A Review of Victoria Patterson’s “The Secret Habit of Sorrow”
Half Baked
What do you do when you come across a collection of short stories where you can see the intrinsic worth in each piece, but the collection as a whole leaves you a little cold? That question is being posed to me as I write these words. Victoria Patterson’s new short story roundup called The Secret Habit of Sorrow is undoubtedly an important book as it deals with the feminine perspective of those who are or know someone who is in alcohol or drug abuse recovery. Much of these stories, but not all of them, are on that theme or have divorce or family matters as a backdrop. However, reading the individual stories in this book is akin to waiting for a novel to break out of them. The stories are usually stuffed to the gills with secondary characters, and there are hints of a larger backstory at play. Essentially, reading this collection is like walking in on a movie that’s in its second reel and being forced to leave before the final one is unspooled. They don’t feel complete or whole. However, that all said, each story is impeccably well written and you can see why a large swath of them was picked up by literary magazines.
Patterson comes off as a female version of Charles Bukowski. She doesn’t romanticize drug or alcohol addiction, but sees it for what it is: messy, complicated, and sometimes even harrowing. Some of these characters may even relapse. However, Patterson holds these characters at arm’s length — you never really get to know them somehow, even though the author does a stunning trick of portraying them at different levels of the socio-economic spectrum. In the stories where a character is not addicted, the characters are treated as though they are, albeit to something else entirely, whether it be love or friendship. At Patterson’s best, she writes of the complicated nature of friendship between females, which is usually rooted in some kind of competition. At worst, though, we never get to know what really makes these individuals tick.
Also hindering matters is that a large percentage of these tales feature characters that are mired in hopelessness. Many are going through a divorce or are the products of dysfunctional marriages. That’s why the first story in this collection is also the best: it’s about a little boy whose mother has died from substance abuse, and as he adjusts to life living with his aunt, he has to overcome his fear of being completely immersed underwater. The story has an upbeat ending, sure, but it works as an analogy for being thrust into new territory, a life with a mother where the future may seem like a question mark, where things are not clear. The story, whose title escapes me, is positive and punchy, even as it asks some very hard questions.
However, the vast majority of what follows is despair-riddled and it’s hard to find an entryway into these characters as we realize that they are damaged in some way, but by what is sometimes unclear. There’s a good story wanting to break out in the tale where a woman of limited means wants to reunite with the junkie father of her son, but we don’t really get to learn what value she sees in him — other than his features being present in her son as a reflection. I suppose the story is about how hopeless some people are in wanting to return to the scene of a past crime and offer second chances, but the reasons for wanting to do so are unclear and muddled. That’s the case with most of the stories in this collection. You never get a sense of the why someone would want to remain close to someone else, or, in at least one case, why someone might want to cut someone out of their family.
Divorce is a recurring theme in this work, and it becomes a weary refrain by collection’s end. It may have been far better to show women placed in situations where the marital status is a little more stable the odd time, because it comes to seem that these characters are defined by their mistakes in coupling with others. And yet we sometimes don’t really know why mistakes have been made or why someone has grown out of a relationship with another. Divorce is painted simply as a fact of life, with no big deal made about it aside from the fact that it has marked women and men as lesser beings in some ways. The characters of The Secret Habit of Sorrow are weak and vulnerable in ways. When this becomes an overarching theme of the book, it just wears down the reader.
To get back to my original point, most of these stories feel incomplete and are waiting for an additional 200 or 300 pages to get the juiciness wrung out of them. They feel more like postcards written from the edge, with little or no substance to them (other than the substance abuse angle). As such, the stories could read as poetry in a way — which shows that Patterson is, at least, a gifted writer. Taken individually, it may just be that this book works in a writerly fashion that showcases the talent behind the pen. Taken as a whole, however, things just become too much: the repetition of circumstances in these characters lives become just too much, and the failed nature of their lives simply become unbearable. It’s like Patterson is stuck in a vinyl groove that skips, hammering the same point over and over and over again. By the end of this collection, the reader may sigh and say, “Enough already! We get it! Divorce is bad! Families are bad! Substance abuse is bad!”
To that end, I feel torn with this book. I will concede that the writing is sound and could write circles around the block of others. However, the cumulative effect of the book, due to the similarities in the circumstance of each major character presented in these stories as being lost somehow, really drags things out. It may have been far better if one of the stories was chosen and then turned into a full-fledged novel where the reader could get a better grip or understanding on why these characters have made the (often poor) life choices they have. In the end, The Secret Habit of Sorrow is a wearying book. It’s interesting enough to warrant a read, but if you stop halfway through, I don’t blame you. Read one story from this collection, and, in a sad sort of way, you’ve read everything that Patterson seems to have to say on the nature of tumultuous relationships and dealing with alcohol and drug abuse. This is a sore point, because these are important topics to be addressed, and could have been with a little more detail. As it stands, The Secret Habit of Sorrow is middling and frustrating, and its stories are in search of a much bigger canvas to be painted on. And that has me split in two.
Victoria Patterson’s The Secret Habit of Sorrow was published by Counterpoint Press on July 17, 2018.
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