Patrick Somerville

Three down, one to go. This is the third book I have finished reading on our vacation, and maybe because I picked it up in the latter stages of the trip, when we were winding down our adventures and spending more time relaxing, I sped through it in the time I did. A comment on the cover of the book sums it up: the story makes you want to linger but you simply cannot. It starts with a description of an event that is so striking that it would not leave my brain through the entire rest of the story, although it is not revisited until the denouement, when so many other things have happened that I was unable to discern what it was or where it would fit in. This isn't a mystery novel, in the conventional sense, but this element is a hallmark of a successful mystery. Aside from that, the engaging nature of the prose and the intriguing, almost-unlikeable protagonists kept me turning the pages. In fact, the undercurrent of menace was so subtle that I almost didn't realize what it was until it exploded in my face and I had a moment where I actually didn't want to go on reading, except that I couldn't stop. The long denouement, which includes the unraveling of the initial intrigue, eventually draws the story together, and to a satisfying close. There is a kind of hipster quality to this writing, but I find myself hoping I read more of this guy's books, despite that. Also, as an aside, I will remind myself that I found this book by searching the term Wisconsin--Fiction in the library catalogue. All hail cataloguing and subject headings!… (más)

The adult lost boy in Patrick Somerville's marvelous debut, "The Cradle" (Little, Brown, $21.99) starts out beholden to his pregnant wife's obdurate demand that he retrieve a long-lost cradle. On this dubious premise Somerville builds a road narrative that gradually accumulates the mythic echoes and dreamlike inevitability of allegory. Matt's search for the cradle takes on a picaresque nobility; he's like a blue-collar Odysseus, crisscrossing the Midwest in his quest to return home to his Penelope. What gives "The Cradle" its potent emotional resonance, however, is the way Somerville's prose calmly, relentlessly pulls at the Gothic skein of family tragedies that lurks behind the peeling paint and sagging porches, where a sense of inherited sin settles like a thick fog. From the WASHINGTON POST, 4/29/09… (más)