rev. of The Coast of Good Intentions by Michael Byers
The Coast of Good Intentions
Stories by Michael Byers. Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin. $12.00 paper. Reviewed by Fred Leebron.
In nearly every story in
The Coast of Good Intentions, a debut collection by Michael Byers, there is the beguiling and disconcerting sense that all the
real action is happening offstage, that offstage people are cheating on their dead wives or watching their children die, while onstage the characters preside with a kind of measured restraint and intelligence. Set in the Pacific Northwest, these nine careful tales evoke a realism that is complex and ambiguous.
“Settled on the Cranberry Coast” is a frankly sweet but never saccharine story about a retired schoolteacher, his old high school crush, and her granddaughter slowly weaving a life together in a dusky moment of their lives. “I was drunk but not drunk enough to say what I wanted,” Eddie explains, as he yet again shies from the chasm of boundless intimacy, “that we don’t live our lives so much as come to them, as different people and things collect mysteriously around us. I felt as though I were coming to Rosie and Hannah, easing my way toward them.” While such fatalism may seem easy, the writing does all the hard work: the mist “hung up in the trees like laundry,” the granddaughter “was sweaty and smelled like sun and dirt and meat.”
The stories are novelistic in how generously they dwell in the shades of doubt and decision endured by the central characters, and how deeply they explore with a compellingly languid pace the breadth of details that make up their resilient lives. In “Shipmates Down Under,” two geneticists watch helplessly while their six-year-old daughter struggles with an undefinable life-threatening disease, only to discover that she will survive while their marriage most probably will not. “I think I’m fairly nice,” Harriet insists to Alvin. “Well,” he says. “Sometimes.” The argument rages, abates, finishes but does not finish, devolves to sleep. “And, to my surprise,” Alvin admits, “she huddled against me, her breathing deep and even, directly into my ear, as if she were imparting secrets without words, without secrecy.”
Many of the characters in
The Coast of Good Intentions are, like the spurned professor and the spurned secretary of “Blue River, Blue Sun,” destined to live lives whose shining moments are best described as “solidarity forever.” Joseph is fifty-six, and his wife has just left him; Paula is thirty, and her husband has left her. “Move on. That’s right. Move on. It’s time,” Paula urges the professor. When they finally do, “her expression was full of happy desperation, her eyebrows high on her forehead, her little breasts wiggling as she leaped toward him.”
The forceful quiet of these stories and the deft slide of their endings, as if they could keep going but simply decide to stop, are evidence of a serious and sophisticated vision. All of these characters — and the very talented Michael Byers — have something more ethereal in mind.
Fred Leebron is author of the novel Out West
and co-editor of Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology.
He teaches at Gettysburg College.
