The Cradle/Patrick Somerville

Yesterday I read past the beginning of Patrick Somerville's novel, The Cradle, and straight through to the end. "You enjoying that book?" my husband would stop by and ask. "I am," I'd say. "Okay," he'd say. "That's good."

(that would be book talk, in our house)

But why? Why was I enjoying this book, which can be summarized in a snap: Man gets sent out to search for an heirloom cradle by a very pregnant wife who most often gets her way. Or can it? The man is Matthew Bishop, after all, the product of a destructive, still simmering foster care childhood. The wife is Marissa, whose mother walked out on her at 15. And to find the cradle Matthew must endure one of the oddest road trips ever, a direct stumble across a coterie of strangers who are cut from a cloth full of tatters, holes, raw seams. Moreover, this isn't just Matthew's story, for there's an in-cutting tale about a woman named Renee, who has a past that may or may not intersect with Matthew's present. Or Matthew's future?

Lots of layers, then. Lots of characters. Lots of time going by, backward and forward. All in a novel that comes in at a dead even 200 pages.

"You enjoying that book?"

Yes. I'm trying to figure it out. Trying to figure out how Somerville, an accomplished short story writer, achieved so much economy despite the spill of tangents here. How he found room in his spare story to pack out so much history and want. I'm coming around to the idea that it is, in the end, about how Somerville chose to play the odd—without apology, on the one hand, without a hint of cute, on the other. The Cradle is just as funny as it is sad. And it balances rightly by its end.