Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

PATRICIDE

D. Foy

D. Foy’s second novel is a tornado of brutal Americana. Patricide is a heavy metal Huck Finn that whips up the haunted melancholy of Kerouac’s Doctor Sax, a novel of introspection and youth in its corruption that seethes with the deadly obsession of Moby-Dick, and the darkness of Joy Williams’ State of Grace.

On the face, PATRICIDE follows a man who nearly kills himself with booze and drugs and crazy living and falling in love with one wrong woman after the other. On a profoundly deeper level, however, PATRICIDE is the story of a life-- of a man's struggle to see just how deeply his father's cowardice and failure have shaped it, and how he's survived despite his family's addictions, secrets, violence, and lies. As boundaries between reality and imagination, and custom and taboo, are destroyed, memory is turned to fact, and fact to unforgettable fiction. In PATRICIDE, across multiple voices and perspectives, the unspeakable is spoken, the unnamable named. Beyond the story of a boy growing up in a family derailed by a hapless father, Patricide is a search for meaning and identity within the strange secrecy of the family. Outside the paternal reach of Reagan, Freud, and a thousand others, Foy plots a history of boys in the shadow of The Father’s broken wing. This is an existential novel of wild power, of memories, and mourning-in-life, softened, always, by the tenderness at its core. Shifting easily between voices, between argot and classicism, between innocence and experience, Foy’s place among the outstanding voices in American literature is guaranteed with this novel. D. Foy’s Made to Break was named one of the “15 Most Anticipated Novels of 2014” by Flavorwire and has received rave reviews in literary circles, including the Los Angeles Times. His stories have been published in Bomb, Frequencies: Volume 3, Post Road, The Literary Review, and The Georgia Review. His story, “Barnacles of the Fuzz,” appeared in Forty New Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, edited by Cal Morgan. Please visit www.dfoyble.com

Available products
Book Published 2016-10-01 by Stalking House Press

Comments

Those of us who’ve been following D. Foy’s writing for a while will be gratified to find, inPatricide, another marvel of emotional intelligence, another heady cocktail of high linguistic invention and vernacular speech. Foy’s writing contains such energy, such sheer firepower, it’s tempting to cast him as a word merchant in the Stanley Elkin vein, a superlative technician working in the dark American shadow of Melville, etc. Only—such a description would omit Foy’s greatest virtue, namely, his wisdom. It’s one thing to describe the bleaker corners of experience with such full-throated vitality, and yet quite another to do so with as much empathy and equipoise. I already knew Foy was a genius. Now I’m beginning to think he’s a saint.

In D. Foy’s Patricide, the prose is so sharp and evocative that I feel as if I’m watching camcordered home movies that I both treasure and fear. It is as if Denis Johnson wrote Jesus’ Son with an anvil. There is blood and violence and there is heartbreak and heat and there is life and death on these pages. This book is a conjuring even as it is a killing.

If Patricide is a book in which love and survival are at constant odds, D. Foy is the only one who can broker a truce. Baleful and beautiful, Foy’s words braid a destructive tapestry that gets at the heart of what it means to grow up in a world that won’t have you. It’s also a story of resilience and resistance on a razor’s edge. Once you start reading, you won’t be able to stop, no matter how much it hurts.

...this is an entirely unique piece of work, devastating and beautiful in equal measure. This is largely due to Foy’s prose, which is breathtaking in its dexterity: pitiless and punitive one moment, lavish and luxuriant the next; and yet, always—unfailingly—charged with the indomitable spirit of its creator. But it’s not all about the prose.Patricidealso successfully tackles some very big issues... Read more...

Interview with D.Foy in two parts: 1: http://www.theweeklings.com/kbaumeister/2016/08/16/an-interview-with-d-foy-part-1/ 2: http://www.theweeklings.com/kbaumeister/2016/08/18/an-interview-with-d-foy-part-2/ Read more...

Biting as Beckett and honey-hued as a Tom Waits ramshackle ballad, D. Foy’s Patricide is a spiraling and spiteful spire of memory’s two great gods, nostalgia and blame. With it, Foy has delivered a true work of art—addictive, hypnotic, relentless.

The literary superstorm that is Patricide reads as though it had been brewing for decades before D. Foy, in a torrent of inspiration, was forced to blow. As Karl Ove Knausgaard explodes life’s quotidian moments with cool, clockwork precision, Foy expands phenomena ecstatic and traumatic to degrees that not only evoke lived experience but transport the reader to their very essence. When finally the novel achieves its full cyclonic shape, you’re caught in its horrid eye, confronted with the kind of diamond-cut awareness typically offered only to the broken, the abused, the fully-surrendered. The screaming inner child—help me, save me, love me—is torn to bits, giving rise to a quietude that demands nothing less than acceptance of things as they are. Foy’s been there, and lives there still, and this book offers up his battered jewel.