Where has Patrick Roscoe been? His new short story collection The Laboratory of Love (Arsenal Pulp Press) is his first book in twelve years. Roscoe released six books between 1987 and 2001, garnering positive notices from many major Canadian review organs. According to the “In Progress” section of Roscoe’s website, in the interim he has completed three thus-far-unpublished manuscripts, one the final part of a trilogy begun with two previously published novels. Considering the existence of these manuscripts, The Laboratory of Love is a decidedly odd choice for a comeback. The new book is essentially a reworking of Roscoe’s The Truth About Love, another short story collection published in 2001 by the now-defunct Key Porter. Laboratory republishes fifteen of Truth’s eighteen stories, and shares most of Truth’s section titles and epigraphs.
Laboratory bills itself as an “attempt to decipher the forces of love, loss, and longing,” and all of the stories feature familial and romantic relationships at their core. However, Roscoe chooses as his subjects only the most damaged individuals: every parent, real or surrogate, is absent or abusive, every partner a narcissist or sadist. Though Roscoe’s point of view is bleak, the collection contains some potent stories. By far the best, “The History of a Hopeful Heart” immediately plunges the reader into the harrowing life of a young child:
One night, when I am six, I fall asleep in my bed but wake up somewhere else. I’m naked and hungry and cold. The room is bare and dark, with walls and floor of rough cement. There are no windows. The steel door is locked. If there’s a light socket in the ceiling, the bulb is missing or burned out. As surely as my heart will beat again and then again, I know my parents will not open the door, will not bring me clothes and food and blankets, will not arrive with comfort.
The story continues, with a keen and unsparing eye, to detail the horrific life this child endures.
Laboratory’s stories float in variously undefined worlds, slightly fantastic but still mostly grounded in realism. The accomplishment of “Heart” lies in how Roscoe gradually reveals the way the fantasy world of the story connects to the child narrator’s reality, and consequently the story’s central metaphor.
Unfortunately, few of Laboratory’s other stories are able to equal the economical power of “Heart”. Unlike the majority of the collection, “Heart” proceeds in strictly chronological fashion, and moves with a surety and directness that is otherwise mostly lacking. Laboratory’s stories are kitchen-sink kaleidoscopes, leaping freely through chronology and employing a haphazard variety of metaphors and images—most feel overstuffed.
Roscoe’s maximalist tendencies extend to his prose, as well. Roscoe is undoubtedly a talented stylist, but all too often Laboratory veers into the purple: “A quarter-moon is visible, its sickle scythes my mind, carves a forbidden shape upon my memory.”
The stories in Laboratory share one or more of four settings: California, Spain, Africa, and the small BC town of Braille. The collection’s second part is dedicated to stories focused on a young boy, removed from his stripper mother’s care and placed with his grandmother; the third part follows a transplanted family living in Africa. Going by Roscoe’s biography, it seems obvious that he is mining his own life experiences for his fiction: born in Spain, childhood in Africa, educated in Canada. In fact, perusing the synopses of Roscoe’s previous books, it seems that all of his fiction is similarly set, and Roscoe has been, for the entirety of his career, apparently building a huge interconnecting mythology.
Links between stories such as shared characters and locations appear in Laboratory almost immediately. However, these proliferating connections quickly begin to feel arbitrary. Such explicit links imply a promise that the book’s threads will eventually weave into a coherent whole, but Laboratory frustratingly becomes an impenetrably knotted tangle.
Laboratory’s links even serve to actively harm some of its stories. Much of the power of “The History of a Hopeful Heart,” mentioned before, is derived from the reader’s uncertainty of what is actually “real” and what is metaphor, or an invention of the narrator’s mind. So, when the story “Touching Darkness” concretizes certain aspects of “Heart,” it narrows the story’s interpretive possibilities, retroactively blunting its impact. “Darkness” would certainly have been unaffected if left as a thematic echo of “Heart,” as opposed to a direct sequel. Throughout Laboratory, Roscoe consistently chooses the needs of his mythology over the needs of the story.
Considered individually, many of Laboratory’s stories are quite accomplished. “Pulsera,” which not coincidentally seems to exist outside of Roscoe’s myth machine, is a tender sketch of the relationship between two Spanish children:
When I turned thirteen, I joined the club that rowed on the river running through the city… neon from riverbank cafés could cast impossibly gaudy swathes across the black water below. When I mentioned spotting one of her blue pulseras on a boy in San Eloy, Esperanza’s thin face would ripple like those reflections that insisted on glistening out of reach no matter how quickly I rowed toward them.
Most of the collection’s stories contain at least one passage of lovely writing or one striking image. Unfortunately the book, like many individual stories, contains too many disparate elements to knit together, and consequently exists in a no-man’s land, attempting far more than a mere short story collection, but falling short of even a fragmented novel’s cohesion. The Laboratory of Love is simply less than the sum of its parts.
Patrick Roscoe is undeniably a talented, ambitious writer, but after twenty-five years of forcing every piece of writing to fit into his fictional world’s increasingly cumbersome mythology, it seems apparent that what Roscoe would benefit from now, more than anything, is a clean slate.
Arsenal Pulp | 320 pages | $18.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1551525211
‘The Laboratory of Love,’ by Patrick Roscoe
Book Reviews
Where has Patrick Roscoe been? His new short story collection The Laboratory of Love (Arsenal Pulp Press) is his first book in twelve years. Roscoe released six books between 1987 and 2001, garnering positive notices from many major Canadian review organs. According to the “In Progress” section of Roscoe’s website, in the interim he has completed three thus-far-unpublished manuscripts, one the final part of a trilogy begun with two previously published novels. Considering the existence of these manuscripts, The Laboratory of Love is a decidedly odd choice for a comeback. The new book is essentially a reworking of Roscoe’s The Truth About Love, another short story collection published in 2001 by the now-defunct Key Porter. Laboratory republishes fifteen of Truth’s eighteen stories, and shares most of Truth’s section titles and epigraphs.
Laboratory bills itself as an “attempt to decipher the forces of love, loss, and longing,” and all of the stories feature familial and romantic relationships at their core. However, Roscoe chooses as his subjects only the most damaged individuals: every parent, real or surrogate, is absent or abusive, every partner a narcissist or sadist. Though Roscoe’s point of view is bleak, the collection contains some potent stories. By far the best, “The History of a Hopeful Heart” immediately plunges the reader into the harrowing life of a young child:
One night, when I am six, I fall asleep in my bed but wake up somewhere else. I’m naked and hungry and cold. The room is bare and dark, with walls and floor of rough cement. There are no windows. The steel door is locked. If there’s a light socket in the ceiling, the bulb is missing or burned out. As surely as my heart will beat again and then again, I know my parents will not open the door, will not bring me clothes and food and blankets, will not arrive with comfort.
The story continues, with a keen and unsparing eye, to detail the horrific life this child endures.
Laboratory’s stories float in variously undefined worlds, slightly fantastic but still mostly grounded in realism. The accomplishment of “Heart” lies in how Roscoe gradually reveals the way the fantasy world of the story connects to the child narrator’s reality, and consequently the story’s central metaphor.
Unfortunately, few of Laboratory’s other stories are able to equal the economical power of “Heart”. Unlike the majority of the collection, “Heart” proceeds in strictly chronological fashion, and moves with a surety and directness that is otherwise mostly lacking. Laboratory’s stories are kitchen-sink kaleidoscopes, leaping freely through chronology and employing a haphazard variety of metaphors and images—most feel overstuffed.
Roscoe’s maximalist tendencies extend to his prose, as well. Roscoe is undoubtedly a talented stylist, but all too often Laboratory veers into the purple: “A quarter-moon is visible, its sickle scythes my mind, carves a forbidden shape upon my memory.”
The stories in Laboratory share one or more of four settings: California, Spain, Africa, and the small BC town of Braille. The collection’s second part is dedicated to stories focused on a young boy, removed from his stripper mother’s care and placed with his grandmother; the third part follows a transplanted family living in Africa. Going by Roscoe’s biography, it seems obvious that he is mining his own life experiences for his fiction: born in Spain, childhood in Africa, educated in Canada. In fact, perusing the synopses of Roscoe’s previous books, it seems that all of his fiction is similarly set, and Roscoe has been, for the entirety of his career, apparently building a huge interconnecting mythology.
Links between stories such as shared characters and locations appear in Laboratory almost immediately. However, these proliferating connections quickly begin to feel arbitrary. Such explicit links imply a promise that the book’s threads will eventually weave into a coherent whole, but Laboratory frustratingly becomes an impenetrably knotted tangle.
Laboratory’s links even serve to actively harm some of its stories. Much of the power of “The History of a Hopeful Heart,” mentioned before, is derived from the reader’s uncertainty of what is actually “real” and what is metaphor, or an invention of the narrator’s mind. So, when the story “Touching Darkness” concretizes certain aspects of “Heart,” it narrows the story’s interpretive possibilities, retroactively blunting its impact. “Darkness” would certainly have been unaffected if left as a thematic echo of “Heart,” as opposed to a direct sequel. Throughout Laboratory, Roscoe consistently chooses the needs of his mythology over the needs of the story.
Considered individually, many of Laboratory’s stories are quite accomplished. “Pulsera,” which not coincidentally seems to exist outside of Roscoe’s myth machine, is a tender sketch of the relationship between two Spanish children:
When I turned thirteen, I joined the club that rowed on the river running through the city… neon from riverbank cafés could cast impossibly gaudy swathes across the black water below. When I mentioned spotting one of her blue pulseras on a boy in San Eloy, Esperanza’s thin face would ripple like those reflections that insisted on glistening out of reach no matter how quickly I rowed toward them.
Most of the collection’s stories contain at least one passage of lovely writing or one striking image. Unfortunately the book, like many individual stories, contains too many disparate elements to knit together, and consequently exists in a no-man’s land, attempting far more than a mere short story collection, but falling short of even a fragmented novel’s cohesion. The Laboratory of Love is simply less than the sum of its parts.
Patrick Roscoe is undeniably a talented, ambitious writer, but after twenty-five years of forcing every piece of writing to fit into his fictional world’s increasingly cumbersome mythology, it seems apparent that what Roscoe would benefit from now, more than anything, is a clean slate.
Arsenal Pulp | 320 pages | $18.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1551525211