PATCHWORK, excellent title for what I hope you'll see with refreshed and restored pleasure in Literature

PATCHWORK
TOM COMITTA
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Tom Comitta returns with a novella that is at once a picaresque quest for a stolen snuffbox and a marvel of literary découpage, equal parts love story, old-fashioned thriller, and absurdist romp.

To whom does a story belong? Who is its author? What is an author? Does it matter? These questions and more populate the subversive and audacious Patchwork, a comical tragedy that highlights the connective tissue that joins stories to themselves as well as to the grand history of storytelling itself. Celebrating the tropes and clichés of classical novels while simultaneously forging them into an original narrative, Patchwork ultimately shows us that the stories produced by hundreds of writers past—celebrated or obscure, reverent or hilarious, factual or fantastical—may, in the hands of a master, become a single, seamless whole.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Every so often it's very helpful to one's mood to see Literature cavorting naked, ignoring your shocked gaze. It's a little like finding those nudes of your grandfather, young and virile, displaying for whoever it was that took them. (DON'T ASK.)

Tom Comitta's displaying Literature's bare backside as he remixes bits and pieces of what others wrote to serve new meanings and explore ideas of authorship, of Authority, by...ignoring it. Samuel Beckett made similar experiments sixty years ago. It's refreshing, to say the least, when someone looks afresh at shibboleths like Literature and sees what's under its underpants instead of reverently praising its court dresses.

The means by which he accomplishes this is to set Literature off on a snipe hunt for a snuff box. Ostensibly. Sorta-kinda, anyway, but we ain't goin' in a line, let alone a straight one, anywhere. There are lots and lots of side quests, points where you put your readerly trust in Author Comitta because if there's a path ahead you sure can't see it, and then lo! Behold the comic-strip of a walk home, made up entirely of Victorian artwork that decorated Dickens novels.

Does it make sense? Yes, but in a curious way, no. It's consistent with hunting, with being in motion; it's a metacommentary on research and its pleasures; it's not the only time we are required to double-clutch the non-synchromesh transmission of this assembled car of many manufacturer's bits to see if we're going to make it up the hill of narrative logic.

Don't count on it.

We're then thrust into an olfactory assessment of the walk that runs through Richard Price's evocative prose pertaining to a mall food court's assault on one's nose. That's really another sly rib-poke. A huge assortment of things made into one thing in our readerly framework just by the accident of proximity...like reading the thesaurus as a story, like using all the words you find there in chains of meaning.

It's short, barely two hundred pages. It's pungent and oddly elegant, see above. It's unusual, it's not country you necessarily have a map for at hand (unless you own a copy of Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, that is). Patchwork is a perfect title for this patched-up piecework example of how to quilt, tat, and knit a whole thing, to sew bits into a refined Frankensteinian monster, that becomes a whole and separate artwork. It's a read that is animated in its parts by many heads and hands long-dead mostly forgotten and revived, reanimated, restored and repurposed by Tom Comitta.

He's done this before, The Nature Book came out from Coffee House Press in 2023 when his subject was the deathly serious issue of climate change; I didn't read it because, well, grim much? I'll go back and pick it up. The world needs fresh ways of thinking about things we already (think we) know. Perspectives like Comitta's are forceful reminders that knowledge, that what already exists in our heads, is not static, not fixed in one pattern, unless we force, allow, ignore it to be. I can't offer a perfect five because, in order to ask people for money, the publisher needs to tell them it's *about* something so a plot of sorts is crafted...I'd say grafted, in the sense skin is over a wound...and it really doesn't add a whole lot to the exercise.

Freshen up your readerly search engine by querying it in unusual ways. You're rewarded by surprises and pleasures not easy to find.