I read Patchett’s book immediately after David Szalay’s All that Man is. Szalay’s short stories, while superbly written, are a bitter catalogue of male selfishness and insensitivity.
With Have this heart by Lawrence Patchett, we find a generous, optimistic author who believes in people’s goodness, both men and women. The characters in his stories are sometimes rough, sometimes uneducated, and we witness the way they cope with the stresses caused by ordinary difficulties – by a person who is late, by a person who is ill, by a person who is unexpectedly dead, by a fire destroying a house next door.
The writing is fluid and fresh: “the mist lay on everything, damp as fish”, the exposed embers of a fire are “sparkling orange and white in the shock of the air.”
Patchett understands people well and his description of their intimate world is always deft. An excellent and interesting New Zealand collection!
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