Paterniti's Echo-Effect

Two other sources:
"TALK; The Money Trail", 11/21/10, New York Times via Byliner
"Travis the Chimp: The Wild One" 12/23/09, New York Times via Byliner

Michael Paterniti's stylistic strength seems to come from his haunting double-take of particular scenes of importance. The quaint, fog enveloped shoreline near the plane crash featured in "The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy"pulsates with the green, electrical surge of the lighthouse eye and presumptuous dread in the opening; by the end of the work, it is a place more imbued by mystery and sixth sense than before.

In Paterniti's brief summation of the tragedy of Travis the Chimp, the incident of bloodshed is rushed through, head-long (and no pun intended, but just like the plane crash of the aforementioned article), a torrent of action after which the real reflection and impossible task of reckoning may begin. Paterniti writes "Afterward, the ghost of Travis appeared everywhere", much like the billowing white clothes on the line where the souls of the crash survivors still seemed to hover. The inescapable scene that seeps into witnesses consciousness and refuses to leave here is inside the home of Travis and his "mother": "The silence was like a primal thrum, the eerie frangibility of everything -- the window curtains, the reflection in the mirror -- hung in the balance."

Paterniti's "chosen" voices, or voices of his choice, are authoritative, formal, fringe elements who are at once distant from the story, and gradually become saturated by it. The degree and rate of saturation seems to progress with the reader's level of continued immersion and involvement with the story. In the esquire piece, these characters continue straining through emotional torment, as the story sums them up in tiny, incomplete blurbs; "The Father", "The Medical Examiner", and even "A Split-Boulder Monument." This ending emphasizes, without melodrama, that the stories of broken people are unresolved, and no reporter can bandage them together. Travis is described by the chief detective as a criminal, whose motives and reactions could climax in unfathomable possibilities.

The author is inclined structurally towards lists, altered and amended to fit the mood of the particular piece. In "TALK; The Money Trail", lists of ski-trail types, luxury car models, and celebrity names outline a resort in the French Alps. A hilarious aside of listed "douche" options Paterniti imagines are whisperingly recommended to him by God herself  shows a delightful sense of humor (and that Paterniti is not merely a philosophical ghost hunter). These lists are in sharp contrast to the quickly unraveling and unnerving affect the mental checklists of the plane pilots have as they dissolve, a last grappling, before impact.

Paterniti's reporting is based on keen sensory observation. Objects are found within objects; bones are forced into coins; personal articles become artifacts, even if their retrieval is denied by family members. Things exist, even if they are not present at this moment. The sense of the fleeting is permanent for Paterniti.