Book review: “Patchwork” by Tom Comitta

General readers, beware! Tom Comitta’s new book Patchwork isn’t for you. Patchwork isn’t for someone who wants a novel that tells a story and has characters and settings and scenes. It has none of that stuff although, from another perspective, it has too much of it.

Comitta didn’t write any of the words in Patchwork, except for the chapter titles. Instead, they stitched sentences together sentences and other stuff from hundreds of novels to make what they calls “a story of love and loss, suspense and snuff boxes.” Their publisher, the Minneapolis-based Coffee House Press, calls it “a picaresque romp and a marvel of literary decoupage.” One of the blurbs on the cover compares it to a cubist painting.

I found it to be an overblown, overly clever mishmash.

 

A very complex undertaking

Patchwork was, for Comitta, a very complex undertaking in which they created a framework, comprised of recurring themes—they call them guiding patterns—from those hundreds of novels in which they had immersed themself and of elements of the hero’s journey from world myths as delineated by Joseph Campbell.

Each of Comitta’s 32 chapters has a guiding pattern, such as “First lines from novels” or “Descriptions of running and jogging,” and a phase of the hero’s journey, such as “Meeting the Mentor” and “Approaching the Innermost Cave.”

In the back of the book, Comitta provides a list of dozens of sources for each chapter. For instance, the list for the final chapter, “Being the end of this Novel,” has 38 titles from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens to A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, from The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling. Other writers on the list are Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, James Joyce and Philip K. Dick.

 

“The sea. The earth.”

There’s a cleverness to all of this and what must have been a lot of tediousness for Comitta in identifying and gathering all of those sentences from all of those other books by other writers.

The challenge that Comitta set was to weave all of these sentences to make a story, and here, from the final chapter, is an example of what resulted:

The sea. The earth. The house of the seven gables toward the shore. It was the end of the line. It was the beginning of my present prosperity. It was an adventure. The beginning of an adventure. That was how it felt. So that, in the end, there was no end. This was just the beginning. It was not midnight. It was not raining. Evening began to fall.

The audience that Comitta envisioned for Patchwork includes, I suspect, other writers who enjoy the idea of twisting and spinning and wrestling storytelling out of its usual shape. And includes people who have read many, many novels, covering many periods of English and American literature.

One apparent expectation is that the reader of any paragraph in the book, such as that one above, might want to go to the list of novels for the chapter, seeking to identify which sentence came from which book.  Was “It was an adventure” from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead? Was “The house of the seven gables toward the shore” from The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles? (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables isn’t on the list.)

This seems like thin entertainment to me, but maybe I haven’t read enough novels.

It also seems like a kind of layering of literature, and perhaps this results in a resonance for some readers, a story beneath the story, so to speak. But it didn’t resonate for me.

 

“No way, dude”

I think Comitta means for their groupings of sentences in themed chapters to be amusing for the reader. For example, the third chapter has this Guiding Pattern: “Nos and synonyms for ‘no’ from books deemed to be the most negative by literary blogs.”  And here are four short paragraphs from that chapter:

Nay, there’s no comprehending it.

Nay, you’ll be ashamed of me every day of your life.

Nay! It fair brusts [cq] my heart!

No way, dude.

Some might find this humorous, but it left me frustrated, looking for a character and a story.  Instead, it’s as if every one of those paragraphs is spoken by a different character—as, in fact, each apparently was—and all just to express, “No.”

It is as if some very energetic person traveled great distances to get bricks and stones and other pieces of a wide array of buildings and used them all in constructing the walls of a home. It would look odd and maybe a little interesting, but not a place where you’d want to spend time. Patchwork is like that.

Some, I suspect, will find pleasure in Comitta’s intricate, painstaking process.  Some will find pleasure in its non-creative creativeness. But I didn’t. And I can’t imagine the average fiction reader finding much pleasure in it either.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

7.15.25

This review was originally published at Third Coast Review on 8.14.25.