Country of Cold

January 6, 2003
This debut collection of 13 linked stories from the acclaimed author of the travel memoir The Water in Between
tracks eccentric and genuinely torn-up characters through barren, dramatic regions. The volume begins with the story of an obese malcontent's journey over a waterfall in a barrel ("Les Is More") and ends with the account of a charged high school reunion in the same riverside town ("Manitoba Avenue"). Patterson is an avid and successful describer of place; the locales in this book, all fairly frigid, range from northern Canada to France. The everyday barbarism that often erupts in his landscapes rarely slackens, although it assumes radically different forms. In "Boat Building," divorcée Carol builds an ocean-going vessel and sets herself literally and psychologically adrift. In "Starlight, Starbright," a man serving as a doctor in a remote Canadian military outpost suddenly finds himself thrust headlong into the middle of a firing exercise. There are strained, overambitious touches, as when Patterson ends numerous stories with "This was in ." This technique, although initially disarming, becomes almost maudlin with repetition. Also, the tone of the book is occasionally too wry for its themes, too self-consciously clever. Patterson is at his best when bringing out the natural poetry of the landscapes that fascinate him—at such moments he writes with the power of Russell Banks or Annie Proulx, with a gaze that both appreciates the beauty of the imagined scene and understands the socioeconomic complexities looming over it.