It Needs to Look Like We Tried

March 1, 2018
A variety of lives hit the skids in dramatic and usually self-inflicted ways in this linked story collection.Though billed as a novel, Petersen's debut more closely resembles a disjointed Pulp Fiction-style narrative, hopscotching west of the Mississippi with a motley set of characters. In the opening chapter, a man is speeding through Arizona to get to his father's wedding when he strikes a dog on the highway, and in short order he's pursuing a fling with its owner. Cut to a story narrated by the son of a friend of the groom, recalling the perils of buying a home without a real estate agent. Cut then to a story about the angst-ridden former owner of the house and his brother, whose wife is having an affair with a reality TV star. And so on: The connections between the characters are often tenuous (though Petersen ties a bow at the end), but they're all grown-ups who make rash, immature attempts to reboot their lives and pay the price for it. "I wanted to find a different path," says the ill-fated home buyer, though he could be speaking for everybody populating this book. "I wanted to buck the system. That was all me." Petersen usually delivers the stories in the first person, with narrators recalling their personal-life own goals with sardonic humor or barely contained fury. But the penultimate story, "Providence," is a gem told in the third person, involving Eric, a deaf teenager attempting to rise above his trailer-park upbringing and sour memories of his mother's death by delivering chemicals for meth labs throughout rural Oklahoma. Like everybody else here, he's a victim of his own bad decisions, but Petersen so carefully and compassionately arrays the forces in his life (dead mom, remorseful dad, a conspicuous disability) that every easy assumption gets repelled.An engaging set of stories of broken lives, jagged in structure but smooth in the telling.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 26, 2018
This propulsive collection from Petersen (Long After Dark) concerns the bad luck, hard decisions, and poor choices of a group of characters, each in a peculiar and dire situation. The opening story, “The Impeccable Drive,” is about Doyle, a road-tripping son who, taking a detour on the way to his father’s wedding, hits a dog and decides to track down its owners. In “Cape Cod Fear” the bride-to-be from the previous story is a realtor helping clients buy the foreclosed home of an ex-military man, Condit, who tries to intimidate them. As they investigate his past, they discover that he has a famous brother whose wife is cheating on him. In “Unscripted,” the man with whom Condit’s sister is having an affair is about to ruin the lives of a family of hoarders who live across from him. One of the hoarders’ daughters, Jaymee, just wants to get away from the mess in “Providence,” and her boyfriend takes a job trafficking ingredients for methamphetamine to make some quick money. In the last story, “Small World,” things come full circle as Jaymee and her boyfriend meet up with the man from the opening story who never made it to his father’s wedding. Petersen’s stories sing with wise-cracking (a drug dealer on his business arrangements: “It’s an LLC, man. Corporations are people”), irresistible characters who make the best of a world filled with corruption and deception.