Send Me Book

This tear-your-heart-out novel-in-stories-of-sorts uses pinpointed moments over decades (each a short story that is strong enough on its own) to show a splattered portrait of a family, focusing on how the accumulating years are derived from all those before, perfectly displaying how people find themselves in lives they can't believe.

In the title story it is 1996 and Frankie is in his thirties and seeking information from a Preacher famed in art circles for his crudely rendered and completely sincere depictions of the messages he claims to have received from The Visitors who will come to our planet and make things right. The pictures have lots of spaceships, and men and women in various stages of courting, coupling, and coitus -- the Preacher has recently lost his cheating wife. The Preacher doesn't trust Frankie at first, but opens up to his quiet belief, and eventual sharing of his own messages received from the Visitors.

So the collection starts with a lot of questions, posed within a story that shows the oddness of life, the unique ways people deal with tragedy, hinting that Frankie is dealing with something huge. At the end of the story, he is going to see his mother Teresa, because "They were coming. And whether it was going to be beautiful or tragic, tomorrow or ten years from now, home was where he wanted to be when they arrived."

Then, in "Getting Heavy with Fate", in 1965, we meet Teresa, in her early twenties, a recently abandoned mother of two toddlers (Matt and Karen), broke to the point of electricity being turned off, who finds herself succumbing to the advances of a man in her office that she barely knows yet innately understands, knowing all the while that he is not a sure thing. And she sometimes thinks she is the re-incarnation of an eighteenth century model who posed for Watteau: she is the spitting image of this model, and likes to imagine herself in her shoes.

In "So Much for Artemis" in 1976, young Frankie is forbidden from playtime with the neighbor's dying daughter by his father, Roy, Teresa's second husband (not the man from the previous story).

In the ensuing nine stories, Patrick Ryan shows the humanity of each individual -- who you might hate in one story (seeing how they treat another family member) and then love in the next (seeing how they are doing all they can with what they know), each story revealing more of it's characters, showing the complex portrait of a family over the decades through meticulously crafted structure, with prose constantly playful and exploratory in its forms.

I'm afraid I'm not a good enough reviewer yet to fully encapsulate the beauty on these pages. These stories have a startling grasp that emanates from the truths revealed through their characters that connect to the common mystery and struggle we all endure in trying to figure out this life.