Drift: Stories

by Victoria Patterson

Book Overview

Welcome to Newport Beach, California--a community often found glittering in the spotlight, but one that isn't always as glamorous as we imagine. Through the lives of waiters and waitresses, divorced and single parents, and alienated teens, Victoria Patterson's Drift offers a rare and rewarding view into the real life of this nearly mythical place, all the while plumbing the depths of female friendship and what it means to be an outsider. Fresh,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0547054947
• ISBN13: 9780547054940
• Release Date: June 2009
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful book, stories not so much linked

as geographically created so they seem to slip by one another like physical realities that lie side by side. I love the artful way the stories ping and jingle next to one another, the door chime sounds, you look up, there's John Wayne zooming by on his skateboard as Rosie skulks in, looking for a job. The setting is gorgeously drawn, the many ways the surface of the water, so variously described, is so clearly seen, simply stunning, amazing, various as the look of the Pacific itself, and it's how the physical beauty of the place makes the devastated lives being lived here all the more sad, the frail connections, the bonds forged because of materialism, the aching pulsing loneliness. This writer is a COMPLETE surprise, smart, serious, astonishingly gifted. Victoria Patterson is an American original, she puts me in mind of Henry James.

Moving story collection

These thirteen linked and evocative stories are set in Newport Beach, California, a Southern California landscape that is at once breathtakingly gorgeous -- the palm trees, the water, the yachts, the sand, the twinkling lights -- and emotionally bereft. Like Victoria Patterson, an exciting new fictional voice, I grew up here too, though many years ago. I went to the same high school as Rosie, perhaps the most central of several repeating characters, and felt both the excitement and the danger of coming of age in a place so beautiful yet so brutal, where youth and beauty alone are the coin of the realm for a young woman. But I didn't expect to like these stories as much as I did, because it's too easy to mock this Eden and to expose its blindnesses and hypocrisies. Think "The OC." From publishers' descriptions of the book, that was what I was fearing. I'm used to the thoughtless denigration (or alternatively the uncritical exploitation) of Southern California and Orange County for its shallowness. I was unprepared for this complex fictional sketch of a seductive Eden where children struggle with the pain of divorce, parents and grandparents seek fulfillment while mourning the damage, and people chafe against constricting gender and sexual categories. This collection is truly something fresh, free, and different -- and painfully accurate. Both entertaining and haunting, Patterson's collection is a tour de force. She won me over, and I look forward to her future writing.

Excellent Writing, An Engaging, Emotional Read

It's always rewarding for me to read something of quality from an emerging writer and Victoria Patterson is a great example. "Drift" is not really what it purports to be, it's actually a novel built from various viewpoints of characters in the story line. The timeline is somewhat jumbled, so you get pieces here and there of their intertwined histories, like flipping through a series of diaries. Patterson's handling of several difficult subjects (drug addiction, sex addiction, prostitution, incest, rape, runaways on the street) is done with a careful and emotional hand. The writing is so close to the bone in some places, it's as if she's gone through several of these things herself and is writing from her own history. Her characters are all fully fleshed-out, you get a definite mental picture of each and they stay with you. I've been thinking about specific ones for two weeks after I've finished the book. That rarely happens to me. As a long time reader, I've only been brought to tears only three times by the written word. Once was a story in 1980s Esquire by Bob Greene about a murderer's confession. Once was in Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses". And here, once again by Ms. Patterson in the touching chapter about a homeless skateboarder who receives a form of love from an old woman who lets him "sneak" into her house, eat a meal and sleep in one of the homes beds on a weekly basis. Some really well-handled, emotional stuff written from a place of deep connections. I'm a sucker for charity, especially when given to those who are damaged beyond help. I highly recommend this book. I only wish it would have been longer so that I was still in the middle of reading it instead of currently trying to do it justice with this review.

Stories for our age...

I doubt that any of the characters in "Drift" would read a collection of "literary" short stories like this one. They just aren't the type. Most of them work in dead-end jobs, and seem to have had a great deal of trouble getting out of high school. Their parents abused them, so the protagonists do what comes naturally to them, which is to look for boyfriends, girlfriends, bosses and probably dentists who can continue to abuse them in one fashion or another. They suffer from all of the millennial and post- millennial afflictions of the day -- strung out on drugs, sex, booze and pointless relationships that make their parents loveless, sterile unions look like Ozzie and Harriet. Against all reason, they decide not to commit suicide, but choose instead to live out their lives the best they can, which on balance is probably a good thing. This situation, however, presents author Victoria Patterson with a formidable challenge. How do you portray the inner lives, thoughts, and feelings of people whose self-awareness and articulateness is almost certainly at the polar end of the spectrum from your own? It's a question that Raymond Carver struggled with throughout his career, with mixed results. Carver's stripped-down, short sentence, almost monosyllabic prose style had a beauty and efficiency that was almost poetic, and it did seem to capture the courageous, if grim, fatalism of his mostly lower middle class protagonists. On the other hand, Carver's distinctive style looks increasingly like a literary dead-end, too mannered and too limited to really get inside the heads of people like himself and most of his readers, who approach things at a higher level of abstraction and understanding. To her credit, Patterson has chosen not to adopt Carver's style, even though it would almost certainly have lent itself to the treatment of her largely down-on-their-luck characters. Instead, she has reduxed John Updike, who faced a similar but far less extreme problem with Rabbit, who shared the author's lustful energies and voracious appetites, but not his social class. Despite the lack of a Harvard education and a lifetime man of letters status at New Yorker Magazine, Updike's ex-star basketball player turned out to have an articulateness of his own. It was physical rather than cerebral, expressed through the instincts and actions of an athlete, misguided at times but never graceless, and unfailingly genuine and convincing. Patterson's Rabbit is a girl named Rosie, who seems to see a lot of what the author would like us to see, but who lacks the fluency and self-awareness to say it herself. Still, at times she manages to get through in her own way. She allows a seemingly brain-damaged sidewalk-surfer named John Wayne to live surreptitiously in her grandparents guest apartment, and allows a desperate old man to break into the safe of the restaurant where she works. Even though they are accomplished at the expense of others, Rosie's random acts of kindness do offer a

Great Book!

I grew up in South Orange County and have been doing hair in the area for 10 years this book was a very real account of growing up "in the O.C." The characters were so interesting that I found myself getting sucked in and comparing their lives to the lives of my clients and friends I grew up with. This is a must read!