Patrick Somerville
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For his debut collection of short stories, Trouble, published by Vintage last month as a paperback original, Somerville drew on the knocks and scrapes of his Green Bay upbringing to spin a set of dark, wry stories about guys getting into all kinds of mishaps. Disasters of every degree dog his cast of hapless and frustrated teenagers and men. They crash their bikes and ski into trees, get stuck in chimneys, have inappropriate affairs, and learn how to kill a man with one magical touch. There’s a foreboding feel to even the most mundane setting–the looming threat that your life may not actually be remotely in your control.
Somerville, 27, wrote most of the book while getting his MFA at Cornell; in 2003 his “Trouble and the Shadowy Deathblow” appeared in the literary journal One Story, attracting the attention of an agent who sold the collection to Vintage. He didn’t set out to write a whole pack of coming-of-age tales, but in effect that’s what Trouble is, even though some of his protagonists are well out of their teens. “I think I just developed this thing to do while writing a short story that involved pivot points, often moments of violence,” he says. “It works against the problem a lot of the characters have, which is an overestimation of rationality as a means to make a life, or make your life better, or be happy. . . . But then something unplanned comes along and totally throws them off. And most of the characters have no ability to adapt afterward.”
