Michael Byers' The Coast of Good Intentions

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.

Byers focuses primarily on men who, although certainly not simple, are simply trying hard to do their best.  They are, like the retired school teacher in "Settled on the Cranberry Coast," still looking hopefully to the future, or, when they do look to the past, are like the elderly couple in "Dirigibles," reaffirmed rather than disappointed by where they have been.  When Byers takes on the persona of a woman, as he does in "A Fair Trade," once again, the past is perceived without regret, the present is accepted with equanimity, and the future is looked forward to with hope.  Even the self-absorbed father in "Shipmates Down Under," who should take responsibility for his troubled marriage, and the young widow in "Spain, One Thousand and Three," who has, for ego's sake, treated women as conquests, ultimately are simply human with all the frailties humans are heir to.

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.

As Eddie makes Rosie's house sturdier, their relationship  grows as well, gradually affirming Eddie's opening sentence in the story, "This I know; our lives in these towns are slowly improving."  Eddie can imagine moving in with Rosie and Hannah, thinking that we don't live our lives so much as come to them, as people and things "collect mysteriously" around us.  At the end of the story, Eddie invites Hannah to go to the next town with him to buy radiators.  In a simple scene handled perceptively and delicately by Byers, Eddie stands under a parking-lot overhang in the rain, smoothing the sleeping child's hair, her head "perfectly round" on his shoulder. In a Carveresque final sentence, he thinks he is "on the verge of something" as he waits there listening to Hannah's easy, settled breathing.

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.

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.

Junot Diaz, Michael Byers, Charles Baxter, Joan Wickersham--Best American Short Stories 2013

I love a good love story.  I don’t mean those faux romantic fictional fluffs that you often see at the movies or on television.  I mean a story that explores the mysterious complexity of love.

When I started this blog, almost five years ago, the profile program asked me what my favorite book was. I wrote, without hesitation, The Great Gatsby.  I was reminded what a classic love story it was when I saw the recent film version, which was just frothy cinematic display, until Gatsby came face to face again with Daisy, and from that point, it was all about that boyish look on his face and his effort, Tom Sawyer-like, to impress Daisy. It didn’t matter that she was not worthy of his adoration; that wasn’t the point. That’s never the point. For example, there is only one moment in Wuthering Heights when Cathy is worthy of the mad passion of Heathcliff—when she says “I am Heathcliff.”  The love object is not the result of evaluation but rather obsession.

When the profile program asked me my favorite movie, without hesitation, I wrote The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which is, to my mind, a brilliant exploration of the fiction/reality complexity of being in love. The character Jeremy Irons plays is no match for the magically mysterious fictional construct that Meryl Streep creates so brilliantly that one never knows when the French Lieutenant’s woman is acting and when she is….what? Well, when love is concerned what else is there but acting?

What’s all this preamble about love stories about?  I want to talk a bit about four love stories of sorts in the 2013 Best American Short Story collection. And since one of those stories is Junot Diaz’s “Miss Lora,” for which I have expressed my distaste in an earlier blog this year, I thought it would give me one more chance to try to explain why I thought it was an inferior story—certainly not a story deserving of all the awards that Diaz has received this past year for it and the collection in which it appears. So far in my reading of the 2013 BASS, it is the only Elizabeth Strout selection that disappoints me. And she doesn’t give me any clue in her introduction why she chose it except to praise the vividness of the character Lora. However, since I respect Strout’s work, the fact that she chose it as one of the “Best” has forced me to go back and read the damned thing one more time—the sixth time.

The other three stories I want to talk a bit about, are Charles Baxter’s “Bravery,” Michael Byers’ “Malaria,” and Joan Wickersham’s “The Tunnel, or The News from Spain.”

I think the basic problem I have with “Miss Lora” is that the central character, a sixteen-year-old Dominican Republic male, has no depth of feeling.  He just wants to have sex.  Nothing wrong with that, of course.  But if it is the only motivating force of a piece of fiction, we are apt to call it “pornography.” Nothing wrong with that either--except when the work is parading as something better than that, something meaningful or culturally relevant.

And Miss Lora herself, although we do get a bit of a backstory about her past sad life, is primarily just an older woman that Yunior can have sex with—what more about her do we really know than that? So what really happens in this story? A sixteen-year-old boy admires his older brother, who has recently died of cancer, because he was such a successful sexual predator. The boy’s girlfriend will not have sex with him, so he is delighted to hook up with an older woman who will. What sixteen-year-old horny boy wouldn’t? They have sex for a time; he graduates from high school, becomes involved with another woman and then graduates from college. Miss Lora disappears. It means nothing.

I have been accused of having a blind spot about this story, but so far, no one has told me why they think it is such a great piece of fiction. I assure I am no prude and am not put off by the explicitness of some of the sexual description. It’s just that the story offers me nothing complexly human.

  If Elizabeth Strout happens to read this, I hope she will tell me why she thinks it is one of the “Best.” Yes, the “voice” is an interesting mix of educated jargon and street patois.  But the story is so hollow, so cynical, so meaningless. Nuff said.  Never for the rest of my life will I say another word about “Miss Lora.” I hope Diaz is laughing all the way to the bank.

Diaz’s Yunior may be just the kind of guy that Susan, the central character of Charles Baxter’s “Bravery,” secretly desires.  Although she goes out with the kind ones, the considerate ones, what her roommate calls the “humane” ones, what she really seems to wants is a bit of a ”troublemaker.” She meets and marries a kind and considerate man, Elijah.  When they go to Prague on their honeymoon, they encounter on the street a madwoman, who Susan imagines tells her that in the future she will be terribly jealous of her good-hearted husband “because of the woman in him.” And this announces the story’s theme.

When they have a son they name him Raphael, the name of another angel. Soon after they bring him home from the hospital, Susan comes into the nursery and finds Elijah holding a bottle of her breast milk in his left hand with the boy cradled in his right arm. Baxter says, “A small twig snapped inside her” and, finding it hard to breathe, Susan tells her husband there is something about this she cannot stand, insisting that she is the mother here, and that she does not want him to feed the boy. “With one part of her mind, she saw this impulse as animal truth, not unique to her, but true for all women.” She shouts at him that this is her territory and that he must put the child down immediately.

Elijah angrily leaves, and Susan falls asleep watching television, dreaming about her experience in Prague. When she wakes up, Elijah is standing over her with blood on the side of his mouth, but he is jubilant, telling her a story about seeing two men attacking a young woman and him charging in to rescue her by beating the men off, breaking the jaw of one of them. When she wipes the blood off his face and knuckles, she cannot believe his story. She tells him she loves him and then tucks him in bed as she would a child. The story ends with her looking in the mirror as she brushes her teeth. She does not recognize her own face, but she does recognize her milk-swollen breasts and her smile when she thinks of ”sweet Elijah bravely fighting someone, somewhere.”

This is not a highly complex story, for it seems a little too governed by its theme—the puzzling conflict women perhaps experience about nice guys vs. somewhat dangerous characters. Baxter explores several aspects of this conflict. Whether it is an “animal truth” deriving from the primitive need a woman had for a strong masculine male to protect her and her child or a socially instilled bit of claptrap, I like the way Baxter carefully sets the situation up. If you read it, please let me know if you think the story is true, or false, to a basic human truth.

I have to admit right up front that I was predisposed to like Michael Byer’s “Malaria” before I read it because I loved his first collection of stories, The Coast of Good Intentions, published in 1998 when he was only 28 years old.  I especially liked “Dirigibles,” which is a wonderful love story about a couple much too old for Byers to understand, except by the wondrous magic of authorial empathy. And indeed authorial empathy is what the story is really about.

I can understand why Elizabeth Strout was drawn to the first-person pov voice of this story, for Byers creates convincingly the rhythm of mind of the central character, Orlando, who is twenty and, as he says, unadventurous. The story focuses on his short relationship with a girl named Nora and her older brother George. The title comes from the fact that George tells Orlando that he caught malaria while in Ecuador, although Orlando knows that George has never been to Ecuador. “Everything changes" when George is arrested naked in the middle of the high school athletic field. Nora says he is hearing voices and she begins to worry that she is hearing voices also. Orlando admits that he does not know what to do about all this, since he has little experience with women and believes that “frictionless amiability” is his best way of handling things.

Orlando’s grappling with his relationship with Nora and Nora’s relationship with George makes him feel that for the first time he has an idea of ambition, that he could “be something in particular, rather than just me in general.”  But he does not know what to say to anyone about George’s delusions and Nora’s fears that “wouldn’t sound hollow and ridiculous.” He knows that his own life up to this point has been “featureless,” “free of pain,” and thus he has no training in delivering sympathy. The primary focus of the story ends with Nora trying to reassure Orlando that there was nothing they could have done about George.

But the story does not end until a final section some years later, after Orlando has married, and he is at home alone with the flu; in his fevered condition, he feels he is in a different world and senses a “hideous estrangement from the plain objects of everyday life.” He says he feels not only alone, but as if he were the only human left in the world. He knows his problem is that he does not know what he was supposed to do about George, asking: “What is George Vardon to me?”  He wonders if one is supposed to do anything; he thinks maybe what he is telling is just a story of something that happened to him or to George, concluding, “It’s really George’s story, that is, but naturally he can’t tell it, and neither can I.”

I like this story because it is such a conscientious and thoughtful exploration of our relationship to the “other.” Maybe I am prejudiced in its favor because it reaffirms much of the argument in my recent book about what Frank O’Connor saw years ago as a basic thematic impulse in the short story. The answer to Orlando’s question “What is George Vardon to me? is perhaps the answer that O’Connor says Gogol poses in”The Overcoat”: “I am your brother.”

I have to confess that I am not familiar with Joan Wickersham, although the Contributors’ Notes say that her work has appeared before in Best American Short Stories. Her most recent book, from which “The Tunnel or the News from Spain” is taken, is entitled The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story. I liked this story so much (and since I am such a sucker for a love story), I just ordered a copy). Wickersham says that the book is a “suite of asymmetrical, thwarted love stories” in which the title “the news from Spain” means something different in each story, but “acquires more resonance” (hate that overused word) as the book goes along.  I will talk more about that when I get the book and read it.  As for “The Tunnel,” there are multiple love stories involved here, although the primary one is the love story between Rebecca, age 45, and her mother Harriet, who is living, unhappily, in a nursing home.

The narrator of the story sums up the relationship between Harriet and Rebecca as one in which Harriet needs attention and Rebecca needs to feel like a hero. But more than this, they have discovered that they like each other and are having a good time together. Now that her mother is dying, “in some unexpected way she and Harreit had fallen in love.” Almost on the periphery of this love affair is the ten-year relationship Rebecca has with Peter and a short new relationship she has with Benjamin, who comes into her bookstore and buys a set of Chekhov stories.

This story is more “novelistic” that I usually like, lacking the language-based poetic focus and economy that make for a great short story, but it is so intelligent and sensitive about the various complex aspects of love that I find I can’t resist it.  It is not a story I will read over and over, but I did enjoy the experience of reading it the two times I did.