[.ca] The Coast of Good Intentions: Stories (ISBN 0618446516)

From Amazon.com:
Michael Byers grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and the stories in The Coast of Good Intentions evoke that region's cloudy and caffeinated landscape with impressive ease. He gives each location the particularity of a fingerprint: "The alders were in full leaf," Byers writes in a typical bit of Sensurround prose, "and the cranberry bog was a deep russet now in the middle of the summer. Down at the end of the road another little house sat, abandoned, its door gaping open as if to breathe, a tree growing through the windows. Somewhere we could hear a tractor. The ocean was a mile away, across the highway, invisible, but I could smell it, the salty air." Yet the author never indulges in merely bucolic scene-painting. Instead, he explores how the landscape shapes his characters, who seem alternately depressed and comforted by the perpetual sight of thunderheads "piling themselves against the Olympics, like gray balloons against a ceiling." What's more, Byers has a wonderful touch when it come to rendering the middle ground of happiness. In stories like "Shipmates Down Under" and "In Spain, One Thousand and Three," his protagonists seem to stagger under their allotments of disappointment--and remain surprisingly and persuasively alive to possibility. This would be a impressive debut for a late-blooming, middle-aged master. Coming from a 28-year-old, it's an astonishing performance, which makes the word precocious sound limp and irrelevant.

Wonderful book, wonderful teacher:
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.

Superlative:
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!

Quiet, expansive:
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.

Hmm,:
I guess a lot of people still like pretentious, tedious prose. I thought that was a big no-no these days. These things do tend to go in cycles though. I suppose if you're young enough, you've taken a writing course somewhat recently, and we all know where that can lead. The strange thing is when the word "understated" appears in so many reviews of this book. The only thing that could make this book more overstated would be two sentence-by-sentence appendixes, one describing the setting of each scene in the greatest possible detail, and the other containing essays about each individual emotion experienced moment-by-moment by each character.

A beautiful piece of work:
The short stories here are honest, smart, lively, and wonderfully observed. They are often mysterious in the way that the best poetry is mysterious. There are two stories, "Shipmates Down Under" and "In Spain, One Thousand and Three," whose endings I found deeply moving in ways I still don't understand. Michael Byers writes beautifully. His sentences lightly carry a remarkable load of striking metaphors and real-life anomalies. More important, he doesn't judge his characters as most young writers do; he questions them, explores their motives and the claims they make about their lives. He gives them, and the reader, a bit of breathing room. These stories floored me. I can't wait to read the man's novel.