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Patchwork
by
Tom Comitta
general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author
| Title: | Patchwork |
| Author: | Tom Comitta |
| Genre: | Novel |
| Written: | 2025 |
| Length: | 180 pages |
| Availability: | Patchwork - US |
| Patchwork - UK | |
| Patchwork - Canada | |
| from: Bookshop.org (US) |
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Our Assessment:
B+ : fun, elaborate concept; solid execution
See our review for fuller assessment.
| Source | Rating | Date | Reviewer |
|---|---|---|---|
| TLS | D | 1/8/2025 | George Monaghan |
From the Reviews:
- "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. (...) 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." - George Monaghan, Times Literary Supplement
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
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The complete review's Review:
As author Tom Comitta sums up and explains in a Note at the end of Patchwork:
Apart from the summaries that introduce each chapter, this book contains no words of my own. Through a process of collage and constraint, I have gathered fragments from hundreds of novels and arranged them into a story of love and loss, suspense and snuff boxes.Patchwork, then, is composed entirely of sentences (and some other sorts of fragments) from existing works -- novels -- by other authors, arranged in thirty-two chapters, the constituent bits and pieces chosen also according to a different 'guiding pattern' for each chapter. So, for example, the guiding patterns of the first and last chapters of the novel are, appropriately enough, respectively, the first and last lines from novels, with the chapters constructed entirely of these. An appendix of Sources helpfully: "details the patterns and source texts used in each chapter" (as well as suggesting the "Phase of Hero's Journey" the chapter presents). (Comitta also notes having: "sprinkled four other texts throughout this book for their snuff box descriptions [....] and references to Catherines" (snuff boxes and Catherine(s) featuring prominently in the story, and apparently not being as readily found in the wider literature ...).)
There is a story, of sorts, to it all too, with Comitta adopting a: "narrative formula identified and popularized by Jospeh Campbell in the 1950s". The story is basically a quest tale -- to recover a stolen snuff box --; there's also an elusive love-interest, Catherine -- with these two threads also loosely connected. (Unsurprisingly, in such a pieced-together work, the connections everywhere tend to the loose -- though Comitta gamely combines and links what and where he can.)
The 'guiding principles' are not always the ones one might expect: Chapter VII, 'Being the Events of the Following Morning Told in the Form of a Run-On Sentence' is not, for example, made up of a sampler of run-on sentences, but rather: "Descriptions of running and jogging" (as also this 'phase of the hero's journey" is: "Crossing the Threshold"). (Typical here, however, is the range of sources -- from Dhalgren to Forrest Gump, as well the perhaps predictable, including William Goldman's Marathon Man, (Stephen-King-writing-as-)Richard Bachman's The Running Man, and John Updike's Rabbit, Run, as well novels by authors ranging from Samuel Richardson and Charles Dickens to Agatha Christie, Michael Crichton, Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Dan Brown, and Nicholas Sparks.)
Other guiding principles include: 'Castle descriptions' (Chapter XVI; 'Being my Brief Ascent into Gothic Mystery'); 'Olfactory descriptions' (Chapter XXV; 'Being an Olfactory Rendering of my Walk Home'); and 'Moments of "and then I woke up" and the like' (Chapter XXVI; 'Being the Discreet Dreams of the Bourgeoisie'). One chapter relies on: "Poetry in novels", and two offer: "Story options from choose your own adventure books".
Several chapters are purely or largely visual, from Chapter VI ('Being a Visual Representation of my Thought Processes After Reading Said Book'), whose guiding principle is: "Illustrations and other visual elements from novels") to Chapter XXIV, 'Being a Visual Rendering of my Walk Home', consisting entirely of: "Illustrations from Charles Dickens novels".
Creative takes also include Chapter XX -- 'Being the Tattered Testimony of How the Dominie Obtained the Coveted Snuff Box' --, which is made up of: "Intentionally obscured proper nouns and profanities, along with other excessive uses of punctuation, from mostly pre-modern novels", and Chapter XXII, 'Being the Typo-Tortured Tale of My Time Following the Loss of the Snuff Box', which relies on: "Typos from the first editions of novels". One short chapter consists solely of: "Bird sounds from novels" -- and, in the most humorous (if sophomoric) turn, Chapter XIX -- appropriately enough: 'Being the Climax of the Novel' -- is made up of: "Exclamations and sudden utterances from pre-modern novels", with Comitta noting that in his work towards the novel: "one of the most glaring and admittedly juvenile observations was the liberal use of 'ejaculate' in place of 'exclaim' in pre-1900 fiction" -- leading, here, to:
"Oh, Jem !" Jane ejaculated.Etc.
"Ah !" ejaculated Grace.
"Humph !" ejaculated Mrs. Thorne.
"Humph !" ejaculated Chet's mother.
"Dolly !" ejaculated Mrs. Boncassen. "She's a woman, through and through, if ever there was one."
"She is," ejaculated Keith, looking meditatively at the stove.
"Very glad, very glad !" she ejaculated.
"Good lord !" ejaculated the old man, sitting down feebly and staring.
"Brian !" ejaculated the banker. (The clerk ejaculated the length of his toothpick.)
Unsurprisingly, parts here can feel forced and others random. The approach here hardly makes for a smooth-flowing narrative -- but then it is, after all, a patchwork-work, as the title already makes very clear.
Working with multiple constraints -- different ones, from chapter to chapter -- Comitta juggles (and has good fun with) a great deal here. The variety and range is certainly appealing, as he sticks to and cycles through his 'guiding principles'; as to the novel as novel ... it's a bit rickety (i.e. if these were all Comitta's -- rather than borrowed -- words (and images) it would feel rather forced, and be a bit of a chore to get through). Still, following the Campbellian 'narrative formula' as he does, with its 'Phases of [the] Hero's Journey', makes for a familiar journey that allows the reader to focus more on the constrained twists Comitta plays with while still providing a satisfying (if, again, also very familiar) arc.
The range of sources is quite impressive -- though dominated by English-language works, popular (including quite a bit of contemporary shlock) and 'literary', classic and modern (with more bits taken from Finnegans Wake than Ulysses); the foreign sources are largely limited to some French authors, the classic Russians, and a few odds and ends such as Murakami. Somewhat surprisingly, in a work built up on constraints, there's very little recourse to Oulipo-writings -- basically nothing beyond Calvino and Perec (and in the latter case it's only an illustration, rather than text, that Comitta takes up).
For all its mixing of pieces from very different sources, Patchwork is only in part an exercise in (contrasting) styles, though certainly part of the fascination of the work is how the mix -- of 'high' and 'low', contemporary and classical -- works and comes across. The shift from chapter to chapter in approaches (patterns) -- second-person writing ! monster sounds from vintage comic books ! pre-duel and dueling language ! -- also allows for very different forms of composition. This also goes beyond mere narrative sequence and presentation, as Comitta also presents text in appropriately different fonts (the letter-chapter, for example); with the text spread out over the page (the variety of 'nos' in the chapter responding to the letter); or even framed, as in Chapter XVII, 'Being the Paintings that Lined the Hallway on the Other Side of the Door', which consists of: "Visual descriptions of monsters from premodern fiction". (And there are, of course, also the more or less text-less chapters that are basically entirely composed of illustrations.)
It all makes for an interesting exercise (or exercises), and a text that also allows for engagement beyond the usual simple reading-of. Read and considered simply as 'a novel', Patchwork likely would feel like a somewhat awkwardly constructed and very unevenly written -- in both its shifts in style basically from sentence to sentence to how these are strung together -- work, but taking into account the quite elaborate framework(s) behind it -- as one surely must -- it makes for a quite fascinating piece of intricately and curiously assembled fiction to consider.
The games being played here (and how they are played) are what's most appealing about Patchwork, but there's also something of a story here -- simple and familiar, but strong enough to hold the whole together. All in all (and there's a lot of that all ...), it's good and very playful fun.
- M.A.Orthofer, 9 August 2025
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Patchwork:
- Coffee House Press publicity page
- The Columbia Review
- Publishers Weekly
- XRAY Literary Magazine (scroll down for review)
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American author Tom Comitta was born in 1985.
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© 2025 the complete review
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