Patricide is D. Foy’s second novel, released back in 2016. Following the life of Pat Rice, a broken child who becomes a broken man, Foy creates a rich and complex voice, using Rice as a vehicle through which he explores some pretty weighty themes.
The story is told in semi-linear fashion, playing out as if remembered from a (not-so-safe) distance, and it becomes clear that the narrator is not just damaged by past trauma but haunted by the violence of the experiences. As such, Patricide mixes the desperate small scale deprivation of Denis Johnson (albeit with Johnson’s restraint thrown into reverse) with Knausgaard’s meticulous introspection. Outside of this self-reflection, there’s something far larger brewing at the edges, philosophical and poetic nods to concepts of not just life and family but society and power, grasping for grand meaning within the personal fragments like Melville and McCarthy.
The blurb describes the novel as a “heavy metal Huck Finn,” and it’s in the novel’s first half that this becomes apparent. Pat is isolated and sad and seething with anger, wired with a need to take control of something, anything. This leads to bursts of brutal violence, and soon the frustratingly inevitable pact with the very same demons that landed his parents in their own mess. His preoccupation with the past, wherein lies the root of his dysfunction, is intensely powerful, scenes and images from childhood concatenating into one long and painful filmstrip, a dusty reel of loneliness and violence and humiliation. And this fact never really changes throughout the story. Even as an adult Pat is nursing wounds from his past, swimming in a soup of introspective anger and shame.
As the title suggests, Pat’s preoccupation centres on his father. This in itself feels like something of a sidestep for this genre, the fact that it is his mother who does most of the physical tormenting (a result of her own violent childhood) reversing the stereotypical gender roles in such a situation. Here, it is the father’s sins that lay in inaction, a shirking of perhaps the fundamental tenet of parenthood—the protection of one’s offspring. And, worse, he abuses that power to project his own inadequacies onto his son, something that is made plainly clear in opposing scenes where he is first humiliated by another man at the dump and then strikes Pat in anger, channelling all of the hurt of the world onto the one person he’s supposed to protect.
My father is a man of such limitless contradictions that it doesn’t seem possible he walks this earth. And how is it possible I’ve survived this long, having been raised in this world by such a man as my father.
Perhaps the most painful emotion on show in the whole novel is Pat’s confusion about why his father doesn’t look after him better, of his inability to be the much-needed shield against the mother. Even as a child, Pat seems aware of his predicament, nailed to the cross of his circumstances and eternally asking the question: “Father, why have you forsaken me?”
If all that sounds exhausting then that’s because it sometimes is. Just like Pat’s mind/life, the novel races with a kind of internal chaos born of confusion and pain. But there is a glimmer of light. Patricide is often funny, for one thing, especially when Pat is younger. The passage on Dylan Thomas, where he describes the disappointment of discovering the face of the man who writes all those beautiful poems is hilarious (“I loved his poetry, and still do, yet not as much as before I saw his face… the face of a clown without its makeup… the slippery jowls, the ropey lips, the bulbous head overrun with knotty unkempt hair, the penetrating eyes of a man, drunken or no, could be a moron or a genius”). Foy does not write flat characters, but characters being flattened by their anger and pain. A distinction that makes the whole thing more alive, yet all the more galling.
This control of innocence and beauty, even within environments of crushing despair, is what marks Foy’s writing. Indeed, much of his prose a joy, regardless of how depressing the scenes it details. For example, there aren’t many authors who can describe a dump quite so evocatively, or who can capture the dread ingrained in a city:
The sky, monotonous and brown, heavy on the boulevards endlessly trudged by assembly-line serfs and delivery men and mechanics and butchers and dolts, by bagboys and clerks, by sick little children and sick old men, and by the endless plenty of sad-eyed tailors and black-eyed bums, and by the polyester salesmen, dishwashers, cooks, single-mother waitresses, and whisky-slurping keeps, security guards, bank tellers, cholos and cops, and helicopter men, and sheet metal men, and plexiglass cutters and ironwork men and aluminum men and the sons of cops in gangs, the endless vile dust of the walkless ways, the peeling tenements, the tumbledown shacks, the yards of toys all shattered and dogs on chains and car parts and junkies and trash.
And, despite how it sounds, there is some deeper hope too. Pat clearly loves his father, a fact that’s painfully confirmed by his obsession over his failings. Even during the moments when his anger and confusion spills over into vitriol, it’s because he wishes things were different. The dream that his father could be the person that both of them want him to be. The fantasy that he wasn’t born into the double bond that has gripped the family for generations.
The paradox of pain and love is what resides at the heart of Patricide. D. Foy doesn’t simply blur the lines between good and bad, he continually flips them, reminding us that cruelty breeds cruelty, or as he puts it, “brutal men are almost always brutalized boys.” Even in the most dedicated allegorical readings of the novel, it’s worth remembering that all fathers are also sons, that it’s possible to view many tormentors as fellow sufferers.
Patricide is out now on Stalking Horse Press. Ask about it in your local bookshop. D. Foy also put out a new novel, Absolutely Golden, in 2017.