The Patch is the seventh collection of essays by the nonfiction master, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It is divided into two parts. Part 1, "The Sporting Scene," consists of pieces on fishing, football, golf, and lacrosse-from fly casting for chain pickerel in fall in New Hampshire to walking the linksland of St. Andrews at an Open Championship. Part 2, called "An Album Quilt," is a montage of fragments of varying length from pieces done across the years that have never appeared in book form-occasional pieces, memorial pieces, reflections, reminiscences, and short items in various magazines including The New Yorker. They range from a visit to the Hershey chocolate factory to encounters with Oscar Hammerstein, Joan Baez, and Mount Denali. Emphatically, the author's purpose was not merely to preserve things but to choose passages that might entertain contemporary readers. Starting with 250,000 words, he gradually threw out 75 percent of them, and randomly assembled the remaining fragments into "an album quilt." Among other things, The Patch is a covert memoir.
"This far into a prolific career, it may be a good time to finally unmask [McPhee] as a one-trick pony. In The Patch, he again shamelessly employs his go-to strategy: crafting sentences so energetic and structurally sound that he can introduce apparently unappealing subjects, even ones that look to be encased in a cruddy veneer of boringness, and persuade us to care about them . . . The Patch is j
Craig Taylor, The New York Times Book Review
"[McPhee] is a singular gem within the contemporary nonfiction genre: a writer who is known for his reported long-form narratives but who has a prose-poetic sense that extends down to his paragraphs and sentences . . . McPhee is more vessel than magician"
and this is said with recognition of his skill. His work is behind the scenes and beneath
"A work that gains its newness through structure alone . . . the experience of having decades of details and observations and exacting description wash over you, the time or the context of the writing never exactly clear, is a fascinating one . . . a more honest and effective way of stitching together the memories of a life, the structure in a way acknowledging that a neat beginning, middle and end is part of the artifice of writing."
