Short stories have a bad habit of disappearing,
originally showing up in little mags with small circulations and then appearing
in collections that seldom get reviewed, get no publicity, and then languish on
library shelves, which fewer and fewer people populate. If literature profs and
academic critics do not find them teachable enough to anthologize in textbooks
and explicate in the classroom, or complex enough to write about in journals,
they just die. In my never-ending battle to keep good short stories alive, I
occasionally call the attention of my readers to short story collections that,
in my opinion, deserve to be read.
Today, I highlight the first collection of Michael Byers, The Coast of Good Intentions, published
in 1998.
Byers,
born in 1971 in Seattle, Washington, received his B.A. degree from Oberlin
College in Ohio and taught elementary school in Louisiana for two years in the
Teach for America program. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the
University of Michigan and attended the writing program at Stanford University
before moving back to Seattle. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford
University between 1996 and 1998. His
story "Settled on the Cranberry Coast" was selected for the O.
Henry Prize Stories in 1995; "Shipmates Down Under" was selected
for The Best American Short Stories in 1997. The Coast of Good
Intentions was a finalist for the Hemingway/PEN Award and won the Whiting
Award of $30,000, given to "emerging writers of exceptional talent and
promise," in 1999.
The
stories of Michael Byers belong to a tradition in the contemporary short story,
represented by Ethan Canin's 1988 Emperor of the Air and Christopher
Tilghman's 1990 In a Father's Place. Like Canin and Tilghman, Byers
affirms, in a seemingly simple, matter-of-fact way, the solid, unsentimental
values of family, commitment, and hope for the future. This is, of course, the kind of fiction that
John Gardner urged in his book Moral Fiction (1978) and that Raymond
Carver embodied in his 1983 collection Cathedral, hailed as mellower and
more hopeful than his earlier, so-called "minimalist" stories.
Such
understanding, loving, and forgiving values are, of course, hard to resist, but
they are also hard to present without either irony or sentimentality. Byers manages to avoid both, giving the
reader characters who are neither perfect nor petulant, neither ironically
bitter nor blissfully ignorant, but who are rather complex and believable human
beings simply doing their best, which, Byers seems to suggest, is simply the
most human thing anyone can do. Here are some comments on the major stories in The Coast of Good Intentions
"Settled on the Cranberry Coast" is
a satisfying story
about second chances or the pleasant realization that it's never too late to
live, "Settled on the Cranberry Coast" is narrated by Eddie, a
bachelor who has just retired after teaching high school for twenty-seven years
and has taken up part-time carpenter work.
When Rosie, an old high school acquaintance, who has also never married,
hires him to repair an old house she has just bought, the story focuses quite
comfortably on their inevitable gravitation toward each other. Rosie not only fills Eddie's need for a
caring companion, her six-year-old granddaughter Hannah, who lives with her,
gives him the child he has never had.
Because Byers was only in his twenties when he wrote these stories, reviewer made much of his understanding of older characters, such as Eddie in "Settled on the Cranberry Coast." In "Dirigibles," Howard and Louise, in their late sixties and retired, are visited by James Couch, a friend from the old days, who is stopping on his way from Seattle to Montana. Couch talks about his daughter hang-gliding in outer space, and Howard realizes that he has "gone a little way around the bend, and he wasn't coming back." When Howard sets up a movie projector to show Couch old home movies from the time when they were friends, it turns out he has put in the wrong film; what they see instead is a very brief scene of Louise, young and thin and almost all legs, running naked from one doorway to another. Howard and Louise both laugh, remembering the event when he came returned from the navy and she came to the door nonchalantly nude.
After
putting Couch to bed, the couple lie awake, and Howard says he played the
greatest concert halls in Germany before the war, with ten thousand women
waiting on his every need; he tells Louise to think of him like that, and she
says "yes." He tells her he
flew "great dirigibles of the age" over the "great nations of
the earth," and she says "yes."
And in the last line, when he says "It's true. Everything is true," she says, "Oh,
Howard. Howard." The conclusion is
a great affirmative paean to love and union, much like the end of Molly Bloom's
famous soliloquy in Joyce's Ulysses.
"Shipmates Down Under" focuses on the protagonist's
relationship with his nine-year-old son, who seems principled and controlled;
with his six-year-old daughter, who becomes mysteriously ill; and with his
wife, who feels an outsider to his connection with the children. Because the daughter's illness threatens to
dominate the story, the underlying marital conflict, which is its real subject,
does not become apparent until the end when the child improves just as
mysteriously as she fell ill.
The
boy, who intuits the unspoken conflict between the parents, says he is writing
a sequel to a boy's adventure book his father has recommended, and urges his
father to take his mother on a vacation, since their planned vacation to Perth,
Australia, the father's home, has been cancelled by the daughter's
illness. When the protagonist talks to
his wife about this, she calls him "Mister Distant, Mister Nowhere, Mr.
Say Nothing," accusing him of living in his own little world with the
children while pretending she does not exist.
Although he denies this, when he sees the first sentence of his son's
sequel--"My father and I live in Perth in a tiny white house with a wall
around the garden"--he feels a "little bloom of secretive joy"
in his heart. The story ends with his
thinking that he will apologize to his wife and that they will make it. However, when he imagines them finally taking
their disrupted trip to Australia, what he thinks of is the children
remembering the experience, the hotel standing strong and unchanging, "the
solid keeper of my precious cargo, these two damaged packages of my detailed
dreams."
The
central character in the story, "In
Spain, One Thousand and Three,"
Martin Tuttleman, tries to cope with the loss of his wife at age twenty-five to
cancer. A computer game designer, he has
been off work so long with her illness that he now, at least temporarily, works
in the support department, giving phone advice to kids playing the game he
helped design. The primary focus of the
story is Martin's constant sexual fantasies about women. Before his marriage, he had slept with every
woman he could, and thinks of himself as having had more sex than anyone he
knew. Now that his wife, who completely
filled his sexual life during their marriage, is dead, he has begun to
fantasize about other women again.
The
central crucial event in the story is an ambiguous encounter with his
mother-in-law in his wife's old bedroom.
When he takes one of his shirts out of her closet, the mother embraces
him, and he compares the feel of her body to that of his wife. They begin rubbing against each other, like
"shy dancers" and then abruptly push away. The story ends with his
father-in-law angrily confronting him, demanding that he apologize. When he does so, he feels good, as if he were
saying he is sorry to all the women he has seduced.
"A Fair Trade" is the longest story in the
collection, and covers the longest span of time, practically the whole life of
the central character Andie, beginning at age fourteen with her trip to live
with her aunt for a period after her father's death and her mother's emotional
breakdown, and ending with a visit to her aunt some forty years later when she
is in her fifties. However, most of the
story focuses on the time Andie lived with her aunt Maggie; the rest of her
life is recounted in brief summary.
During this period, Andie has fantasies about a mysterious European man who works for the elderly couple who live across the road. The only real plot complications occur when Maggie's unscrupulous boyfriend, who, trying to get the elderly couple's farm, threatens to tell the authorities that the man has made sexual advances to Andie; when Maggie finds out, she sends the boyfriend packing.
During this period, Andie has fantasies about a mysterious European man who works for the elderly couple who live across the road. The only real plot complications occur when Maggie's unscrupulous boyfriend, who, trying to get the elderly couple's farm, threatens to tell the authorities that the man has made sexual advances to Andie; when Maggie finds out, she sends the boyfriend packing.
The
last part of the story covers Andie's life after she returns to her
mother--summarizing her marriage, divorce, her daughter's going off to college,
and finally her move back to Seattle when she is fifty-five. Seeing her aunt's old boyfriend, now in his
eighties, on television prompts a visit to her aunt, who has adopted a gay man,
and who has a boyfriend in his seventies.
Although her aunt tells her she should have a man, Andie looks forward
to twenty more years of being alone. She
feels she has made a "fair trade," that her way is not a bad way to
live. As she sits in a restaurant with
her aunt and her adopted son, she shuffles her feet under the table, thinking
that from other tables she may appear to be dancing.
Michael
Byers has published two novels and several short stories in the last two
decades and is an assistant professor of literature at the University of
Michigan. The Coast of Good Intentions
is a book that deserves to be read and reread.
2 comments:
On your recommendation, I read "Dirigibles" and found it funny and wistful. I look forward to reading more. Thank you.
On your recommendation, I read "Dirigibles" and found it funny and wistful. I look forward to reading more. Thank you.
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