Afternoon Hours of a Hermit
Patrick Cottrell
Ecco Books
When someone takes their own life, the aftermath is complicated. Those who love them miss them. They grieve. They sort through logistics of funerals and the person’s earthly possessions. They wonder why.
Five years after Dan Moran’s brother passed away, he thought he’d sorted it out. He’d finished solving the mystery of his brother’s suicide right around the time of the funeral. The investigation was closed, but when Dan receives a childhood photo of his brother in the mail with no context, no name, and no return address, he believes there must be something more. In “Afternoon Hours of a Hermit,” Dan retraces his steps in his hometown, reinvestigating his brother’s death.
“Afternoon Hours of a Hermit” is marketed as a standalone novel, and in many ways, it is one. But in other respects, it’s really not. The novel’s main character, Dan, is trans and has written a novel about his brother’s death called “Sorry to Disrupt the Peace.”
Real-life author Patrick Cottrell is also trans. His debut novel, “Sorry to Disrupt the Peace,” is about investigating the main character’s younger brother’s death. The debut novel tells this story, fresh and through the eyes of Moran’s pre-transition self. There’s information about the plot and narrative arcs of characters you could only really get if you read the first book, but it’s not strictly necessary to read the first one before the second one. The latter just makes infinitely more sense with the context of the former.
There’s a strange quirk of semi-autobiographical works of fiction where everyone has a morbid curiosity about how much is true. I’ll confess that I’ve spent some time googling. Cottrell like Moran is a Korean transracial adoptee, his brother did commit suicide, he has a book called “Sorry to Disrupt the Peace,” the aforementioned book did publish before he came out and transitioned, and he did write another book, the one I’m reviewing now.
There’s a meta quality to reading a book about a guy who’s written a book. It’s even stranger to read what is essentially a rewrite of the same story set five years into the future and from a trans point of view. Having read both, I find it not unwelcome. It’s like how Taylor Swift rerecorded all her songs so she’d own the masters. There are some similarities, many moments that we feel like we’ve seen before, but overall, you root for it.
Dan Moran, like Cottrell’s previous protagonist, is disconnected from reality and not a very reliable narrator. But where Cottrell’s debut novel feels fixated on adoption, “Afternoon Hours of a Hermit,” feels more settled into that part of Moran’s identity. A lot of the headspace of the narrator is spent navigating being in their hometown post transitioning and being mistaken for his middle brother as he’s trying to conduct his unofficial investigation. It’s not exactly a sequel. The most notable departures from the first book is the insertion of this middle brother who doesn’t exist in “Sorry to Disrupt the Peace” and a lack of context as to the circumstances of his youngest brother’s death.
It’s a complicated story, and at some parts, absurd. But in retracing his brother’s life, Dan learns more about the way his brother lived and the way that he saw (and failed to see) Dan. It’s less a mystery and more a meditation on grief and the interconnected web of what we lose when we lose someone.
