Customer Reviews

The Coast of Good Intentions

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I bought this collection because Michael Byers was teaching my writing workshop at Oberlin College and I thought I should read his work while he was reading mine. Though I already had great respect for him as a teacher, I now have great respect for him as a writer. The prose is beautifully crafted and his characters are real and engaging. It's a cathartic read and I highly recommend it to anyone who thinks the art of the sentence is dead.

This is a wonderful collection of short fiction, comparable, I think, to Ford's Rock Springs. There is a depth to this author's writing that is surprising from a person his age. Byers should be around for a long time and we have much to cherish for that.

One of the most astonishing debuts I can remember, Michael Byers' book is precisely, deftly observed and brilliantly unfolded. I find it amazing that a couple of other reviewers have called the stories cliched or tedious: I read a lot of fiction, and I can't remember the last time I encountered a new writer whose work seemed so powerful. Byers is wise beyond his years. Read this book!

When this collection came out, much was made of the fact that Michael Byers was just 28. It wasn't just the fact that a writer so young could demonstrate such talent, but also that he could write so movingly and insightfully about older characters trying to make sense of their lives after retirement or in the wake of a divorce after a decades-long marriage. At 50, I'm not quite there yet, but I can say I was equally impressed with how well he captured the mindset of people well past his age when he wrote this.

Each of these stories reads like a novel - there's no attempt at post-modern techniques or any sort of artsy short-story trickery. There's plenty of subtext in each story, but there's also enough on the surface that you won't have to scratch your head after finishing a piece and ask, "What the heck was that about?" Each piece simply delivers solid story-telling, good characters, an interesting premise that gives us a chance to see how they act under pressure, and effective clean writing that lets the story unfold on its own. The final three stories have a clever thematic link about the power and impact of illusions.

The rain, mountains, and connections to the ocean in coastal towns provide a consistent visual setting for the pieces, all of which are set in the Pacific Northwest.

The 8 stories in the collection are:

1. Settled on the Cranberry Coast - 15 pp - A retired schoolteacher begins to work as a carpenter and is reunited with his high school crush when she hires him to restore her house. A park ranger now, she's raising the grandchild her daughter abandoned. As he gets closer to them both, he welcomes the opportunities for a second chapter to his life.

2. Shipmates Down Under - 26 pp - A couple's young daughter comes down with a severe fever, forcing them to cancel a trip to Australia and exposing the tensions in their marriage.

3. In Spain, One Thousand and Three - 28 pp - A great exploration of the unexpected directions grief can take. Handsome Martin, a former player with the ladies, settled down when he met cello-playing Evelyn. But after they married young, she unexpectedly died of cancer. In his grief, he finds all his old urges have come back. While still thoroughly mourning Evelyn, he's lusting after every woman he sees, a desire that makes him put the moves on someone he most definitely should not. (The title comes from his watching of the movie Don Giovanni and the number of women that player supposedly slept with in Spain.)

4. A Fair Trade - 33 pp - A young teenaged girl must move in with her aunt after her father dies in WWII and her mother is incapable of raising her. Her spinster aunt lives in a remote town outside of Seattle. With few friends her age, sexual fantasies about a neighboring caretaker for an elderly couple are about all the girl has to occupy herself. Still, as she rambles about the house while her aunt works, the girl learns to enjoy a solitary life, thinking she's as independent as her aunt. That preference for being alone ends up influencing her adult life, but years later she gets a few surprises about how her aunt has lived.

5. Blue River, Blue Sun - 22 pp - A 56-year-old geology professor reels from a divorce, not sure what to do with the dull monotony of his days. Left to wonder where it all went wrong, visting malls, with all their hustle and bustle, is one of the few pleasures he finds in life. But then a secretary in his university department, bitter over her own divorce, presents an opportunity for a date. The story has a very powerful conclusion.

6. Wizard - 19 pp - A substitute teacher writes a play for a very small-time theater about Thomas Edison (a personal obsession of his) and his much younger, first wife. The playwright develops a crush on the older woman cast in the role of the wife, and while they're rehearsing the story takes an intriguing sexual twist.

7. In the Kingdom of Priester John - 8 pp - A 17-year-old boy's crazy uncle goes missing, and with insanity running in the boy's family, he wonders about his own future. (Priester John was a mythical world traveler, whose stories of intrigue in unknown worlds fascinated Europeans in the late middle ages. It applies here because during a history exam the boy has to answer a question about the legendary myths that drove European explorers to Africa. It provides a parallel to the boy's uncle who has his own delusions about reality.)

8. Dirigibles - 12 pp - An older couple lives alone on a mountain, with the wife suffering from cerebral palsy. The wife isn't eager for a visit from a man who was a co-worker of theirs on an island ferry. The husband is eager to show old home movies of their younger days, but when the man shows up, both he and the couple have surprises in store for each other.

One reviewer called these stories "wise, beautiful, and necessary" and I think that's right (Baxter). Here is a quote from the first story of the collection, "Settled on the Cranberry Coast," "I was drunk but not drunk enough to say what I wanted, that we don't live our lives so much as come to them, as different people and things collect mysteriously around us" (Byers 13). To my ear, Byers has a keen and compassionate wisdom about life and people, but that his aesthetic judgment wants something, especially in the endings to the stories, which seem to strain for the iconic, beautiful, and quaint in a way that the stories themselves fall into, without effort. Byers is a Seattle native and who, in his late twenties, is already winning some significant literary prizes. After publishing this collection, his first book, he went to teach at Stanford. They're all based in Seattle, or its surrounding cities, which would endear the collection to me even if the writing were not so good as it is.

the emotional range of these is boggling- from gentle longing and the uncertainties of parenthood to what may be revenge, madness... all told with layers of hope, strength and ultimately optimism. perhaps there's hope for all of us.

"This I know: our lives in these towns are slowly improving": so begins Michael Byers's book of stories of seaside middle-class folk traveling and exploring their way through their misty days. The improvement is indeed slow, as characters feel their way to a deeper relationship to life, to people, to passion. Byers replicates authentic experience with a skilled eye for detail. Each story presents a captivating drama of human emotion that never delves into melodrama. So many short stories claim to explore "the ordinary" but wind up mired in the mundane, the bland, the mediocre; Byers's stories are richer, yet always approachable. An interesting collection of stories that provoke thought and reflection upon completion.

I have read an advance copy of this book, and I cannot find enough superlatives to describe it. Byers employs an understatement that is both simple and profound. His hands-off storytelling puts the reader in the middle of the emotional and psychological dramas that he creates. His characters are real, and we feel their thoughts as if they were our own.

Byers' star is undoubtedly on the rise. This debut is only the beginning of a long and promising writing career.

Byers writes with remarkable sensitivity and perception. He takes you into the lives,...indeed, the souls....of his characters. His writing style is smooth and flowing,....a perfect bok for an fternoon in front of a fireplace. The best short stories I've read since Tina Brown took over the New Yorker.

I picked up this book after returning from a trip to the Northwest. These stories are as refreshing and beautiful as the landscape in which they are set. Some are extremely moving; in fact, it was hard to stop thinking about them after I had finished. There is a nice range of topics and characters here, some unlikable, but all true to life.

Byers has a quiet way of writing that is lyrical but not overwrought. I am looking forward to reading other works by him and definitely plan to re-read some of the stories in this collection in the future.