11/30/2015
Dacey’s debut story collection chronicles the economically and emotionally struggling residents of a Massachusetts town, Wequaquet. Despite the exhausted, drained characters, these tales of neighborly conflicts, professional and personal malaise, and family tragedy are marked by a certain buoyancy. In describing these frustrated lives, Dacey can be as funny as he is compassionate. A retired football coach overzealously guards his gazanias (“Friend of Mine”); a married high school teacher is drawn to an old flame who has become a sexual healer (“Frieda, Years Later”); an alcoholic chaperones his unstable young son on a date (“To Feel Again the Kind of Love That Hurts Something Terrible”); a woman undergoes extensive plastic surgery (“Mutatis Mutandis”). The stories are less lurid and violent than those in Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff, another promising debut collection about small-town American life, though darkness does creep in: “Bad things will happen. They have to. They’re good for you, anyway,” a father tells his son. There are some hiccups, including “Ballad,” an underwhelming, unpunctuated internal monologue, and “Incoming Mail,” which consists of a mother’s letters to her son fighting in Iraq and strains to capture an unhip parental voice. But taken as a whole, Dacey’s breakout collection shows that small towns can still yield big fictional rewards. (Feb.)

Featured in Brooklyn Magazine’s 2016 Book Preview

“Patrick Dacey is one of my favorite young American writers. The stories in We've Already Gone This Far are dangerous, funny, sometimes savage (the phrase 'lyrical hammers' comes to mind), but underneath it all beats a strangely kind and hopeful heart. Dacey is channeling both a terrifyingly dark view of America, as well as a movingly optimistic one, and he shows us that the truth of who we are lies in that very juxtaposition. Fast, poetic, edgy, full of tremendous affection for the things of the world.” —George Saunders

“Excellent. . . ambitious and heartfelt . . .an impressive debut. While not every story is perfect, the best of them are harsh but beautiful reminders of the cost of wars—not just the ones overseas, but the ones we wage against ourselves.” —Michael Schaub, NPR

“[A] remarkable first short-story collection. . . .Dacey’s naturalistic writing always feels clear-eyed and assured, his most mesmerizing stories capable of breaking free from their surroundings like a running back turning a short-yard gain into the improbable, tackle-breaking touchdown.” —Style Weekly (Richmond)

“The title tells the tale: The characters in Dacey’s debut collection have already gone this far, so they might as well keep going, just to see what’s up ahead.” —The Toronto Star

“Breathtakingly good . . . . Dacey has a special knack for leavening his prose with wickedly funny, satirical flourishes. . . .Dacey is an agile writer who mixes satire with scenes of great emotional depth and empathy.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“An empathetic and strikingly original debut short story collection.” —Kirkus, author feature

“We've Already Gone this Far is a strong, intelligent, deeply-felt book; Patrick Dacey is a beautiful and natural writer.” —Mary Gaitskill

"Patrick Dacey's We've Already Gone This Far is a rock-solid and mercifully unpretentious collection of stories, the sort of book I'm always in search of, but rarely finding. This is a book about people who (mostly) do honest work for a living by a writer who knows how hard it is out here on the ground in America. Generous and beautifully written." —Peter Orner

"In the keen, observational short-story style of writers such as George Saunders and Lauren Groff, We’ve Already Gone This Far illuminates both the quotidian details and the profound strangeness of modern American life. Readers will find this set of mournful, biting, and resonant tales united not only by geography but also by Dacey’s deep humanity towards his flawed characters." —Booklist

“Dacey’s breakout collection shows that small towns can still yield big fictional rewards…Despite the exhausted, drained characters, these tales of neighborly conflicts, professional and personal malaise, and family tragedy are marked by a certain buoyancy. In describing these frustrated lives, Dacey can be as funny as he is compassionate.” —Publishers Weekly

“…Irreverent…poignant…superb…A fine debut collection from a storyteller who improves as the stakes get higher.” —Kirkus Reviews

"Patrick Dacey is a wonderfully talented writer, and among his many gifts is his willingness to explore the hole in the heart (and I believe we all have at least one if we've truly lived), and to find humor and grace in the sadness that surrounds it. We've Already Gone This Far is one of the best collections I've read in a long time." —Donald Ray Pollock

"These thirteen stories are linked not just through place and character but also by their pursuit of a warped form of happiness. Together they provide a startling portrait of American life today. A daringly resonant collection with the best endings in the business."—Courtney Maum

“Whether a used-car salesman or past-his-prime coach or lonely mother of a deployed soldier, the characters in Dacey's collection are 'living on these images of the past' looking for something that glimmers just out of reach. A book that brims with unguarded humanity and quiet moments of communion, I couldn't stop reading it. Dacey is a masterful prose stylist, a vibrant and original new literary voice.” —Rae Meadows

2015-11-04
Stories of tough times in working-class Massachusetts, where the sons head off to war while the grown-ups left behind confront their aging, impatient selves. Dacey's storytelling is rarely as domesticated as his plots suggest, befitting a young writer who's studied under George Saunders. "Ballad" is told in a single run-on sentence by a songwriter contemplating the way his relationships have shifted as he talks to his newborn baby. In "Frieda, Years Later," a man furtively escapes his family to reunite with a girl he had a fling with in high school, now a yoga instructor in Florida; he anticipates somebody New Age-y and sexually available but winds up with a woman who has his number. Efforts at self-improvement tend to go south quickly: the woman who appears on TV for a whole-body makeover is turned into a narcissistic villain by the show's producers; the father of a teenage boy with mental health issues struggles to prepare him for his first date. Throughout, Dacey is skilled at giving these stories comic moods without mocking the seriousness of his characters' anxieties. The best example, the opening "Patriots," is an irreverent study of the mother of a dead soldier, told from the point of view of an unfriendly neighbor ("she said that my collection of wind chimes drove her nuts, and I said her collection of flags and ribbons drives me nuts"). Two follow-up stories add layers of generosity and pathos to that seriocomic atmosphere. "Incoming Mail" is told in letters from the mother, increasingly at loose ends with family chaos at home and a lack of response from overseas. And the closing "Lost Dog" is a poignant revelation of details of the son's fate and a superb stand-alone story about displaced affection in a war zone. A fine debut collection from a storyteller who improves as the stakes get higher.