her bony finger.’’
It’s the details that kill you. But, in the fiction of Victoria Patterson, they may also be your salvation.
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[Published by Counterpoint on July 17, 2018. 224 pages, $16.95 paperback]