The Little Brother's Revenge: Victoria Patterson Brings It All Home
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Categories: OC Bookly
The writer Victoria Patterson's name should by now already be at the top of everybody's unlikely if welcome list of sincere and important and, yes, esteemed Orange County writers of literary fiction. It's actually a pretty strong list, and if you need further convincing, do check out this column's archives, recently celebrating poet Grant Hier and novelist Peggy Hesketh and more. Yet Patterson stands out this week, for all kinds of reasons. Her first two books, a debut literary short story collection (Drift) and a novel (This Vacant Paradise) helpfully advertised their social, existential and political themes (at least to those in the know) about the weird county in which we live, by way of breezy privilege and hollow excess. She was acclaimed as the Edith Wharton of the OC, which is surely just plain fun to say, but it was an accurate if perhaps purposely and purposefully self-constructed comparison, not the least because the writing and the analysis are so strong and brave and, importantly, nobody else encouraged that association, not from Orange County, CA anyway! Then Patterson pivoted, gracefully, to writing a different kind of social critique in The Peerless Four, if with the same vigorous and also stylish class and feminist-historical critiques, this time reimagining the story - or speculating or elaborating on it - of four women Olympic athletes and the singular lady coach whose own story demands revisionism of nearly everything about the period of the story, its quiet prejudices, its loud and clumsy ones, its so-called truths and received wisdom and received stupidity.
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