Patrick Cottrell’s first novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (2017), had a Korean/American returning to her Milwaukee adoptive parents’ home following news of a tragic family event. Afternoon Hours of a Hermit, the author’s second novel, begins: ‘Five years ago I put on my detective hat and my existential black turtleneck in order to solve the mystery of his suicide. I mean the reasons my youngest brother killed himself.’
Readers of the first novel will be aware that the suicide was apparently explained at the time. But now, just before the fifth anniversary of the death, comes an anonymous letter – a puzzling photograph of the dead brother which plunges the surviving sibling back into investigative mode. In the intervening years much has changed. Both author and narrator have transitioned: Dan Moran refers to his former female identity with what he calls his deadname. Which appears as ____ on the page.
As the anniversary weekend unwinds, Dan is busy asking awkward questions, sleuthing around like a spectacularly ill-equipped private eye and managing to miss the family gatherings organised by the kindly white couple who adopted the Korean toddlers. His unexplained presence arouses wider family resentment: they feel he used the tragedy as material for a book that got published – called, as you may have guessed, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace.
There’s more than a hint of Nabokov’s Pale Fire here: the obsessive investigation, the ambiguous narrator’s position in the story. The answer – the figure in the carpet – could be hiding in plain sight. We should consider what triggered Dan’s wish to transition, and what part Matthias, the confident ‘normal’ middle brother, played in their past lives.
Throughout, Dan repeatedly references the distinguished Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard as his mentor, who inspires him, reads his work and frequently provides creative advice. This is tricky, bearing in mind the novel is set in 2018 – nearly 30 years after Bernhard’s death. Readers who admire the Austrian’s looping, self-referential humour and suicidal landscape will welcome this book with knowing pleasure. Those inclined to saddle up and head for the hills at the sound of his name might find it a little more challenging to navigate. It is very Bernhardian; but stick with it and you’ll find dark, absurdist humour enlivens every page, alongside a sense of estrangement, alienation and lost identity. The true force of the novel is the scalpel it takes to the situation of the outsider: the one who looks – and feels – different.
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