A death in the family
Patty Yumi Cottrell’s debut novel, “Sorry to Disrupt the Peace,” is a strange and lovely thing, and it features narrator Helen Moran. Adopted as a baby from Korea into a white family in Milwaukee, Helen is now grown up and living in New York when her Uncle Geoff (she’s not quite sure how he’s related to her) calls with the news that her adoptive brother killed himself. She heads home to her adoptive parents’ house in order to join them in mourning as well as to achieve closure for herself.
Cottrell fills every page with an impossible-to-ignore voice, characterized by its idiosyncrasies and intelligence. Helen is not a shy narrator; she doesn’t recede to the background of scenes. Instead, she sidesteps them with her thoughts and musings, letting her mind wander, missing possibly essential information and subjecting us to the same fate. She isn’t always certain whether she’s speaking aloud or thinking, which creates further uncertainty in the reader: “When a person dies, it is the end of a human life, I announced. Then I saw or I thought, What a difficult time it is! What a toll it has taken! My adoptive mother and Chad Lambo continued to look at me in amazement and disgust, a disgust reserved for cockroaches.”
Helen’s pronouncements are shockingly odd, often intrusive on those around her, and entirely honest and unmitigated. She is frustrating on the one hand and endearing on the other, clearly insecure and probably anxious — though it would be dangerous to ascribe to her any particular mental disorders. Indeed, her own adoptive brother thought she might be schizophrenic or bipolar, a fact that Helen regards with suspicion and surprise. After all, she is the one whose profession involves helping troubled youth (her term) in New York, brown and black kids who are failing out of school with whom she shares her weed. Clearly, Helen’s logic says, she cannot hold that job and also be mentally ill.
Besides being unreliable as a narrator, Helen is remarkable in other ways. She distorts reality, is childishly selfish and is prone to obsessing. She also makes her own indiscretions somehow correct due to her particular logic: “I had always promoted early intervention in my workplace; I was a proponent of special medical intervention when it came to my troubled young people, intervention mostly through the administration of marijuana, which was illegal, but I felt it was my ethical duty to give it to them. It calms them down, as I had explained to my coworkers, it helps them focus on real things, they smoke it and they mellow.” Also, Helen is apparently asexual (though, again, she refuses any and all othering labels) and finds sex, with anyone of any gender, rather gross and unappealing.
Though it doesn’t seem like there is a big secret to Helen’s adoptive brother’s suicide — certainly no signs point to anything mysterious going on — Helen nevertheless continues to search with the relentlessness of the bereaved for some sign of his distress. But her brother’s ultimately plain, simple life eludes her grasp, as he slipped away rather quietly and neatly from her and their adoptive parents. Instead of the distress of the suicidal, we see that of the surviving.
Ilana Masad’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Guardian, Vice and other publications. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com