Book by Patricia Horvath Review by Allison Kornet

But Now Am Found by Patricia Horvath

Review by Allison Kornet

Publisher: Black Lawrence Press

Publication Date: February 24, 2023

ISBN: 162557035X

Page Count: 256

At the end of “But Now Am Found,” Patricia Horvath’s debut story collection out from Black Lawrence Press in February, I felt like Arthur Miller’s Linda Loman, ready to grip someone, anyone, and fierce-whisper, “Attention! Attention must be paid!” The collection’s seventeen stories feature powerless protagonists in powerful scenarios, often girls and women who are overlooked or quietly exploited, no thanks to a parade of problematic men. The male antagonists arrive in the home or loom in the periphery, varying in degree and kind: philanderers, predators, the merely absentee; irresponsible guys who miss trains or steal mothers, unfortunate dads who die too early, the dangerous and intriguing older brothers of friends.

We also meet a dutiful professor, cuckolded by his grieving wife; a boy with a doll, nearly forgotten at his mother’s wedding; an earnest beau who dares intimacy with a scoliotic girl, releasing her from a back brace only to lose her to fundamentalism. These people need our attention, too. In Horvath’s stories, anyone could be one street corner away from harm or redemption, and even the seemingly powerful characters aren’t really in control. I kept reading for the small surprises, the series of unanticipated pleasure bursts that the writer George Saunders has called a story’s real work.

Sometimes the pleasure Horvath produces is recognition, however painful. Those who know grief might hold their breath during the book’s first and last stories, “Wakey Nights” and “Sunrise,” about mothers suspended in liminal moments, staving off despair with the temporary peace of the mundane. In the first, a sleepless nurse does the crossword awaiting—intuiting—news that something terrible has happened to her daughter. In the last, a woman rises too early on Mother’s Day, the anniversary of her son’s fatal car crash; she turns on the light to recreate the moments before the call, as if this year it might not come. The collection often illustrates how grief hovers, imagining how far a survivor might go to avoid the harbors of her pain.

Among my favorites in the collection, “The Things That Claimed Her” follows a wife escaping the slow death of her mother by falling into an affair with a man whose arms she literally stumbles into after tripping on a crack in the sidewalk. “A late-life baby from a mid-life affair, she was the daughter of a woman who had always been old,” the narrator reports. Maybe her affair is an unconscious attempt at new closeness with her mother. Maybe it’s forgivable, even fated. The dramatic tension is electric because, like the wife, we know her husband is decent, the lover could turn out to be a creep, and discovery could wreck any good that outlives her parent. I won’t spoil what happens, but full credit to Horvath for the expansive and freeing idea that a human being who suffers can fall from one grace into another. Life, on balance, can be joyful.

The pleasure of tension and surprise also animates “Never Let Go,” another favorite, in which Roy, a tattooed bartender who keeps a diapered monkey for a pet, takes a fatherless girl to see the Rockettes. The outing is a Dad audition set up by the girl’s mother, his fiancée, and the stakes for him and the girl are high. Can Roy be trusted? He’s as oblivious as he is attentive, as frightening as he is kind. For the girl, the present and future are scary, and she combats the unknown by keeping a diary of Roy’s “Crimes” and “Good Points.” The monkey is a Good Point but also a point of concern. The mother wants it gone if they marry, and Roy tells the girl he’ll comply. What will happen to it? The girl’s question is a miniature of the one concerning herself.

The quiet dramatic tension sustaining “Hold On Fast” features a girl with yearslong access to her friend’s older brother as she tracks him from alluring bad-boy to born-again zealot. Will she catch up to him? Will he ever stop seeing her as a twerp? The story’s highlight is fleeting, arriving on the brother’s last day home before college when the girl exits and he enters a bathroom.        

You’re all right, he said. For a pain in the ass. He kissed my forehead, like a priest, then my mouth, like a boy. It was over before I could shut my eyes.

Move it, he said. I gotta pack.

Our devoted narrator gets one precious moment of recognition and affirmation before the brother is lost to bigger forces. The story could end there, but months later, sleeping over at her friend’s house during a holiday blizzard, she rises at night and sees the brother outside, bare, making angels in the cold: “I got some water and drank it by the living room window, a girl half-awake in borrowed pajamas, watching snow make the familiar world disappear.” And then the girl becomes wiser, wanting him to stop, wanting to bring him a coat: “We’re not angels, I wanted to say. The world filled up with snow, his arms and legs pushing it away.” How gorgeous to track the move from innocence to experience with this vantage point, one journeying soul witnessing the journey of another, just out of reach.

The turn of a fresh phrase, the starkness of a plain-put truth— these stories offer plenty of pleasure in the language itself. Padded, helmeted men pile on top of each other, spilling on too bright grass. A woman must have been pretty once, possessing “that aloofness of the favored.” A man in a chemo ward looks like a baby buzzard, “downy-skulled and beaky, his Adam’s apple a riot of agitation.” Horvath’s descriptions can briefly return us to the freshness of first experience.

There is also the pleasure of scripted mischief. In “Griswold,” two neglected sisters use the head of a mannequin to torment their mother’s live-in boyfriend.

The older sister hoisted Griswold’s head level with the window.

Go from here, she intoned. Go on your cursed way.

Your cursed way, the younger one repeated. Be gone forever.

I loved these hijinks, casting sisterhood as the antidote to powerlessness and resentment. In “All You Wish For,” the big sister may continually mess with the little sister as she consults a Ouija board for news of their father, but it means something when, board on her knees, the little sister asks, “If anyone’s here, please give me a sign.” The power goes out, and it’s the older sister at the fuse box, laughing. She’s there. She’s the sign. Like the “Griswold” sisters, they share a need and can save each other, almost.

Even during her most active scenes, Horvath’s narration folds inward. She doesn’t offer quotation marks, so sound blurs with sound and the characters’ voices blend with the voice telling the story. At first the effect is disorienting, creating a need to double back. Soon, though, it feels essential to the mood of the collection, in which perception is both sharp and blunted, tenderly regulated. Things happen, but the dialogue is muted, muffled, as if heard through a pillow, as if the words spoken, whether pleasant or repugnant, are already half buried. Such stylized quiet ultimately feels generous to the characters, providing a buffer between them and what befalls them.

Each story ends with a kind of charged stillness. Recognizing the expiry of romance during a Ferris wheel’s slow descent, a character in the title story finally “looked out towards the water and saw water.” Shuttling between parents on a train, another narrator finishes, “I sat there alone, looking, not being looked at, waiting.” And then there’s the abandoned wife, doling out birthday cake, unable to offer her daughter the longed-for other parent. “Who wants more?” she asks. “Anyone want more?” The question rings, answerable and not.

Attention must be paid, and Horvath understands this. “But Now Am Found” is a collection of extended attentions and considerations, lost characters recovered in the pages through the grace of the writer and her readers, keeping them company.

Patricia Horvath is the author of But Now Am Found, a short story collection,  along with the memoir All The Difference. She writes essays and stories that have been published in literary journals such as New Ohio Review, Confrontation, The Massachusetts Review, and Shenandoa. She won the Goldenberg Fiction Prize at Bellevue Literary Review, the Frank O’Connor Fiction Award, and received the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in fiction and literary nonfiction. She currently teaches at Framingham State University in Massachusetts. 

Allison Kornet has written for Psychology Today, SAIL Magazine, New Woman, and The Boston Herald. Her work has been nominated for an ASME award, anthologized in Women’s Health, and published in Herstory: What I Learned in My Bathtub…and More True Stories on Life, Love, and Other Inconveniences. A high school English teacher and freelance writer and editor, she is currently wrangling with the fourth draft of her first novel. She gets her best ideas while rowing a single or hiking with Harry, the family Bernese mountain dog.

14 June 2023