Patrick Somerville, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, Featherproof, 2011."In this genre-busting book from award-winning novelist Patrick Somerville characters, stories, and stray thoughts revolve around the “The Machine of Understanding Other People,” the story of a Chicago man who is bequeathed a supernatural helmet that allows him to experience the inner worlds of those around him. Through his lonely lens we peer into the mind of an art student grappling with ennui, ethics and empathy as she comes to terms with her own beliefs in a godless world. We telescope out to the story of idiot extraterrestrials struggling to pilot a complicated spaceship. We follow a retired mercenary as he tries to save his marriage and questions his life abroad. Mind-bending and cracklingly new, Somerville’s broadly appealing and uniquely imaginative constructions probe the outer reaches of sympathy, death, and love in a world seen from the inside out."
“In “The Machine of Understanding Other People,” the novella that concludes this marvelous set of loosely connected stories, the main character is bequeathed a helmet that enables him entry into the minds of others. Perhaps Somerville (The Cradle) had access to such a device as he crafted his wide-ranging yet wonderfully authentic narrators. These densely layered tales invite multiple readings, but even a glance uncovers profound human connection beneath Somerville’s often whimsical surface.” —Publishers Weekly
“Patrick Sommerville makes the characters real, unique, fragile, sad, and powerful. You will root for these characters. This is not just a great book, it’s an important book. Read this book. I’m going to say it again. Read this book.” —Ghost Ocean Magazine
“Patrick Somerville has perfect pitch across the thirty-odd voices in these stories, gets perfect reception from past and future both. He is funny and sad and scalpel-sharp, at times all in the same sentence. This book contains worlds within worlds. Every single one of them enrichens ours. ” — Roy Kesey
“This is a visionary story collection. Somerville inhabits the minds of his characters so beautifully you can almost picture him reclining on a couch in their brains.” — Jami Attenberg
“"Patrick Somerville is the most devastatingly sensitive badass nerd in contemporary lit - he is as consistently inventive and surprising as anyone writing today. I love this book, with its weird art and crazy machines and secret agents and out-of-control love. It's as if Optimus Prime has folded himself up into a story collection.” — J. Robert Lennon
"This bizarre, hilarious and endlessly inventive collection of short stories is a must-read for any fan of George Saunders, Donald Barthelme, or Robert Coover—and Somerville can hold his own with those heavy-hitters. The stories range from the surreal to the science fictional, and every single one is worth reading." — Chamber Four
“Patrick Somerville unleashes the full force of his mischievous imagination. In this inventive and robust collection... bold tales deliver psychological realism to the outskirts of speculative and science fiction. Attuned to the apocalyptic, Somerville, like Jim Shepard and Joe Meno, creates ensnaring plots involving characters in stories of melancholy and absurdity, failure and out-of-the-box heroics.” — Donna Seaman
"When you chart it out, Patrick Somerville’s second collection (and third book overall) probably shouldn’t work. It blends psychological realism with unabashed homages to pulp fiction, veers into dreams, and shifts tones from the impeccably mannered to the heartrendingly honest. And yet it gets inside your head, coming at you from so many angles it’s near-impossible to resist. It’s a haunting book, and its imagery remains embedded deeply in my mind." — Tobias Carroll
“Somerville’s ability to depict moments that are heartbreakingly familiar, but difficult to pinpoint and express, serves as one of the major strengths of this book. The Universe in Miniature in Miniature The Universe in Miniature in Miniature will appeal to lovers of contemporary fiction as well as readers who have a penchant for speculative fiction.” — ForeWord
“The Universe in Miniature in Miniature gives Sci-Fi such a dose of dark humor, style, and domesticity that it really can’t be classified as geek-lit. Through 15 exquisitely drawn portraits—like the title story, about a lovelorn artist who makes models of boys and their fathers making models of the universe—author Patrick Somerville pairs themes that are delightfully abstract with contemporary dialogue. All this culminates in a mysterious mini-thriller, the front and back covers of which fold out into a miniature model of the solar system. ” —Alice Vincent
"Patrick Somerville's collection of loosely intertwined short stories is full of fresh ideas that demand to be spun out at greater length. But he dispatches each of them quickly, in somber prose. Matriculating at the School of Surreal Thought and Design, the young people in the title story are each absorbed in some bizarre project that's monitored from the school's secret underground headquarters. That's a fine premise for a novel (and already a pretty neat spoof of places like the School of the Art Institute). "The Peach" hints at an Area 51-like base hidden on Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Another novel. The mad mercenary failing spectacularly at civilian life in "People Like Me"? I could do with another 300 pages. And the situation described in "No Sun"—the earth has stopped spinning, leaving the western hemisphere in permanent night while the eastern burns—well, that would have to be a very short novel, the end being so near and all.
Mostly featuring humdrum urban citizens and salt-of-the-earth types, the stories in The Universe in Miniature in Miniature seem to form an earnest, extended attempt to describe what I might as well call our shared humanity. For all of Somerville's wacky sci-fi plot devices—like the unwieldy gadget in the book's final tale, "The Machine of Understanding Other People"—it's the random stabbing death of a young man on a Chicago street that resonates among disparate characters across multiple stories. Whether his subject is a teenage crush on a high school teacher or a monster made of smoke, Somerville insists that the story is about the people. —Pat J. Daily
"The 15 loosely interconnected stories of Patrick Somerville's "The Universe in Miniature in Miniature" (Featherproof, 304 pages, $14.95) explore such classic themes as love, death, time, the absurdity of life and the meaning of success. Every story is a stage for someone's philosophical ponderings; there's almost always someone wondering either what the hell they're doing or what the hell is going on. And yet despite such heavy topics, "The Universe" is actually not a downer.
A number of different styles are represented in "The Universe," from sparse prose-poem to almost paragraphless, run-on sentence ramble, to novella. Settings range from the ordinary to the skewed, with most stories hovering somewhere in between. In the title story, students at "the School of Surreal Thought and Design" work on abstract class projects that were never really assigned to them and may never be checked. The narrator of "No Sun" finds himself accepting the recent development of the Earth's ceasing to turn (and the resultant near-apocalyptic environment) with surprising self-possession. There are also inept aliens, a man who wants to borrow $85,000 from a writer friend for an experimental hair regrowth treatment that carries the risk of "total-body disintegration," and a recurring nightmare about vengeful ghost-oxen.
Throughout, Somerville endeavors to strike the right balance between cleverness and introspection. Often, he pulls it off; other times he's too obvious or (to take a word used by a couple different characters in a couple different stories) twee. He can also do well even when leaving the zaniness mostly behind. "The Wildlife Biologist," with one of the most traditional plots in the book, is surprisingly satisfying. In the story, a high school student's crush on a young, hot biology teacher begins to break down as she finds out more about him; meanwhile, her silly parents separate and then get back together. Perhaps adolescence is absurd enough that no added absurdity is necessary.
In addition to the cleverness-introspection issue, another seeming challenge for Somerville is voice, in that the voices of different characters across the collection are very similar. This isn't an entirely bad thing -- the voices are smart, direct, deadpan and self-aware, and the stories themselves are generally distinct enough -- but it does tend to whitewash the experience.
Even with some weak spots, "The Universe" is noteworthy in how it takes the serious and philosophical and makes it approachable, playful or both. With unflagging humor and an emphasis on how we are all in the same, utterly human situation, Somerville keeps the stories from creeping into despondency. It's as though he's both the creator of your pensive mood, and the friend who pulls the improbably silly antics that manage to make you smile in spite of it." - Kim Hedges
"I can, fortunately or un-, remember exactly when it was I last read a book of stories as compelling and gasp-inducingly fucking gorgeous as Patrick Somerville’s The Universe in Miniature in Miniature: it was four years ago, and it was Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners. There’ve been great collections since then, of course—Blake Butler‘s Scortch Atlas comes instantly to mind, plus every collection ever by Jim Shepard—but it’s been a long, long time since I’ve been this knocked back and shocked by a book.
I started this book on a plane flying from Iowa to Atlanta, and Ellen was beside me, reading her own book, and I had to damn near put my hand over my mouth to keep from constantly, botheringly interrupting her, hitting her with these sentences which were, at 34,000 feet hitting me hard as hell. That, more than anything else, is the Somerville magic, or at least where it’s most clearly manifest: in sentences. Here’s a good sample, drawn entirely at random:
“Lucy says we aren’t watching to see if he will die. ‘That would miss the whole point,’ she says. ‘And besides,’ she says, ‘that would be, like, cruel.’” (“Universe/Miniature/Miniature”)
“I recognized it from the one time I had done it in Grayson, when I’d first come back to the midwest. I’d met an old friend and we’d gone to the playground at the same elementary school we’d attended twenty years before. He had gotten into ATV sales or something. I’d spent a lot of time having fourth-grade memories come into my head, not really knowing whether they were real or whether I was making them up—they’d been too pleasant, in a way, and didn’t fit into my haunted, dark-enchanted-forest sense of childhood. The kind where the trees eat little boys. He’d asked me why I came back, and I said “It was so lonely out there,” which had felt basically true, and then we’d smoked the meth.” (“No Sun”)
“Phil is not much of a researcher, or a reader, or someone who thinks anything through. For him to be preparing is a meaningful development. It’s like a horse reading The Celestine Prophecy.” (“Hair University”)
Look, I could keep going on and on like this—honestly, every page, or, at very least, every third page, featured lines like these—lines which featured a loose, chummy, playful confidence, lines which just fucking shone with good.
It’s worth me at least acknowledging all the ways I’m predisposed to liking this book. First, it’s Somerville, and his The Cradle knocked me sideways two years (or whenever) back. Second, it’s out from Featherproof, and if there’s a more interesting press publishing more gorgeous books—I’m talking all presses now, indie or big guys—I don’t know of it. Third, the book’s not only midwestern, but features one of my all-time favorite tricks of midwest fiction: it’s set in a fictitious town! I admit this may be a moderately silly adoration on my part, but seriously: fictitious midwest towns are where it’s at. Someday somebody smart’ll put together an amazing atlas of fictitious towns (for the record: one of this year’s upcoming devastators is Alan Heathcock’s Volt, which is a powerhorse of a collection as well, and that whole thing? It’s set in Krafton, another fake midwestern town). Anyway, those are three legitimate beefs you could cite regarding my overwhelming enthusiasm for Somerville and Universe/Miniature/Miniature.
But still… you should believe. You should believe how good this book is. Look again at that long passage from the story called “No Sun”—in which, by the way, the sun stops shining (not really: the world stops spinning, but the result’s the same). The genius of Universe is in the decisions at sentence level: that whole paragraph’s just about the moment a character spots some meth on a gas station’s counter, yet look at what you get, look at all you’re being given by this generous, incredible author—not just the ass-kicking fireworky stuff (“didn’t fit into my haunted, dark-enchanted-forest sense of childhood. The kind where the trees eat little boys.”), but the quieter, plainer stuff (“He’d asked me why I came back, and I said “It was so lonely out there,” which had felt basically true, and then we’d smoked the meth.”). Look, here’s a simple quiz: if you’re the sort of reader who just fell sideways over reading Cather/Rye and Holden’s description of his brother’s red hair (right at the start—Holden teeing up at the golf course—go to the shelf, pull it down and read, it’s before page 13), you need to read Universe/Miniature just for the sentences alone, for the associative glory of them. These are sentences propped one after another by someone with a phenomenal sense of how to make a reader comfortable, how to befriend a reader with nothing more than sentence order.
If that’s not your thing, though, you’re still not off the hook. Like gorgeous books? Pick this thing up–and, please, write a letter to Featherproof, let them know how spectacular the actual object is. Like pictures in your book? There’s pictures in here. Like fiction which is attempting to solve or address questions of empathy, aloneness, the boundaries of self, the difficulty of truly connecting and being with and loving another?
See how that snuck up?
It’s easy to flap arms and shout about Somerville’s sentences—they are really, really, really that good. What Somerville’s actually doing in these stories—the things he’s trying to make happen among and to his characters—is orders of magnitude more difficult and gorgeous. Here’s another quiz: in a non-Gardner way, are you interested in moral fiction? That is, fiction which, in some way, attempts to address how it feels to be alive and trying to connect to people and feel honest, decent love, to make do—and, actually, not just fiction which addresses it, but which honestly reckons with the difficulties, the threats, the risks, the attendant harm of all those enterprises?
This sounds lofty. It is. Not for nothing did Wallace couch such questions in futuristic tellings of tennis academies and halfway houses, and Somerville, in his collection, couches such questions in strange quasi-science-y ways. In these stories, the earth stops spinning, there’s a machine for understanding other people, an ox and man are burned on the same pyre. The word and idea of Pangea comes up more times than I kept track of. There are—maybe I’ve said this—some of the best sentences written in a long while.
Look, just read this book. It’s the new year. You’ve got resolutions. I guarantee that, if you’re generous with your definitions and yourself, reading Patrick Somerville’s The Universe in Miniature in Miniature will fulfill at least two of them, maybe more. Read and be amazed. Read and be grateful." — Weston Cutter
"You may recognize Patrick Somerville as the author of “The Cradle,’’ a realistic and often comical exploration of contemporary fatherhood. Little in that novel would prepare for you the amazing stories in Somerville’s second story collection, “The Universe in Miniature in Miniature.’’ These tales are mostly speculative fiction-science fiction, surrealism, absurdism, and fantasy blended into a metafictional continuum.
In his linked sketches, vignettes, and full-blown stories, Somerville’s characters like to quote or allude to Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, characters straight out of Tolkien’s fantasies, but they also read Coleridge and Salinger. Characters, institutions, and techno gadgets from one story sometimes recur in another. Nevertheless, the stories are chiefly connected by theme: how we cope with pain, fear, death, and how the world works and how it might end. Somerville offers these topics in smart, often humorous techno-geekish ways.
The best stories are the full-blown tales. In the title piece, Dylan and Rosie, students at SSTD (School of Surreal Thought and Design), help Lucy with her project about pain: surveilling an invalid to “observe the wholesale collapse of a family following major trauma.’’ Dylan is writing a novel about scientists who, while trying to develop the perfect carbonated beverage, destroy the world. Rosie’s project is making a miniature of a boy making a miniature of the solar system.
Dark on one side, afire on the other, the Earth has stopped spinning in “The Sun,’’ and people doubt that normalcy will ever return. Fear and pain drive the magic in “Vaara in the Woods.’’ A soon-to-be-father dreams about a magical ox that returns from the dead as a monstrous ox-man and attacks the narrator’s ancestors and metaphorically his own baby.
“Hair University’’ shows us how far people will go to fend off aging. Danny, a successful sci-fi writer and former SSTD student, lends $85,000 to his hard-up friend Phil for a dangerous hair treatment involving gene therapy that will not only stop baldness but will re-grow hair. The risk: full-body disintegration.
Danny mentions he’s the author of a short story about aliens too stupid to fly their own ship. It’s the very next story, “Confused Aliens,’’ a humorous look at what aliens and their leaders might really be like — very like ourselves and our leaders.
The brightest thing in Somerville’s universe of stellar stories is “The Machine of Understanding Other People,’’ a witty and ironic four-part novella. A down-and-out drunk and former lawyer from Chicago, Tom Sanderson, and a social worker from London, Eliza Dagonet, are heirs to the fortune of their lost aristocratic uncle Herman. The eccentric Herman had lived in a well-furnished cave with a door, “not unlike hobbits.’’ The cave, lit by track lights and cooled with central air-conditioning, has furniture fashioned from stones, an organic sort of architecture that’s a fantastical mix of Taliesin West and a hobbit home. Herman’s money, castles, and cave go to Eliza. The machine, actually a helmet, goes to Tom. Eliza’s Grandma Beatrice, a scientist, designed the helmet as a weapon during World War II. When a person wears the helmet, he can simply point a stick to merge into the consciousness of others.
One story, reminiscent of 1970s experimentalism with the typeface placement, failed to resonate, but the rest twinkle. Somerville has vast talent for invention and a flair for writing in a variety of voices, whether his character is a young female, a middle-aged male, or an alien. All in all in all, this is a remarkable and fun-to-read collection." - Joseph Peschel
"Human beings have two systems for making sense of their universe, two ways of understanding the seemingly unfathomable pain and suffering and sorrow and even beauty of their lives. The first is art, and the second is science. In his exquisite collection of linked short stories, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, author Patrick Somerville illustrates the appeal – and the shortcomings – of both approaches, and leaves the reader all the more astonished with the mystery that is existence.
The stories in The Universe in Miniature in Miniature orbit like planets around an event that sounds better suited for a two minute clip on the evening news: the stabbing of a recent college drop-out by a madman on the street. Yet this incident, as seen through the eyes of the boy’s doctor (“Easy Love”), his parent (“The Mother”), the police officer on the scene (“The Cop”), the madman (“The Abacus”), the boy himself (“The Son”), and finally a telepathic bystander (“The Machine of Understanding Other People”), exerts surprising gravity each time it returns. The boy’s death, we come to understand, isn’t just a personal tragedy – though it’s that too – but a call for philosophical re-evaluation: an example of “news that’s so crazy you decide you ain’t gonna take it,” as the murdered kid’s mother says. What do we do in the face of such realities? Where do we turn?
That’s a question the characters in these stories answer with varying degrees of soul-searching, and wildly different results. In the title story, three students at the unaccredited School of Surrealist Thought and Design (SSTD, for short) are struggling with their “projects,” the only requirement for their graduation. “Our projects are whatever we want them to be,” the narrator Rose explains. “We have total freedom and I’m not sure anybody even looks at our projects when we’re done.” SSTD serves only as a shield – and a thin one, at that – between them and the dizzying existential void. The characters constantly second-guess their own attempts to make meaning: “I condemn my own art as I make it…Is that okay?” Rose asks in conversation. Yet the subjects they tackle in that work are not so easily dismissed. Rose’s classmate Lucy is studying the collapse of a family after the son, a young man she used to love, suffers horrible brain damage in a freak accident. Another student, Dylan, is writing a novel about a group of scientists whose knowledge destroys the world, but which might also be the only thing capable of saving it. And in her own work, a series of sculptures of fathers and sons building miniature solar systems, Rose – like Somerville himself – seeks to reflect both the poignancy and the insignificance of human attempts to comprehend our vast universe.
Another story, “The Wildlife Biologist,” examines science on its own terms. In the wake of her parents’ separation, teenage narrator Courtney finds herself smitten with her biology teacher, not just because of his rebel persona, but because of the comforting clarity his worldview provides. When on the first day of class, he asks his students to come up with “the definition of life,” Courtney comments, “I noticed that he said ‘the’ and not ‘a,’ which was different than what most of the young teachers said about truth and definitions, no mater what the class. They liked to say ‘voices’ and ‘readings’ and ‘models’ and ‘the situation of the observer.’” She falls in love with the possibility of truth, but finds herself sorely disappointed when she discovers her teacher’s wisdom isn’t enough to help him make sense of his own life, let alone life on earth.
Some of the characters here retreat from knowledge when it proves inadequate to help them function, though they still find a return to total naiveté impossible. In “No Sun,” a former addict finds hope for the first time only after the world stops spinning on its axis, plunging his hemisphere into darkness and cold. “What if we start spinning again?” he asks, adding a little later, “Why not go all-in for hope? Every time? What other arguments made sense? It had taken apocalypse for me to see it.” But his uncle, a physicist, is unable to embrace this: “It may start again,” he says. “But it won’t make a difference… I mean that now, and forever, we won’t know what to believe. Our knowledge has fallen apart.” The uncle’s very ability to grasp what has happened makes it impossible for him to survive it.
The novella that concludes this collection synthesizes the artistic and scientific impulses into a single object: “The Machine of Understanding Other People,” which is also the piece’s title. In this story, despondent alcoholic Tom Sanderson receives a strange inheritance: “a piece of technology that distilled the power of romantic poetry into a usable, portable device,” a helmet that allows the wearer to enter other people’s minds. Invented in wartime as a weapon but never deployed, the contraption seems useless to Tom at first: “[W]hy do it at all? Why run around investigating the minds of other people? There was no goal, no endpoint.” Like truth, like beauty, the understanding the helmet provides isn’t good for anything. And yet, as Tom starts to use the machine, he realizes that there’s an intrinsic value to the experience. “It drew you in,” he thinks. “It freed you. It opened you up, this knowing other people… It was something good to understand another person, if not for a couple of minutes. He’d never really thought about it before. How there was something inherently good in that. And considering how few inherently good things Tom perceived in the world, he took note.” Human intellectual endeavor, human seeking, may be puny and limited when seen in the greater scheme. But to us as individuals, it has whatever value we choose to give it.
Somerville is an author of extraordinary talents, and The Universe in Miniature in Miniature is that rare thing, a formally inventive and profound book of ideas that also manages to stir the emotions. Though the scale of each piece is small, it’s hard to imagine a writer of larger ambitions." - Chandler Klang Smith
"I don’t think I was smart enough to be bequeathed with the role of reading and reviewing The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, Patrick Somerville’s new book of 30 short stories. But, Tom, a character in the book who is a deadbeat alcoholic and is bequeathed with a magical helmet that allows him to see inside the psyches of those around him, wasn’t really the right man for that either. And he did fine in the closing chapter.
The Universe in Miniature in Miniature is tricky because every single one of the 30 stories is related in some way, but those ties aren’t always obvious. Many relationships between the stories and characters do not emerge until much later. Tom and his supernatural helmet are important, but the readers don’t meet him until the very end. And, the ties between the characters will depend on how closely readers are paying attention. Different stories will appeal more to different readers. The Universe in Miniature in Miniature is truly an eclectic mix of stories and characters - “Confused Aliens” is about exactly what it sounds like, whereas “Easy Love” is about a man trying to escape his past as a hitman and repair his marriage. Many are set in Chicago and you can feel it; the story that evolves around Windy City Liquors feels familiar with its sticky floors, Zenith TV and homeless bums. Other stories are more abstract.
But all carry the same voice, which is always to-the-point. Somerville isn’t one for confusing language (unless he’s using words he made up) or really dense sentences. Even though I felt disconnected through some of the more science-fictiony stories, I was chuckling enough to keep reading, like when an alien questions the meaning of the spaceship:
'Sometimes we like to wonder how we got on this ship in the first place, and who built it, and where we are supposed to go, but the truth is, we have all forgotten. Or maybe we never knew. Or maybe we knew and have never forgotten. I do not understand what I am saying here.'
I struggled to “get” the book as a whole because I entirely missed huge relationships between characters that others who read the book easily caught. But I did find a lot of the questions Somerville mentioned in his acknowledgements:
'This book is an attempt at answering, in the best way I know how, a handful of worrisome questions. Probably like a lot of people, I began to wonder about these (admittedly abstract) questions in my twenties and could never shake their hold. And not to be annoyingly mysterious, but I hope there’s no need to restate the questions themselves here; if they’re not somehow in the book already, there’s a problem, and that’s my fault completely.'
Before reading The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, I had never wondered about the effectiveness of a Machine of Knowledge of Other People. Would it help people more intimately and effectively relate to each other? Or, is everyone too caught up in their own miniature universe that they would not even be interested in such a machine? These sorts of questions were the pieces of this book that stuck with me. I forgot many of the individual characters. That’s why I couldn’t decide if I liked the book or not. And that’s why I’m going to read it again." — Betsy Mikel
"As is well-documented, there’s been a lot of anxiety in recent years about “the future of the book.” Lately, that anxiety has focused on e-books and whether they’ll supplant traditional books as our preferred literary medium. Maybe they will, and maybe they won’t. But one thing’s certain: e-books can’t do the kinds of things that titles from Chicago-based Featherproof do. Scorch Atlas, for example, has the look of a book that’s been through hell and back. Daddy’s looks, at first glance, like a fishing tackle box. And Patrick Somerville’s The Universe in Miniature in Miniature can, if the reader is ready, willing, and able, be converted into a working model of the solar system (see diagrams below!). You just can’t do that with an e-book no matter how hard you try. Yes, these titles are available in e-formats, but half the fun of owning them is just plain looking at them — or “accidentally” leaving them out on your coffee table for your guests to admire and enjoy. To put it another way, these books are cool.
The other half of the fun inherent in Featherproof’s titles, needless to say, is reading them. As reported in an earlier post, Christian Tebordo’s The Awful Possibilities is a mind-bending roller-coaster ride of a read, and Patrick Somerville’s aforementioned The Universe in Miniature in Miniature follows in the same vein. Indeed, the works in Somerville’s collection display a colossal range of imagination and emotional depth. He is an author who is as comfortable depicting the end of the world (as in the apocalyptic “No Sun,” which sees the Earth stop in its tracks without cause or explanation) as he is following the burgeoning passions of a teenage girl (as in the coming-of-age tale “The Wildlife Biologist”).
Significantly, Somerville is also funny, as initially evidenced by the book’s dedication to Slartibartfast (of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame) and borne out through subsequent tales of wayward, incompetent aliens, grad students in unaccredited MFA programs, and a balding man desperately seeking matriculation into an overseas institution known only as Hair University. The humor in all of these situations is, of course, balanced with pathos, underscoring the exquisite ambivalence of the human condition in ways reminiscent of both Kurt Vonnegut and Woody Allen. Our struggle for happiness, these stories suggest, will always be undercut by our tendency to screw things up, yet it’s our tendency to screw things up which, ironically, makes us keep trying (and failing, and trying again) and, not coincidentally, also makes us human. We are flawed, and we are beautiful, and we are funny. Patrick Somerville sees all of it (and then some), and reports lovingly on our shared humanity throughout The Universe in Miniature in Miniature. It is, in short, an amazing collection of stories.
Most likely, we’ll be debating the future of the book until the Earth does, in fact, stop in its tracks, but as long as small presses like Featherproof — which is to say, people who care deeply not only about storytelling but about books themselves, the very experience of reading a book, the thrill of regarding a book as more than a medium for conveying information but as a work of art in and of itself — have anything to say about it, the printed word will continue to thrive. If you or someone you know is a book lover, do yourself a favor and check out this wonderful press." - Small Press Reviews
"As I read the final story of Patrick Somerville’s recent book of stories, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, published by hometown heroes Featherproof Books, I realized that at no other point in the collection had I been so engrossed. This might seem like a useless thing to point out, but bear with me.
The final story is called “The Machine of Understanding Other People,” and it blows the other stories in the collection out of the water. It is the most ambitious, the most grand, and the most heartfelt story in the book. It has a magnitude lacking in the others. It helps that it’s an 85 page story, of course, but in “The Machine…” Somerville really approaches a scale and sincerity of emotion that is often hard to manage in short forms.
I don’t mean to diminish the rest of the stories in The Universe in Miniature in Miniature. They’re all at least adept, and in some cases very compelling. Stories like “The Peach,” for example, in which the narrator visits her grandparents and hears the story of her grandfather’s UFO encounter, or “The Universe in Miniature in Miniature,” about a group of graduate-level students conducting an clandestine observation of a former schoolmate now vegetabled by an accident, focus on quiet connections between people and how we draw meaning from them. But they are just that, small moments. They lack the grandeur of “The Machine…” It’s not their fault, though.
The basic premise of “The Machine of Understanding Other People” is that an alcoholic, emotionally devoid stock-broker type named Tom Sanderson inherits a machine of understanding other people. Reluctant at first, he begins to use it mostly out of boredom, and it slowly leads to a change in his understanding of the world – although not in a maudlin “It’s a Wonderful Life” way, thankfully. The rest of the stories in the book are revealed to be the tales of the people upon which Tom trains the machine of understanding other people (with the unexplained apparent exception of “No Sun,” a science fiction ponderer set in a future in which the Earth has ceased it’s orbit). And this is how “The Machine of Understanding Other People” achieves it’s novelistic scale, by drawing upon the others.
Because of this device, however, all of the stories save “The Machine…” are written in the first person, and many of them end up with more or less the same voice: a soft, neutral, observational narrator. Individually each story is strong, and it is probably only because of the side by side comparison that the trend in narrative voice becomes apparent. And deeper into the collection there are a series of stories from the points of view of the characters surrounding the murder of a young man, which all take on unique voices.
Closing with “The Machine…” though, instantly makes the book more than the total of it’s parts, more than the merit of each of it’s stories. It pulls the reader back and lays out a bigger picture and a grander scheme that by extension lends something more to its constituents (it’s also a very gripping and moving story in it’s own right and deserves to be held up as such). The total result is rare: a collection of stories that is considerably more than a simple compilation. It left me with a satisfied sense of completeness usually reserved for the best of novels.
Out of Context Quote: “Grayspool, holding an umbrella, yellow flower in his lapel. ‘No more jokes about glory holes, are there. Tom?’ ‘No.’ he says. ‘Not at all.’”
The Universe in Miniature in Miniature in Miniature Review: White people all sound the same, even when narrating their own stories, but then stories of human connection create human connection in unconnectible human, and everything is forgiven. Book is dedicated to Slartibartfast.
Thing the book turns into if you cut along the dotted lines on the cover." — Benjamin Kumming
"The intrinsic precision of Patrick Somerville’s 2009 novel The Cradle may not be its most striking feature, but it was arguably its most rewarding. The novel’s structure incorporated parallel timelines, dancing around the fate of one major character while offering tantalizing glimpses of how others were connected. In its own subdued way, it also tackled sizable themes, grappling with issues of parenthood and politics, and showing a welcome willingness to deconstruct both. Some of Somerville’s short fiction hews to a similarly realistic aesthetic — his recent “A Game I Once Enjoyed,” for instance, which abounds with conflicts explicit and implied. The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, Somerville’s second collection (after 2006’s Trouble), is something very different.
These stories fit together in a more than arbitrary way: images and themes and names recur, even if characters do not. To call this a novel in stories would be fundamentally inaccurate, but there does seem to be an underlying logic here, a connection shared among these fifteen stories. This is most obvious in the two stories that bookend the collection, but is also manifested in (or is a manifestation of) several other moments that occur throughout the book. A series of stories, each titled for their narrator — “The Cop,” “The Mother,” “The Son” — explore different facets of a random killing. The crime itself resounds throughout the collection: the narrator of “Easy Love” is the doctor who tries to save the victim. Reading these stories in conjunction prompts questions: Was this an attempt to give voice to a seemingly minor character felled as a background prop; a sort of re-establishment of a humanist order?
Elsewhere, that humanism becomes more explicit. The title story, focusing on a trio of students at a highly conceptual institution of higher learning, threatens to become painfully twee (its narrator makes dioramas of people making dioramas) before turning on itself and becoming an exploration of ironic affect. Some of the details are eminently realistic, while others (such as the nature of the academic institution, and the surreal way in which the students make progress reports) belong in some off-kilter post-Chestertonian world. That institution is both foreshadowed and mirrored in “The Machine of Understanding Other People,” the novella that closes the collection, incorporates economic collapse, secretive family histories, and unconventional inheritances; it, too, balances realism with elements gleefully echoing pulp-adventure tropes. Images and ideas float between the two stories, less in a cause-and-effect relationship and more in the sort of haze of implications that one might encounter in the fiction of Steve Erickson or Chris Adrian.
Perhaps it’s more accurate to use a more accurate designation: dream logic. At times, this is explicit: the horror-tinged “Vaara in the Woods” finds its narrator (who may well be Patrick Somerville) dreaming of his family’s history and ruing the images those dreams bring forth. The concentrated experience of reading The Universe in Miniature in Miniature is to find oneself disoriented. This is a book, ultimately, that requires its own navigation — or, to build on the title’s metaphor, its own instructions for assembly. On its own, it’s a deeply successful marriage of surreal structure and aching empathy. Taken together with the neatly ordered The Cradle, it marks Somerville as a writer with enviable range and honorable concerns." - Tobias Carroll
"On the surface, the book is somewhat reminiscent of Steven Millhauser's Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories. Somerville's characters, however, provide an edge that gives his work its own character, keeps the stories from becoming perhaps too precocious.
Although the book contains 30 stories (including a closing novella), a couple are vignettes of moments or events in two pages or less. That includes "Mother," on a per word basis perhaps the book's strongest piece. In it, a mother recalls the day her son was killed in that random stabbing. Not quite a stream of consciousness, the story traces her thought process from shock and dread to anguish and pain. (Later brief stories give the perspective of the son, a police officer who walks past the assailant shortly before the stabbing and the killer himself.) Immediately following "Mother" and nearly as strong is "The Wildlife Biologist," in which a high school girl learns through her parents' separation and her biology teacher of the failed dreams and compromises that can accumulate over the course of a life. In fact, Somerville's frequent reliance on generally strong female narrators helps give the collection a breadth of perspective one might not expect a male author to carry off quite so well (or well from the perspective of a male reader).
As with any collection, not everything in The Universe in Miniature in Miniature will not resonate with every reader. In fact, this is the type of work where a group of readers can quite legitimately differ on which are their favorites and which stories are stronger than others. The closing novella, though, will likely provoke every reader into considering which stories tie together and in what fashion. Some may also wonder about the significance to be attached to any perceived connection between or among any two or more stories. Combining a light touch of science fiction with his emphasis on the characters, "The Machine of Understanding Other People" also helps epitomize Somerville's "genre-busting." Yet it also reminds us that the work as a whole may be its own machine of understanding other people, one that tends to give insight into not only the empty prison but, more important, the window." - Tim Gebhart
"Central to this set of linked stories is a device—a giant helmet, actually—that offers the wearer an experience of radical empathy, the knowledge of another person’s thoughts and feelings. Designed in the slightly loopy hope of ending the Second World War, this helmet gets inherited by an alcoholic from Chicago whose life, at the time of the inheritance, has deteriorated to lots of lonely drinking punctuated by occasional musings on the ennui induced by those pieces of junk mail that are seemingly hand-written—commercial garbage disguised as intimate missives—and the slow realization that the emotion oppressing him, constantly, now, was “the sort of thing he’d read about in college English classes, the most boring ones with the most asinine and pompous rich students on campus...a special kind of contemporary numbness of the spirit, they always said, ennui, Zooey Glassinitis, angst, dread, nothing, a dearth of Existenz, and back then he didn’t think much of it, as it was so utterly unrelatable, such a privileged condition, like someone had just made it up because there weren’t any interesting wars to write about at the time.”
Enter the helmet—the Machine of Understanding Other People—and the various other denizens of these pages, ranging from a murdered kid and his mother to assorted students at the underground School of Surreal Thought and Design. There’s the girl riding out her parents’ separations and the mercenary attending anger management with a nine-inch knife in a calf sheath, the people playing movie star name association games in the wake of apocalypse, the veteran who starts a bee farm in the hope of making up for a civilian he killed in the war. The notions here, the motivating ideas, are often at once senseless and so urgently felt that they necessarily inspire solidarity, whether in the case of the bee farm or the quixotic quest to shut down a private hunting ranch, the dumping of a fortune into the sea, or the project pursued by the students throughout this book, students at various fantastical universities, including, in the first and strongest story, the School of Surreal Thought and Design, the underground facilities of which resemble Willy Wonka’s factory. Here work toward graduation involves the study of carbonated beverages or the high-tech voyeuristic monitoring of others or the construction of models of the construction of models—of a father and son, for instance, building a miniature solar system to some warped version of scale. Another university, later on, boasts a list of units such as the “Department of Meaningless Projects... Cetacean Role-Play; Carbonated Beverage Studies; Bomb-Sniffing for People... Creating Propaganda;...Escaping Propaganda; Ghouls; The History of Dirt; Methane; BP Destroyed a Huge Part of the Gulf and They Will Just Change Their Name....”
As is evident here, just beneath the level of comically self-devouring gimmickry is a righteous rage. The ideals of The Universe in Miniature in Miniature are far from farcical, no matter what far-out character, in what zany circumstances, might be voicing them. Indeed, one of Somerville’s points—along with the fact that all stories are, themselves, machines for understanding other people—is that sometimes the silliest action is also the most human. Breeding bees in no way makes up for having shot a woman dead, but it might also avoid the poisonous quantifying logic of even conceiving of life as capable of “making up for” such a tragedy. The best that can be hoped for is some small sliver of empathy, of true encounter, person to person, and yet—in the face, of, say, that gushing Gulf oil “accident”—this can seem insignificant, an impractical gesture, an absurdity. One character expresses this concern, wondering, about the invention of the helmet, why anyone would
'think that this particular invention would be the thing to stop the war. What could you learn about a Nazi that would make the Nazi make more sense? See that he has children, or that he’s felt pain, too? The string of decisions required to find oneself a member of the party? It seems a worthless thing to do, considering the amount of evil involved. Why understand evil? As she works she will sometimes imagine it, though: Dunkirk, but all the young soldiers creeping through that exodus with helmets on their heads, pointing sticks up at the sky as German pilots dropped their bombs.'
What makes this image so haunting is that what Somerville has added—the layer of surrealist slapstick, if you will—pales in comparison to the absurdity of the original. This book, cluttered with po-mo academies or sci-fi accoutrements, is ultimately a lens for looking at something far more banal and far more complex. A boy is stabbed, randomly, and dies. The world goes on, spinning around the sun, and nothing is going to bring that dead boy back. Yet fiction, in its own small and sometimes exceedingly quirky way, is not without essential, practical uses. No one at Dunkirk needed a fancy machine offering instant flashes of empathy, but we, in this bloody, oil-stained world, might need precisely the sort of education that helmet could provide. This clever book, passing at first as light entertainment, lays out some heavy issues along the way. You won’t wake up after aching from an empathy hangover—as users of the helmet do—but you will likely find yourself consumed by the voices of the characters and realize anew the need to relate to others in this fleeting, lunatic, terrifying, and precious world." - Spencer Dew
In his own words, here is Patrick Somerville's Book Notes music playlist for his short story collection, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature
Patrick Somerville, The Cradle, Back Bay Books, 2010."An elusive heirloom cradle symbolizes childhood's pains and possibilities in Somerville's spare, elegant first novel (after a story collection, Trouble). Marissa, pregnant with her first child, becomes obsessed with tracking down the antique cradle her mother took when she abandoned the family a decade earlier. Marissa's husband, Matt, is sure he's been dispatched on a fool's errand, but his journey soon connects him to Marissa's family and his own history of abandonment, neglect and abuse amid a string of foster homes and orphanages. Matt's quest through four states is interwoven with another drama that takes place 11 years later, in 2008, in which poet and children's author Renee Owen is haunted by memories of war and a lost love as she prepares to send her son off to fight in Iraq. Again, long-buried secrets come to the surface, one of which poignantly links the two story lines. Though the connection will not shock, Somerville's themes of a broader sense of interconnectivity and the resultant miracles of everyday existence retain their strength and affirm the value of forming and keeping families." - Publishers Weekly
"Critics uniformly praised Somerville’s moving debut about the meaning of family and its power to heal. Somerville’s spare but buoyant prose strikes the right emotional balance, expressive without being sentimental, and his fast-moving plot steers steadily between the profound and the whimsical toward a satisfying conclusion without ever veering into melodrama. Despite a few flaws—some awkward narrative shifts, one-dimensional characters, and clichés—The Cradle is a finely crafted full-length novel skillfully condensed into just over 200 pages. “As a writer, I’m still wondering how Somerville created this exquisitely complex story on such a small canvas,” noted the New York Times Book Review critic. “As a reader, I’m glad he did.” - Bookmarks
“This is a very beautiful, very hopeful story about a man who goes in search of a simple piece of his wife's past--the antique cradle she herself was rocked in--that ends up changing the future for many people. It's about taking chances, getting second chances, and creating families in the most unlikely of ways. It begins as many stories, but ends as one. The smile you will have on your face as you finish the last page of this book is more than worth the price of spending an afternoon with this lovely tale.” - Jackie Blem
"In a small Wisconsin town during the summer of 1997, an expectant mother sends her husband on a seemingly impossible errand: to retrieve her childhood cradle, which she hasn’t seen since her own mother stole it and disappeared. In a second thread, 11 years later and outside of Chicago, a children’s book author fails to dissuade her son from joining the military and tracks from afar his tour in Iraq. At first these stories, running parallel through The Cradle, seem to share only their Midwestern landscape, but a connection soon emerges.
Matt, the young husband and cradle hunter, has found in his wife his first idea of family. Given up at birth and raised in foster care, he failed to track down his birth parents later in life. In contrast to the blank page of his own heritage, his wife’s family history turns out to be more tangled than expected—the search for the cradle ends at the feet of an unknown relative, Joe, another motherless boy. Renee, in 2008, is an urban liberal who writes about such children: the foundlings who populate the pages of kid lit. When her son deploys to Iraq, she returns to writing poetry for the first time in decades and trails her inspiration to its source—a secret of her youth, shaken loose by her son’s absence.
The book hitches itself to the vast loneliness of flat Midwestern spaces—Matt drives through them, Renee’s memories are grounded in them. Both lives are caught in the held breath before change, where life’s structure unstitches and allows for something new. The link between the characters, though easily guessed, is uncovered with a slow grace. But the story’s real centerpiece is Matt’s rapport with Joe. Their spare conversation is beautifully written, with lines of painstaking clarity. The weight of what Matt is doing—speaking, in a way, to his younger self—manages gravity while dodging self-seriousness, a particular gift in a debut novel." - Melissa Albert
"Near the end of The Cradle (Little, Brown), Patrick Somerville makes it clear that his title plot device is no mere MacGuffin but rather a sweetly drawn symbol that not only wraps up his debut novel with a neat bow but also communicates a wise and hopeful worldview. Not bad for a guy born in 1979. (Somerville graduated from Cornell’s creative writing program in 2005 and now lives in Chicago.) In small-town Wisconsin in 1997 a pregnant Marissa sends her young husband Matt on a seemingly impossible quest: to recover the antique cradle her mother took with her when she abandoned her family years earlier. A second narrative, taking place ten years later and told in alternating chapters, involves Renee and Bill, a 50-ish couple in a Chicago suburb who have just seen their 19-year-old son off to war in Iraq. That quiet, heartbreaking trauma—and an accidental amphetamine overdose—leads Renee to reveal a secret she’s kept from Bill for almost 30 years. Of course, that secret involves Matt and Marissa, in particular their messed-up childhoods. As the two plots wind toward each other, Somerville displays an effortless command over his fiction, letting secrets reveal themselves rather than dropping them in like surprise gimmicks. More important, as his knack for oddball secondary characters in overlooked pockets of the rust belt shows, Somerville concerns himself with people as much as plot. Or as Matt concludes, thinking of the cradle, "In it one could place all manner of life and hurt, and still, no matter what, the human could grow." - Patrick Daily
"Marissa is pregnant, and what she wants more than anything is the cradle she was rocked in as child. She can't ask her mother for it — she abandoned the family when Marissa was a teen, inexplicably taking the cradle with her. So Marissa asks her husband, Matt, to find it.
"I don't want to know how you do it or where she is," she tells him. "But you can, if you look hard enough. You can find anything. You're Matt."
Maybe it's because he grew up as a foster child and understands wanting to reclaim something from an absent parent, or maybe he just loves Marissa. Matt gets in his truck and goes looking.
Years later, another couple near Chicago watches their 19-year-old son, Adam, prepare to deploy to Iraq. Bill is stoic, Renee is not. She wants her son to change his mind. "You will die in that godforsaken place, Adam. I am begging you. You think you'll be fine, but I see very clearly the point you're trying to make and it's not worth it," she says.
These two story lines — one of young parents-to-be, another of older parents saying goodbye — unfold in tandem in The Cradle, and part of the pleasure is deducing the connections between the stories through a surprising number of plot twists. The structure allows Patrick Somerville to create a short novel with the sweep and depth of a much longer work (and this, his first novel, no less).
Though Marissa sets the task of finding the cradle, Matt is the novel's heart, a sane and gentle man trying to assimilate an unhappy past into a more hopeful future. His story reflects the broader concerns of The Cradle: how children make it through the traumas of childhood, how painful parenthood can be, and how some adults care for their children while others choose not to. It's familiar territory, but when done carefully and without cliche, as it is here, it's well worth a reader's time and great stuff for book groups. The Cradle is a novel that comforts." - Angie Drobnic Holan
"The adult lost boy in Patrick Somerville's marvelous debut, "The Cradle" 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." - The Washington Post
"I read Patrick Somerville's debut novel, The Cradle, in one sitting--I couldn't put it down. What begins as a man's whimsical quest to recover an antique cradle for his wife becomes a wild road trip where the past keeps pace with the present and the moral stakes become almost unbearably high. The novel's protagonist, Matt, is rendered with such intelligence, humor, and emotional acuity that I feel like I know myself better for having met him. This is an unforgettable meditation on what it means to be a parent, a child, and part of a family."- Karen Russell
"This meditative novel dignifies small gestures, which bring to life the compelling characters. A bonus is the fresh regional sensibility the author brings to Matt's road trip through the Northern Middle West states.? Fresh turf for American fiction from a talented young writer." - Kirkus
"With highly charged lyricism and dramatic concision, Somerville gracefully illuminates what children need, all that war demands, and how amends are made and sorrows are woven into the intricate tapestry of life." - Booklist
"The book cover, with a wooden rocking cradle and baby shoes dangling from its corner, conjures baby boys, boys who become men, men who become fathers… the ongoing cycle.
The man in Patrick Somerville’s novel, The Cradle, is right in the thick of that terrific, life-altering stage of life when his pregnant wife is about to deliver her miracle. He is present for her as onlooker and provider and partner: at her beck and call, basically. In her eighth month, her power at its peak, Marissa makes a teensy request of Matt: She wants their baby to sleep in the very same Civil War-era cradle she slept in as a baby. She believes that the cradle might be found somewhere among her mother’s possessions.
This might be an easy assignment, except Marissa’s mother left home long ago and no one knows where she lives. Marissa wants no part in finding her, seeing her, or reconnecting with her—she just wants Matt to take care of her and provide this one thing. She believes that the cradle matters and she will not take no for an answer. Matt acquiesces, as that is his role, and so begins the quest.
Where has Marissa’s mother gone and why? “She’d left Marissa and Glen because she was going to start again somewhere else. Her version of escape was to begin. It was simple, but it left damage behind that she had to keep moving away from. What kind of woman, Matt wondered, would do this? What kind of person?”
Everything is fraught at this moment in the man’s life, as he looks ahead to fatherhood and back at childhood. The road trip brings up Matt’s own past for his consideration: what was lost, what he never had in the first place. “If Matt went way way way way back, he could remember things. Not a lot…. That far back, he’d been so young that he didn’t know any better than to accept whatever happened as the same thing that happened to everybody.”
The novel’s conceit—the search for the cradle—seems flimsy at first, until it becomes entangled with the stories of Matt’s uneasy early years in foster homes and with the mute and unloved boy he meets on his quest. Much of the novel deals with Matt’s choices—he and Marissa want to move into the next phase of life free of the troubled past. So why go looking for trouble? He can buy a wooden cradle anywhere. He could lie and show up with a reasonable facsimile. But Matt is not a liar or a nihilist. He thinks about all the adults who didn’t love him growing up, about how he has survived his own life:
“He had scrubbed himself clean of it. He had literally spent years tearing out his own insides, all of his twenties spent removing everything that had come before… What had scared him even more, then, was giving it to somebody else, either passing down to a child or transferring it sideways, to someone he loved.”
He has to decide how to live now, what kind of man he wants to be:
“Was it not obvious then, what this other feeling was… when he rushed through the carved passages of all that old pain, but rushed through them without the pain. Instead just existed and allowed himself to be what he was and what he had been at the same time. The divots and the paths and the channels that were there inside him were not malleable. Rather, it was what ran through them that was malleable.”
With The Cradle, Patrick Somerville offers a novel about the many layers of the self—what is found and what is lost and found again. It’s a Midwestern story, with the cold, dank, wide open mystery of abandoned prairies at its hopeful heart." - Marianne Rogoff
"I didn’t read Patrick Somerville’s The Cradle in one sitting, but I maybe should have, since what happened instead was that I read the first 80 pages of it and then spent a day and a half pretending to be paying full attention to friends or the beer in front of me, but what I was really thinking about was Matt, the novel’s protagonist, and his quest for his wife’s old cradle.
John Edgar Wideman said “you need just enough plot to hang a story on,” and the best proof of that’s in this book. The plot is as simple as it could be: on, literally, the second page, the plot is established when Marissa, a young and pregnant-for-the-first-time wife, asks Matt, her incredibly good and dedicated husband, to find and retrieve the cradle she’d been rocked in as a baby. The story is that the cradle’s a civil war relic, though Matt’s got his doubts.
It’s as inauspicious as a start can get, yet that tiny nudge—wife telling husband to find something for her—sets up an entire 200 page novel so exquisitely it’s almost breathtaking. Somerville’s a master of letting a story unfold, and so, though the reader knows the cradle’s with Marissa’s mother as of page 2, we don’t see the full picture of Marissa’s mom’s absence for awhile, and we don’t get the full story of her departure from Marissa’s (and her father Glen) life for a bit.
If that sounds simplistic or not too big a deal, I’d here like to posit that, actually, a novel lives or dies based on how it provides its info to the reader, and an author who can make withheld information not annoying or anything but powerful and hunger-inducing is an astoundingly good author, and I’ll here just go ahead and proclaim that Patrick Somerville is totally that good an author. Because you know what the story at the heart of The Cradle actually is? It actually ends up being about Marissa exactly as much as it is about Matt; it ends up being about gone/bad mothers just as much as it’s about gone/bad fathers (or father figures, anyway). The book, fundamentally, is about family, is about not just the blood and bio that create that institution, but the decisions and choices that attend as well.
This’ll either sound silly or overhyped, but the story in The Cradle, while great, is actually not the thing that makes the book so gasp-inducing; rather, it’s Patrick Somerville’s astonishing sentences, his way of sort of scribbling at the edges. Let’s try to make that clearer: though the point of fiction is to get whatever story’s being told across, the filligrees and details and extraneous bits—the unnecessary stuff, basically—are what make the story so good (if this seems far-fetched, consider that beans and rice will keep you alive, but once you add salt and pepper and olive oil to them, they’re quite a bit more appealing). The writer I’ve seen encapsulate this best is actually Paul Maliszewski, who, in an interview on One Story, said (in response to ‘What’s the best bit of advice about writing you’ve ever gotten?’)
”My teacher Michael Martone says—and I will quote him—”You can never have too much peripheral detail or too little on the color of a character’s eyes.” Along similar lines, he once formulated the theory of neat stuff, which holds that not every single thing in a story has to contribute to some airtight and flawless scheme. Some things, Michael says, are just neat.”
Somerville does this page after page all the way through. Here, describing Walton, Minnesota, page 84: “You could see the whole thing from the right angle.” Here, page 94:
“…and now the dog came up and sat beside him, its tail wagging across the dirty concrete floor. The pleasure. That was what the cost was. That was the definition of worth. Matter was somewhere in there, too. Worth and matter. Darren had meant something more cynical about the marketplace. What he didn’t understand was that five hundred dollars was nothing when it came to the invisible mass of life.”
These moments dot the pages like glitter, and it’s hard not to want to stop as you’re reading, call a friend, read passages aloud: it’s that sort of book—it’s a wonder, a literal, oh-my-gosh wonder.
There are dozens more amazing things about this book, and I haven’t even touched the plot because, honestly, it’s too good a surprise, it’s too clickingly well crafted to rob the joy it’ll give the coming-in-blind reader. Just pick The Cradle up and start reading, pick the thing up and be dazzled." - Weston Cutter
"Patrick Somerville's debut novel, "The Cradle," is a lovely, finely wrought tale of unlikely redemption. In prose that floats so lightly as to seem effortless, Somerville takes the reader on unlikely journeys that results in unexpected consequences.
Marissa and Matt are expecting their first child and in June 1997 she is in her eighth month. Matt has been killing himself at work at the Delco plant outside Milwaukee: "He'd been taking whatever double shifts anyone at the plant dangled in front of him just to store up enough money for the baby. He had no idea what it meant for the kid to come and no idea what it was going to feel like once it came, so the one thing it made sense for him to do, he figured, was put his head down and put money in the bank and leave the understanding to Marissa or her father, two people who seemed to know quite a lot on the subject."
Matt and Marissa come from different kinds of unstable childhood. Matt never knew his parents and was shuffled from one foster home to the next. Marissa's home life seems more stable, but of the pair, she is more obsessed by her past.
When she was 15, Marissa's mother walked in and announced she was leaving. A few days later, the house was burgled, but the only things gone were her mother's favorite possessions. With no further word from Mrs. Caroline Francis, the rest of the job of raising Marissa was left to her father, Glen.
Now that she's pregnant, she wants her cradle back. "The cradle for the coming baby had to be the cradle she'd been rocked in as a child; not only the cradle she'd been rocked in but the cradle that was upstairs in her bedroom when she was fifteen." The cradle was one of the items lost in the burglary.
It makes perfect sense to Marissa to ask Matt to find the cradle, though she has no idea where to start looking. Glen is able to give Matt a location, perhaps, of Caroline's sister. And Matt, in the manner of a man coddling one more pregnant whim, sets off in his pickup truck on a quest.
Set against the story of Matt's journey (though not in parallel) is that of Renee Owen, a happily married writer of children's books. Her only child, a 19- year-old son, has enlisted in the Army. Adam is going to do what he is going to do and no amount of argument from his mother can dissuade him from his course.
Bill, her husband, seems more accepting of their son's decision to undertake a tour in Iraq. It is after 9/11 and the sight of the towers has altered many perceptions about responsibility and duty.
As Matt travels through the Midwest, pursuing one clue after another, he also thinks about his childhood, some of his foster families and patterns of benign neglect. As he does, the search for the cradle becomes almost secondary.
Renee's journey is more subtle. Perhaps it is worry over her son that triggers the reminiscence that brings up Jonathan, the first man she loved, who was killed in Vietnam. There is a secret that she's hidden from her husband, one she's held so long that revealing it may shake the foundation of their marriage, not because of the content of the secret itself but because of the lack of trust implied by her long silence.
"The Cradle" is a slim volume, with prose that slides down easily — so easily that the emotions it explores can sneak up on the reader. Matt discovers something much more important than the cradle, and Renee finds that she can live with the consequences of a past she's hidden.
The final pages of the novel are surprisingly satisfying and right. Somerville has many gifts, not the least of which is the ability to sketch his characters with firm strokes that leave no doubt as to their distinct and varied humanity. The resulting work is nothing short of a surprising treat." - Robin Vidimos
"The New York Times Book Review practically dripped with saliva when this first novel was reviewed. Can a first novel– particularly one so compact– be so good?
Apparently.
The spareness of The Cradle mirrors the simplicity of the complicated—the nakedness of truth, if you will. The structure of the novel is lovely. We join two seemingly disparate households of two different generations, one spotlighting a husband on a VisionQuest, the other focused on a wife unable to turn away from what she must face.
You will care about the young husband, Matt, who has survived the wounds of foster childhood through what Barbara Kingsolver calls looking hard, “for a long time, at a single glorious thing.” That glorious thing is his wife Marissa’s forthright dedication to what she knows to be important. The 58-year-old Renee, on the other hand, has lived an almost-honest life as a wife, mother and children’s book author, but has maybe only survived. We are caught up in the questions of how she withstood what one American war did to her and if she can withstand what another might do to her son.
Somerville is a graceful but humble writer, in full possession of his gifts but seemingly free of the need to over-impress. He most likely is capable of imbedding lyric poetry in his paragraphs, but he seems confident enough to leave it at simple storytelling, letting us know that sometimes a woman on a park bench is all the poetry we need.
This is a lovely, lovely novel. That isn’t meant to be the least bit damning with faint praise. Loveliness is in short supply right about now and very precious because it reminds us that what is important is a kind of fidelity to the miracle of the everyday—particularly if we can remember to live each day with an understanding of the beating of our own true hearts." - Laura Baudo Sillerman
"Always on the lookout for Milwaukee-related things, I acted quickly when I heard author Patrick Somerville's debut novel "The Cradle" was set in Brew City.
What I discovered is that that's not entirely true. In fact, it's not true at all. Somerville, who is currently the Simon Blattner Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University, set the book in St Helens, a fictional suburb of Milwaukee.
However, while I was a little disappointed that the book wasn't packed to the brim with references to familiar places, Somerville's interweaving of two stories in this slim and rather unusual road novel is very satisfying.
And because he manages to somehow pack a pretty epic family story in such a concentrated punch of a book, "The Cradle" is the kind of novel you can read in a single sitting on a rainy spring Sunday.
I asked Somerville -- who is also the author of "Trouble," a story collection published in 2006 -- why he chose to set the novel in Milwaukee -- well, near Milwaukee -- instead of in more familiar territory.
"I grew up in Green Bay and went to school in Madison, but I've had family and friends in Milwaukee for 15 years and have visited and stayed many, many times," says Somerville.
"('The Cradle') starts out in a made-up town somewhere to the west of Milwaukee, and Matt drives through Milwaukee when he's first heading north, but he spends the majority of the book driving around the Midwest, and the other storyline is set in Chicago."
Indeed, even if the book was set in Brew City, the main character spends so much time on the road trying to procure a specific, memory-laden cradle that his pregnant wife wants to have for their child, that there wouldn't be much opportunity to name drop city sights.
"I put Matt and his family where I did because I knew he'd be crisscrossing to Minnesota and Indiana, and I wanted him to have to pass his house and have the choice of heading home each time he went by," Somerville says. "And for reasons that come up later in the book, he needed to be close to Chicago, but not in it."
In his search for this cradle that means so much to his wife Marissa, Matt uncovers details of the life Marissa's mother has led in the years since she left her family behind and what seems like a lot of mucking about for a piece of furniture rapidly becomes something life-altering.
As a reader I found it unusual that Somerville focused so little on place. Perhaps his ability to gnarl a story down to its bones explains how he creates such a powerful story in a novel that just tickles 200 pages.
"There are moments in the book when the landscape matters quite a lot," he says, "and other moments when it doesn't; for example, there's a part right after (Matt) gets north of Milwaukee when he looks out at the farmland for quite some time.
"Since Matt is so unwilling, at the beginning of the novel, to examine much about himself directly, he uses what he sees - his neighbor's house, the light at a rest stop, an old broken-down factory in Minnesota - as a way of being kind of indirectly introspective. It was only those moments that I spent a good amount of time describing the physical world." - Bobby Tanzilo
"Are you familiar with the term "MacGuffin?"
No, it is not a Happy Meal ingredient at Mickey D's. It's a plot device that moves a story along, but proves not to have vital significance of its own.
A cradle is the MacGuffin in "The Cradle," yet it rocks the plot quite nicely.
Patrick Somerville's debut novel begins when a very pregnant wife sends her very compliant husband on a wild cradle chase to find the Civil War-era antique she had slept in years before her mother, Caroline, abandoned the family and, in a staged "robbery," spirited the piece of furniture away.
Marissa is not to be denied. Matt, who was put up for adoption as an infant but wound up in foster care that went horrendously wrong, adores her and sets out to trace her absent mom as a means to bringing the cradle home. One clue leads to another, and he discovers Caroline's hitherto unknown connections with some piquant and troubling characters.
At first, this novel seems a sweet, amusing tale of young love, feminine wiles and the masculine determination to complete a quest. Then Somerville brings in another family, and the story deepens and darkens quite beautifully.
That family is facing the departure of a son to duty in Iraq, and Somerville exquisitely captures the agonies that Renee, a poet, feels at the thought of her boy, Adam, risking his life to serve in a war she opposes. She's angry at her husband, Bill, for not speaking up, thereby giving Adam tacit permission to enlist. And memories arise of her first love and his death in Vietnam — and of a secret she has kept for decades.
Renee is introspective, as befits her calling. Here she is, looking in the mirror:
"... she felt what she always felt when she looked at her face — glad it was her own but surprised this was the thing that stood her place in the world and showed people it was she."
The story toggles between Matt and Renee, as he delves deeper into family history and she fights for calm and acceptance of Adam's wish to serve. The astute reader soon senses why and when their paths will cross, knowledge that does not spoil the story.
Matt does find the elusive cradle, but far more important, he finds Joe, a child at risk and in need of rescue. Good-hearted and responsible man that he is, Matt knows exactly what to do with this lost boy.
In the end, virtue, patience and hard-won honesty prevail and vital connections are forged. This is a fine first effort and a rewarding read." - Carole Goldberg
"At the start of Patrick Somerville’s magical debut novel, a very pregnant woman named Marissa Bishop makes a request. In the short time before her first baby is due, Marissa would like her husband, Matt, to go find the cradle in which her mother, Caroline, once rocked her.
Caroline walked out on her husband and daughter when Marissa was a teenager. Ten days afterward and not coincidentally, a burglar emptied the house of everything Caroline wanted to take with her. Out came the good stuff, cradle and all.
“You can find anything,” Marissa tells her husband encouragingly. “You’re Matt. Where are my keys?” Yes, Matt has the persistence for this odd assignment. But it will send him roaming through unexpected regions of the Midwest, and of the heart.
Mr. Somerville has the chops to keep this story from softening into the generic mush suggested by his premise. As the jacket copy for “The Cradle” puts it, during the search “Matt makes a discovery that will forever change Marissa’s life, and faces a decision that will challenge everything he has ever known.” How often have you read this kind of synopsis? How wearyingly do track-down-a-secret novels conform to this pattern?
And how reflexively do authors crosscut, as Mr. Somerville does here, between two seemingly unrelated stories that turn out to be closely linked? Mr. Somerville uses even that creaky tactic to poignantly good effect. In a streamlined 200-page book that works as a fully conceived novel, he tells an endearing story full of genuinely surprising turns. And while Matt is quietly and whimsically buffeted by fortune, there’s no Gump or Garp in him. Though it takes a while for Mr. Somerville to reveal this, Matt is deeply serious about what first sounded like a purely capricious mission.
The primary focus of “The Cradle” is clear: this is a book about family ties, some ruptured, some restored. And Matt understands what his wife is really seeking. She does not want her new family to fall apart the way her old one did. The cradle will be her talisman. So what if that cradle is barely an heirloom? So what if it came into Marissa’s family when her grandmother bought it at a yard sale? “There’s another link,” Marissa insists to Matt. “Her hauling it home that day.” Matt loves his wife too much to do anything but agree.
So off he goes, away from Milwaukee and toward anyone who may cast light on Caroline’s whereabouts. His first stop, on the trail of Caroline’s half-sister: a house where “the yard gave off few signs of interested human control” and a cat sits staring out the window. “From time to time, Matt stared straight back at it and tried to send it mental signals: I am not your enemy, I am not your enemy” he thinks. Mr. Somerville adds, “Then, later: meow.”
There is a cradle in this house, he tells himself. There are spider webs on its porch, says the woman who lives there. So Matt winds up doing household chores before he can ask if she knows anything about Caroline. “I do,” says the woman. “But do you know anything about plumbing?”
This part of “The Cradle” takes place in 1997. Other, interspersed sections involve a woman named Renee and take place a decade later. Renee and her husband, Bill, have a 19-year-old son who is leaving for Iraq. “Their son was going to war,” Mr. Somerville writes. “This was the week he would disappear and become an idea.” When Renee turns on a television, she is spooked by the apocalyptic sight of a fire at a chemical plant in Milwaukee. By not-quite-coincidence, it’s the plant where Matt worked in 1997.
Renee has envisioned terrible, fiery scenes before. Now she relives that past. En route to Hawaii for a vacation because her husband says that “there is nothing more deadly than February in Illinois” (evidently forgetting Iraq), Renee has a hellish experience on an airplane. (“You’ve just redefined the whole genre of nightmare travel stories,” her husband tells her after they land in Hawaii.) On a parallel track, the same type of thing happens to Matt: both he and Renee are jarringly reminded of long-buried, long-repressed family suffering. These revelations are nicely leavened by the quirkiness of the way stations on Matt’s journey.
It would be better to recommend “The Cradle,” a deeply gratifying modern fable, than to reveal too much about its plot. Leave it at this: Matt does find the cradle eventually, but he makes other discoveries that count for much more. In the course of his wanderings, Matt comes to grip with a malaise that has been with him since childhood. As a result, he is more profoundly ready for fatherhood than he would have been without this voyage of self-discovery.
And all of this sleight of hand is executed with the light, graceful touch that makes Mr. Somerville, also the author of a short-story collection (“Trouble”), someone to watch. A writer who looks at airline clerks at a boarding gate and sees brightly dressed figures typing as busily and happily as Muppets has a charmingly idiosyncratic way of looking at the world.
As a small novel with unexpectedly wide range, “The Cradle” mixes the profound emotional pull of parent-child connections with comically eccentric touches. So when Renee, an author of popular children’s books, gives a reading at a bookstore soon after her son goes off to war, she is reminded of why she wrote these stories in the first place. But she is also pestered by a bookstore employee to read one of her unpublished books for children. Renee is advised not to do this. “That’s nice of you, but you really don’t want to,” the store’s owner tells her. The employee has written a book that features “talking office supplies.” - Janet Maslin
Patrick Somerville, Trouble, Vintage, 2006.
"Somerville's uneven debut collection portrays men and soon-to-be men in various states of transformational chaos. In "Puberty," Brandon, on the cusp of adolescence, attempts to wrest control of his body from Mother Nature by using vitamins to hasten the onset of puberty. In "Crow Moon," Seth mourns his fading childhood and faces a monotonous and unhappy adulthood. Somerville's men don't behave very differently from the teenagers: in "Cold War," an older doctor's affair with a disturbed young woman is the catalyst for a breakdown as he owns up to his impending mortality. One of the collection's better stories, "Trouble and the Shadowy Deathblow," is the first-person account of an unemployed food scientist who learns a deadly martial arts technique from a disabled man. His struggle to control his newfound power becomes a darkly comic portrayal of men afraid of their destructive power. Less successful are short dialogue pieces like "The Train" and "The Whales," which present the banter of teenage boys without sufficient context or the means to involve the reader. At his best, Somerville crafts stories that, with equal parts grace and humility, highlight mordant absurdity and revel in darkly comic moments." - Publishers Weekly
“These gorgeous stories, written with wit and precision, are energized by Patrick Somerville’s improvisational humor and the authentic sympathy he brings to the tempest of ordinary lives. It is hard to think of another book quite like this one. Every story is provocative, revelatory, and satisfying.” —Stephanie Vaughn
“Wonderful. Here are stories packed with big-hearted humor, serious compassion, and plenty of loopy narrative thrust to keep you turning the pages. Patrick Somerville’s characters exist in a modern world where love and cruelty are indistinguishable, and he imbues their struggle with real grace. Oddly tender, dementedly funny, this book is a pleasure to read.” — Gabe Hudson
A GAME I ONCE ENJOYED by Patrick Somerville (pdf)
Patrick Somerville: The TNB Self-Interview
Patrick Somerville on Coexisting in a State of Fracture and a State of Overall Cohesion
Remembering Intent by Patrick Somerville
Patrick Somerville Web Site
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