The Secret Habit of Sorrow

May 15, 2018
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.

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July 23, 2018
Patterson (The Little Brother) offers 16 melancholic tales of souls who are not so much lost as inextricably entangled in their bad habits and behaviors. In “Parking Far Away,” an alcoholic newly released from a recovery home to a housekeeping job shares an unexpected moment of empathy with a drunk coworker. “We Know Things” tells of a college girl who bonds with an older woman out of guilt for having “stolen” her mother’s boyfriend years before. “Trees” is about a young boy who is abandoned by his father and fantasizes a familial relationship with the man whom his father killed in an automobile accident. In several of the book’s most affecting stories, characters find temporary fulfillment in surrogate relationships, among them “How to Lose,” in which a young boy and the aunt raising him find that each reminds the other of his dead mother, and “Vandals,” in which a divorcée who feels abandoned by his family shares a moment of platonic intimacy with his teenage son’s estranged girlfriend. Patterson excels at excavating the lighter side of her characters’ otherwise sad experiences to find stories that are amusing and poignant without being overly sentimental.

August 1, 2018

Some story writers can't resolve the moment they've managed to capture, but in her first collection Patterson (The Little Brother) shows that she's skilled at offering satisfying and effectively contained slices of life. Frequently, her characters battle family or personal issues but won't give up. A woman facing divorce, suspecting her son of smoking pot, and contending with her thrice-widowed mother tosses her own wedding dress out the window but collects it from the bushes. A divorced father reaches out to a girl his teenage son has scorned, even as he catches her preparing to vandalize his ex-wife's house; she finally helps him refill the pond he's emptied. Natalie tries to help her dead sister's nerdy young son while shoving down disappointment about her inability to get pregnant, and a young woman battling addiction still talks with preachy Christian friend Vivian, unable "to shake the intimacy of [their] girlhood friendship" or memories of her crush on Vivian's bad-boy older brother, whom she's convinced sacrificed himself for his sister. Another drug-troubled young woman, well-to-do yet cleaning houses as part of her recovery, wins a smile from a nasty woman on her cleaning brigade. VERDICT You don't have to be a short story fan to enjoy this collection.

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