If it matters, which it doesn’t, the plot of the American multiform artist Tom Comitta’s new novel is a loose picaresque: a narrator seeks a magical snuff box, has a relationship with a woman named Catherine and ends up duelling an aristocrat.
The reason the plot doesn’t matter is that Patchwork is obsessed with its compositional gimmick to the total exclusion of story, rhythm or even coherence. Comitta confesses in an afterword that he has not “written” the book. Instead, he has collaged together sentences from scores of other novels. His own words appear only for chapter titles such as “Being The Events of the Following Morning Told in the Form of a Run-On Sentence”.
The author reuses the same few sources for lines about snuff boxes and Catherines, but otherwise pays no mind to continuity. Characters, ideas and voices appear without introduction and disappear without pay off. Suddenly “A seven-foot tall man leaned casually against a crypt”. He comes from and goes nowhere. For the reader, it is all quite dispiriting.
It may not be fair to assess Patchwork on whether it offers familiar novelistic consolations; success depends on whatever rewards can be harvested from the operating gimmick. Of course, there are many beautiful sentences: Comitta has picked from a fine menu. But they don’t really build on each other. Instead, each feels estranged from its neighbours and loses much of its original splendour in the new, unnatural context. George Orwell said the penalty of quitting your native land was that you must transfer your roots to shallower soil. That certainly feels true here.
The chapters are organized into stages of the “hero’s journey”, but it is not obvious what revelation or stimulation Comitta intends by pointing out that many classic stories involve a reluctant hero adventuring into new lands in search of a treasured object. His other organizing principles are also not obviously profound. There is, it transpires, little to be gained from reading a chapter made up of sentences involving lots of words that begin with the letter “b”, or a collection of sentences that use the word “ejaculate”.
The questions on the marketing copy – “To whom does a story belong? Who is its author? What is an author? Does it matter?” – do not feel posed with much urgency or confidence. A distinct section that involves only random doodles shows not just a loss of vision, but also a loss of care. And at least one of the attributions in the bibliography is wrong. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” closes Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, not For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Readers willing to suspend all other hopes and take Patchwork on its own terms may find their curiosity somewhat aroused. But the book holds little more profound than that. The bibliography does show an impressive range. If only Comitta’s book were a patch on any of the entries.
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