Lawrence Patchett. Have This Heart. ISBN 978-1-77692-304-5. Wellington: Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026. 208 pp. RRP: $38.00.
Whether training a rescue dog, starting a bucket chain to put out a raging fire, raising a marquee beside a line of Ferraris, or reporting on a sensitive workplace accident, then men in Have This Heart are striving for more. They care about their work, even one no one else does, because they know what the consequences will be if they don’t.According to the back-cover blurb, Lawrence Patchett’s new story collection is “about men who are trying to do better.” Blurbs do, admittedly, have a tendency to over-simplify. This one seems particularly inaccurate, though.
You see, that’s not at all the impression I got from the stories themselves. For a start, there’s quite a variety of genres. There are supernatural stories, stories set in the future, social realist stories – the whole gamut, really. They do all foreground men, but are they all “trying to do better”? I wouldn’t have thought so.
Take, for example, the story “Lucky”, which does a pretty expert demolition job on a rather complacent fellow named Marcus. He got promoted at the office ahead of his exact contemporary Melanie, mainly because “she never put herself forward for promotion, or didn’t know how to, or whatever.” Not because she’s a woman, of course.
After scoring himself the perfect flat, he succeeds in solving the sole fly in his ointment – finding safe parking for his brand-new Ranger – by renting a space in a new parking lot that’s just opened a few blocks away. He’s too lazy to fill in the booking form properly – “it looked like a ball-ache of a thing, with a new password to put in and confirm, and then a security link via email, and all a bit fiddly to do at work when he did actually have quite a lot to be doing.” As a result, he ends up getting a year’s free parking before the firm actually notices his payments haven’t been going through.
Funnily enough, they only pick up on it because he’s sent through so many complaints – “Unacceptable puncture hazards. Tradies parking without permission. Oh, and unhoused people” – that he finally ends up on their radar whilst querying an unjustified parking ticket.
As Marcus himself admits, none of it “sounded great when read out like that.” Marcus isn’t all bad, by any means. He has an old Dad in Dunedin whom he has to drive down and see at regular intervals (hence the flash car). He’d also like to stay friends with Melanie, only somehow their jokey relationship doesn’t work quite so well now that he is, effectively, her boss.
Condemned out of your own mouth – it’s a tried-and-true fictional technique. Jason Compson in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is a classic example. Jason sees his feckless siblings as just so much irritating baggage, and feels completely justified in accepting the material success he feels to be his due. Marcus might not be at that level yet, but he’s getting there. Is there still hope for him? Maybe. In any case, the story is – to my mind – entirely successful in puncturing his self-justifying façade.
“Lucky” is one thing, but there are other, more equivocal cases in Patchett’s book: “Half-Time at the Roost,” for instance. The protagonist is a small-town journalist who likes to cover the local Rugby League games even when he’s off the clock. He’s a bit of a pest, snapping away with his camera (“I’ve got a press ID”) to the irritation of at least some of the fans:
Once a diehard growled me off the sideline, years back. ‘Get out of the way, ya dick,’ he said. ‘We didn’t come down here on our day off work to look at your effing back.’However, on this particular occasion he’s supposed to be out on a walk with his daughter, Emmy, who’s been having a hard time of it since she went away to uni:
There were some emergency trips down to Dunedin earlier this year – with me arriving in the dark, sitting by her bed in her flat … trying too hard to help, but later learning to just wait for her to talk.The deal was that they’d take the dog for a walk, and “this would just be a short visit to take a few photos.” But it drags on and on. He bustles around, sends her off to buy a hotdog, tries hard to resist his impulse to accompany an injured player to the hospital:
I’m not a gun at emergency, but I’m the first-aider at our own office, and not all teams have a physio, so helping to stabilize an injury … frees up the manager for their sideline work … They could use the help.Finally, though, when he sees a “doctor or nurse – you can see it the way people part, the way she takes charge like that” – stepping in, he agrees to continue the walk. They do, after all, “have only this afternoon together, then one more day of weekend left.”
So, pillar of the community, or self-important busybody? It’s possible that the author would like us to see him as the former, but unfortunately stories have a way of developing their own momentum. Our journo is certainly well-meaning, but the fact is that talking to his daughter is a tiresome duty, whereas an afternoon at the footy is a seductive treat. He does resist it, but not with a particularly good grace.
As for the other noble activities listed in the blurb – “training a rescue dog, starting a bucket chain to put out a raging fire, raising a marquee beside a line of Ferraris, or reporting on a sensitive workplace accident” – hardly any of them could be said to be an unequivocal success.
The rescue dog in question, in the title story “Have This Heart”, is actually more of an emotional support animal for a depressive young man who almost killed a mother and her children with his drunk driving. Walking her is the only thing that gets him out of the house.
The bucket-chain organiser in the futuristic “My Turn” turns out to be quite useless at fighting fires when the moment actually arrives. It’s his wife who devises an ingenious plan to defeat the blaze while he’s still bumbling around trying to find his mate, the one he did all his planning with. At least he seems to rejoice – albeit somewhat half-heartedly – at her success.
The marquee by the line of Ferraris is a reference to a rather grim fable about a newbie on a work crew who’s thoroughly mocked by the others for not knowing what a Maserati is. He’s almost killed by a clumsy move on the narrator’s part, but everyone agrees to hush it up in the interests of “avoiding paperwork”. Social realism: yes – “caring about your work”: hardly.
As for “reporting on a sensitive workplace accident” – that’s the most barbed item of all. The “Newspaper Fella” of the title manages to screw up a farm worker’s prospects of future employment by reporting his accident incorrectly: as if it had been due to his own carelessness. Our protagonist ends up scribbling a hasty retraction which seems most unlikely to improve matters. He’d like to help, but given that reporting what actually happened would involve offending one of the power couples of the district, his hands are really tied. It’s more of a Chekhovian study of an essentially weak man in a ethical quandary than any kind of inspirational tale.
In a Newsroom essay about the thinking behind his previous book, The Burning River, Patchett quotes something “the short-story writer Breton Dukes said to me recently: ‘What else can I say about it? It’s all there in the story.’”
I can certainly understand Patchett’s decision to foreground men – and white men at that – in his fiction. There’s almost, now, an unspoken rule that ventriloquising a voice that isn’t yours constitutes an act of appropriation.
And I also like the idea of writing about men who “care about their work, even when no one else does, because they know what the consequences will be if they don’t”. It is indeed important that some recognition should go out to all the guys “who are supergood at their jobs but never get any credit,”, as one of the superheroes in Ben Stiller’s classic movie Mystery Men puts it at the end of their own grand adventure.
But that’s not really what Patchett has written. William Blake said of John Milton that he was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”. I’d like to suggest that the same backhanded compliment is true of Lawrence Patchett. His men “who are trying to do better” are – for the most part – so useless and feeble that a reading contrary to the one suggested by his blurb becomes almost inevitable.
I don’t for a moment doubt his compassion for them, but whether he acknowledges it to himself or not, he can see right through them: from the self-pitying drunk driver at the beginning to the useless old uncle at the end.
He’s more of a Chekhov than a Hemingway: his true voice is ironic and satirical – and, honestly, there’s surely far more scope for that in our present state of depression and anarchy. Breton Dukes was right. It is all there in the stories.
Janneth Gil: Lawrence Patchett (Te Herenga Waka University Press)•
(17-25/6/26)
Landfall Review Online (16/10/2026).
[Available at: https://landfallreview.com/a-ball-ache-of-a-thing/]
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Landfall 1 (1947)
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