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Patricide
D. Foy's second novel is a tornado of brutal Americana. Patricide is a heavy metal Huck Finn that whips up the haunted melancholy of Kerouac's Doctor Sax , a novel of introspection and youth in its corruption that seethes with the deadly obsession of Moby-Dick , and the darkness of Joy Williams' State of Grace . Beyond the story of a boy growing up in a family derailed by a hapless father, Patricide is a search for meaning and identity within the strange secrecy of the family. This is an existential novel of wild power, of memories, and of mourning-in-life, softened, always, by the tenderness at its core. With it, Foy's place among the outstanding voices in American literature is guaranteed.
Matthew Specktor says, "I already knew Foy was a genius. Now I'm beginning to think he's a saint."
Scott Cheshire calls Patricide "a true work of art--addictive, hypnotic, relentless."
Dennis Cooper calls this bold, exhilarating novel simply "fantastic."
Matthew Specktor says, "I already knew Foy was a genius. Now I'm beginning to think he's a saint."
Scott Cheshire calls Patricide "a true work of art--addictive, hypnotic, relentless."
Dennis Cooper calls this bold, exhilarating novel simply "fantastic."
- GenresFiction
400 pages, Paperback
First published October 3, 2016
5 people are currently reading
224 people want to read
About the author
D. Foy
6 books44 followersD. Foy is the author of the novels Made to Break, Patricide, and Absolutely Golden. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, Salon, Hazlitt, Post Road, Electric Literature, BOMB, The Literary Review, and the Georgia Review, among many others, and have been included in the books Laundromat, A Moment’s Notice, and Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial. Visit him at dfoyble.com.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
August 25, 2016
One of the most emotionally exhausting books I've read in a very long while.
March 17, 2017
I reviewed this amazing novel for The Nervous Breakdown. Below is an excerpt:
While this is very much the story of one man’s colossal, cyclonic attempt to remake himself from the shards of an annihilating boyhood, I think that it is much more than that. It seems to me that the true subject of this narrative, is the collision of dreams. The lengths to which parents and children break and remake each other and themselves on this contested terrain, this no man’s land of lovesick, homesick, heartsick dreams.
Is Patricide unforgiving? Is it judgmental of the father? Of the mother? Or crucially of the son: Himself? Not ever. Patricide refuses forgiveness because there is nothing to forgive. It refuses judgement in the best documentary tradition that contends that any moral high ground is a travesty. Yet if good and bad are maybe for the birds, right and wrong are real, and Patricide seems to be grasping—gasping— at the possibility that what is right, cannot be wrong, whatever that is. And ‘right’ is Something, perhaps even the Nothing, that renovates the wor(l)d.
Is this a bleak novel? Hardly. It is glorious. Not only because of its lyricisms that are a cauldron of Ginsberg, Whitman, Bukowski, Dickinson, Duras and Beckett and… but also because of its Penrose Stair-like structure that is Escher-like in its possible impossibility— a metaphor for the father itself.
Patricide is a glorious refusal of the impossible son to be refused, and to refuse the impossible father who, “made to break,” refuses to refuse the son – and of that unspoken, unspeakable exchange.
To read the rest of the review, go here: http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/tn...
While this is very much the story of one man’s colossal, cyclonic attempt to remake himself from the shards of an annihilating boyhood, I think that it is much more than that. It seems to me that the true subject of this narrative, is the collision of dreams. The lengths to which parents and children break and remake each other and themselves on this contested terrain, this no man’s land of lovesick, homesick, heartsick dreams.
Is Patricide unforgiving? Is it judgmental of the father? Of the mother? Or crucially of the son: Himself? Not ever. Patricide refuses forgiveness because there is nothing to forgive. It refuses judgement in the best documentary tradition that contends that any moral high ground is a travesty. Yet if good and bad are maybe for the birds, right and wrong are real, and Patricide seems to be grasping—gasping— at the possibility that what is right, cannot be wrong, whatever that is. And ‘right’ is Something, perhaps even the Nothing, that renovates the wor(l)d.
Is this a bleak novel? Hardly. It is glorious. Not only because of its lyricisms that are a cauldron of Ginsberg, Whitman, Bukowski, Dickinson, Duras and Beckett and… but also because of its Penrose Stair-like structure that is Escher-like in its possible impossibility— a metaphor for the father itself.
“My father is a man of such limitless contradictions that it doesn’t seem possible he walks this earth. And how is it possible I’ve survived this long, having been raised in this world by such a man as my father… And how can I live each day in the midst of such terrible ambivalence, how can I hold at once such awesome love and despicable burning hatred?”
Patricide is a glorious refusal of the impossible son to be refused, and to refuse the impossible father who, “made to break,” refuses to refuse the son – and of that unspoken, unspeakable exchange.
To read the rest of the review, go here: http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/tn...
July 19, 2017
I should not be drinking white wine and writing a review of D. Foy’s Patricide. I should be drinking bourbon. Or smoking a cigarette. Or scribbling words in a dark alleyway. I am doing none of those things, but that’s the mindset to where Patricide has transported me. But not just for the gritty idea that bourbon in a dark alley broadcasts, but for the raw truth of family. How they hurt and they try to love and how we do the same to them. Patricide is the story of how we carve ourselves from the muddy hills, the rusty bicycles, the fetid promises and the decaying drama of family. With exceptional prose, D. Foy tells the story of a damaged child of a damaged a father. Patricide explores what it means to be a man in this tainted society and to be an American in this country where optimism persists, even when promises mean nothing. Brutal and truthful, D. Foy is an author not to be overlooked.
November 26, 2016
I am a very fast reader (and often a faster "forgetter.") But I had to put this book down several times before finishing it - though I knew I would finish it. I heard D. Foy read from Patricide at a local bookstore and knew I would buy his book. It is intense! But beautifully written, thoughtful and full of feeling. Having worked with kids who had unhappy lives and troubled families for many years, much of this story was familiar (though luckily not from my own life.) Not the settings, in small towns and rural areas - but the intensity of the protagonists struggles with his family - and theirs with him - is the stuff of both many lives and literature. I often felt I was there with him, the experience was that close and immediate. Glad I read it and highly recommended.
June 23, 2017
One thing that stuck with me around the time of the release of Patricide was the author, D. Foy, claiming that the book “almost killed him.”...
Read the rest here: http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2016/12/0...
Read the rest here: http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2016/12/0...
February 27, 2017
How do we become healthy? How does that even fucking work?
More - http://www.changeyourlifethiswill.com...
More - http://www.changeyourlifethiswill.com...
July 3, 2017
Searing, brutal, and deeply poetic.
May 28, 2019
really mirrors the infuriating arch of adolescence!!!! some slow catharsis the final third of this book gave
January 24, 2017
We are many things throughout our lives; brothers, sisters, husbands, wives. Daughters. Sons. Mothers. Fathers.
Which roles define us most profoundly? Which lay the groundwork for our most complex psychological woes, our moments of greatest joy? How does the relationship of the mother alter, inform, desecrate the relationship of the father? There are no easy answers to these questions. Freud, Oedipus, the bible; just a few of the literary resources we can seek answers within. Patricide seems to float somewhere in the midst of these. At times it is a kaleidoscope encompassing all of them, at others it feels like something entirely its own. D. Foy frequently seems to go deeper, probe a greater fascination.
And yet, the exploration of this novel is done so only barely through introspection, through philosophy. There's a gritty story here- a human story. What Foy's done here is really impressive in that sense. The story of the son, the father: it transcends these characters, making us occupy their lives with our own, while also never ceasing to tell a story, to provide an emotional and engaging plot line.
This book is filled with violence and horror, but as the blurbs provided on the back cover suggest, the tenderness here is what holds everything together. Patricide is bold and psychedelic.
One of the Ten Commandments was on my mind as I read this novel, oddly enough:
"Thou shalt honor thy mother and thy father."
It seems to run parallel to the memorable phrase in the second half of the novel, "you must never strike your father."
Must we never strike patriarchy, domineering forces, religion? Must we honor each father in our world, regardless of its evils?
Which roles define us most profoundly? Which lay the groundwork for our most complex psychological woes, our moments of greatest joy? How does the relationship of the mother alter, inform, desecrate the relationship of the father? There are no easy answers to these questions. Freud, Oedipus, the bible; just a few of the literary resources we can seek answers within. Patricide seems to float somewhere in the midst of these. At times it is a kaleidoscope encompassing all of them, at others it feels like something entirely its own. D. Foy frequently seems to go deeper, probe a greater fascination.
And yet, the exploration of this novel is done so only barely through introspection, through philosophy. There's a gritty story here- a human story. What Foy's done here is really impressive in that sense. The story of the son, the father: it transcends these characters, making us occupy their lives with our own, while also never ceasing to tell a story, to provide an emotional and engaging plot line.
This book is filled with violence and horror, but as the blurbs provided on the back cover suggest, the tenderness here is what holds everything together. Patricide is bold and psychedelic.
One of the Ten Commandments was on my mind as I read this novel, oddly enough:
"Thou shalt honor thy mother and thy father."
It seems to run parallel to the memorable phrase in the second half of the novel, "you must never strike your father."
Must we never strike patriarchy, domineering forces, religion? Must we honor each father in our world, regardless of its evils?
April 19, 2017
Passage after passage in D. Foy's Patricide hit me like punches, like suckerpunches sometimes: a series of body blows, the cumulative effect of which is a mind blown, lost and spinning within the narrator's "whirlpool of memory." Very much enjoyed the repetitions; the incantatory cadences; the deftly constructed epigrams, e.g., "Denial’s the grace that shelters us till shelter is ourselves." And the narrator's thinking about thinking is always engaging:
And the more you think, you’ll think, the more you realize it’s not so much the engine that drives these vanished years that scares you, the reasons behind the things they hold, as why they return at all to appear in the distance of your memory, the way on desert plains a thunderhead will be where there’d been just spacious blue.
March 16, 2017
Patricide is a serious book. I read the first 150 pages of it in one sitting while on a long flight. Stepping off the plane, I couldn’t help but look at the families in the airport differently. What the hell is going on behind closed doors in their homes? I wondered. D. Foy takes his readers to some harrowing places in Patricide. Places you wish didn’t exist in the world, but since they do, as a reader you’re happy that you have a guide like Foy to help you navigate them. If you’re looking for a challenging, thought-provoking, unrelenting piece of fiction, pick up Patricide.
May 7, 2018
I found the story interesting overall. I didn't enjoy the contrived and verbose writing style as much.
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January 30, 2022“Either the father is The Father, or he’s just some other guy.”
February 8, 2026
My dad is in this book. The author is his childhood friend. He is the character Ken Hummel!
February 22, 2026
The author has a way with words (many nice turns of phrase), but this was a mostly dull and uninvolving read. Three stars is meant to be an “objective rating”.
January 3, 2017
Review forthcoming. So much to sit with.
July 6, 2017
The writing style was very interesting and original, but the theme wasn't that unique and lacked a conclusion.
April 3, 2017
Highly emotional novel exploring the crossroads of abuse, relationship and personal identity. Hard to get through in parts, worth it!
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews