Speaking of linked stories: Patrick Somerville's new one

This post is not going to do it justice, but I can't recommend highly enough Patrick Somerville's amazing new collection, The Universe In Miniature In Miniature.  (I must disclose that 1, Patrick is a friend of mine; 2, I got a free galley from the publisher; and 3, I blurbed it.  In fact, it resulted in the greatest blurb I have ever written, if I do say so myself.)  This book indeed consists of linked stories, and it's one of those rare specimens of the species that succeed far better than they have any right to.  I'm at a loss to describe the thing; it is quasi science-fictional (there's some stuff in Patrick's last book, The Cradle, that suggested he might eventually give full rein to his inner sci-fi nerd), mysterious, dark, comic, and thoroughly engaging.  It contains, oh hell, marriage problems, and a supernatural power helmet, and a secret society, and aliens, and a mercenary.  It is also beautifully illustrated by Rob Funderburk, which I didn't even realize when I wrote the blurb ("It's as if Optimus Prime has folded himself up into a story collection"), and which is actually kind of important to one of the stories.

Patrick is a rad dude and this book is incredibly adventurous and utterly unique.  How often is it that somebody follows up their breakthrough book with a small-press collection of semi-sci-fi?  Not often.  Reward him by throwing down for this baby.

The Cradle is not simple

Congratulations to W6 friend Patrick Somerville for this terrific review of his new novel in the New York Times. Somerville, whom I interviewed back in September as part of the Writers At Cornell series, is the author of a good story collection, Trouble. I liked those stories, and I like Somerville, but The Cradle is, in my view, a huge leap forward for this writer, and a testament to how much life is still left in straightforwardly written psychological realism.

I'm very suspicious, I should mention, of the whole "simplicity" thing. A few years back, there was a bit of hulabaloo when the long-blocked Tony Early rolled out a new, un-ironic version of himself in Jim The Boy, a book that I didn't like much. This was also around the time of the whole Jedediah Purdy thing, and it all seemed, at the time, a step back not just from postmodern angst, but emotional complexity, and I grew suspicious of anything that smacked of the New Simplicity.

Patrick's story collection is very guy. All the stories are, in some respect, about their protagonist's tussles with the notion of masculinity. And the novel, too, is a guy novel. Which is not remotely to say it's for guys to read. Indeed, it differs from the stories in the beautifully open moral and emotional qualities of its main character, a guy named Matt, whose pregnant wife, Marissa, has asked him to go find the cradle she slept in as a baby. The request is irrational in the extreme, and its fulfillment likely to be fraught with difficulties, but Matt decides to do it.

At first, the book takes the form of a fairly conventional quest narrative. Matt enounters a lot of strange characters, and gets himself into various apparently picayune situations, in the course of searching for the cradle. But when he finds it, he finds something else, as well--an intolerable situation, related to Marissa's own upbringing, which Matt alone has the power to rectify. The novel stops being about the quest and starts being about more important things--about being an adult, about having the courage to do the right thing, when the right thing is unimaginably complex and undesirable. Furthermore, this narrative is crosscut with a second one, about a mother terrified of her teenage son's impending military service in Iraq. This story line is set ten years after the main one, and it's unclear for quite a long time how they're connected. But they are, and they dovetail beautifully, magnifying and elaborating upon the book's already quietly established themes.

The prose is clear, funny, and supple; the characters are humanely drawn and wonderfully convincing. The whole thing is only a couple hundred pages. The book reminds me of a few of my favorite short novels--The Optimist's Daughter, The Name Of The World, Winter In The Blood, and I expect to return to it often. It's about hope and responsibility in the midst of chaos and confusion, which, in this spring of our discombobulation, may be just the ticket.

Patrick Somerville, and the MacGuffin

I had the opportunity to speak this week with Patrick Somerville, as part of the Writers At Cornell podcast. Somerville was a student here a few years back, when I knew him slightly; since leaving Ithaca he has published a collection of stories; and his first novel, The Cradle, will be out in the spring. We talked about a lot of things (click the link and listen in), but most interesting to me was his description of how he came to write his novel.

The stories, as I mentioned to him in the interview, all pivot around events--tragedies, mistakes, embarrassments. Indeed, Somerville came to realize that this technique (a reliable one when it comes to short stories) had become a bad habit, and he struggled to figure out a new approach to narrative that would enable him to write a good novel. After a couple of false starts, he hit upon an idea--he would let a story spring from a MacGuffin.

Alfred Hitchcock didn't invent the MacGuffin, but he did invent the term, and popularized the concept. It's the device--generally an object--which propels the plot. It doesn't matter, ultimately, what the thing is--"In crook stories it is almost always the necklace," Hitchcock once said, "and in spy stories it is most always the papers"--it merely has to get the characters moving.

In Patrick's case, the MacGuffin is (as his title implies), a cradle. The protagonist, an amiable working-class midwesterner, has recently married, and his wife is eight months pregnant; she impulsively decides that their child must have the cradle that she herself slept in as an infant. The problem is that her mother ran out on her when she was seven, and nobody knows where she is. Protagonist agrees to the quest anyway; novel ensues.

For Somerville, this was a highly effective technique--he wrote a hundred pages in a week. Personally, I love plots like this (another Ithacan, Lamar Herrin, once did something similar in his amazing The Lies Boys Tell), and Patrick's reading of the opening chapter of The Cradle was terrific. The idea of the MacGuffin reminds us what a strange beast the creative imagination is--honestly, it doesn't matter what you use to get the motor running, and it may have no bearing on where you end up driving the thing. It just has to get you started.