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THE LITTLE BROTHER

Victoria Patterson

This riveting novel, reminiscent of Louise Erdrich’s The Round House and Herman Koch’s The Dinner, shows how cruel the awfulness of human behavior can be, and how sometimes even the right decisions feel wrong, no matter how hard you convince yourself otherwise.

Life is pretty sweet for Even Hyde. Despite his parents’ divorce in 2001, he’s doing just fine, having chosen to live with his richly successful father in Newport Beach, California. When not spending “bonding” time with his partially absent father, he has his run of the house, where he comes and goes as he pleases. Even’s older brother Gabe continues to live in Cucamonga with their emotionally unstable mother. Though he feels discarded and left behind, Gabe visits Even and their father on the weekends. Even doesn’t seem too worried about Gabe’s quick?to?ignite temper or his evolving addictions to skipping school and smoking weed. But Gabe commits a crime so unbelievably heinous that Even can’t forgive his flesh and blood for it. In his personal recounting for Little Brother, Even shares the events immediately following his brother and two of his friends savagely gang raping (while videotaping) an uncon? scious girl. When Gabe somehow ends up losing the video tape (which ends up in Even’s hand), it is up to Even to make the life?changing decision: Does he do the right thing and turn his own brother in to the police or does family come first? Victoria Patterson is the author of two novels: The Peerless Four and This Vacant Paradise, which was a 2011 New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her story collection, Drift, was a finalist for the California Book Award, the 2009 Story Prize, and was selected as one of the best books of 2009 by The San Francisco Chronicle. Her work has appeared in various publications and journals, including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Southern Review. She lives with her family in Southern California, and teaches at Antioch University’s Master of Fine Arts program.

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Book Published 2015-08-11 by Counterpoint

Comments

Those who gobble up social issues novels will enjoy.

The Little Brother takes on a real-life situation from the headlines, but Victoria Patterson etches it into fiction - the sad and scary kaleidoscope of family, loyalty and betrayal.

Feature on Victoria Patterson: Why does Victoria Patterson, a daughter of Newport Beach, keep writing such nasty things about the place? ... Read more...

In The Little Brother, Victoria Patterson focuses her unflinching eye on the dark heart of American male privilege. With empathy and dazzling skill, she illuminates an unspeakable crime and the depraved culture that made its reality not only possible, but inevitable. This is an important novel, both terrifying and redemptive, and another reminder that Victoria Patterson is one of our most fearless writers.

Victoria Patterson is a capable and canny writer, and she would have to be to take on the subject of her newest novel, “The Little Brother,” and produce so arresting and haunting an experience. To say the book is about a rape is true, but that’s only part of it — in many ways, the least interesting part. The real subject is the conditions that allow that rape to happen... Read more...

As with many a real-life disaster story, The Little Brother begins with just the slightest tug of something not-quite-right and in practically no time we find ourselves in a dangerous, stomach-churning conflict between decency, loyalty, truth, lies, the good life, and the not-so-good one. Patterson has chosen to tell her unsettling tale through Even, the brother of a man accused of rape, and the ordeal for his own flawed family and his brother’s victim turns out to be unfailingly horrifying, heartbreaking and, of all things, unexpectedly humane.

Patterson’s (The Peerless Four, 2013) well-crafted novel explores a dilemma as old as time: Where is the moral ground when family loyalty and the law become opposing forces?...Patterson turns a gimlet eye on this age-old predicament and imbues it with gripping twenty-first century relevance.