Product Description

Michael Byers's award-winning collection The Coast of Good Intentions tells graceful tales of achingly unresolved lives on the Pacific Northwest coast. Byers captures the lives of ferry workers, carpenters, park rangers, and adolescents leaving home, against a backdrop of crab factories, cranberry bogs, the fog-shrouded shore, and the Seattle skyline. A poignant debut collection, these stories are "richly peopled with compelling characters whose wisdom and experiences span the generations" (San Jose Mercury News).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1252656 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-23
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 163 pages

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.

From Booklist
In the first sentence of the first story of this astonishing debut collection, Byers asserts, almost as a statement of faith, that our lives are slowly improving. The stories--set in the Pacific Northwest and dealing with men and women, young and old, in a variety of occupations and circumstances--mostly bear out that assertion. Of course, the damaged lives that Byers describes have plenty of room for improvement. A programmer of computer games cannot escape the maze of his own debilitating emotions following the death of his wife. A geology teacher can't let loose of the wife who deserted him. A young girl, abandoned by her mother, won't even try to connect with her new acquaintances. Yet all of these people progress slowly, haltingly, through small but authentic epiphanies, toward better lives, or at least toward an appreciation and acceptance of the lives they have. These powerfully affecting stories are wise and true, and they should not be missed. Dennis Dodge

From Kirkus Reviews
A strong debut collection of eight stark stories about decent, ordinary people getting on with life in the Pacific Northwest. Starting with the beginning piece, ``Settled on the Cranberry Coast, in which a paunchy, retired teacher turned carpenter lands his first job rebuilding the house of a woman he had a major high-school crush on years agoa house she now shares with her granddaughterthe themes of dysfunctional, distended families and scarcely nameable yearnings come to the fore. While middle age is often a focus, younger men alone also figure prominently. In ``In Spain, One Thousand and Three,'' a computer-game designer, recently widowed, manifests distress in the form of lusty thoughts about every female he comes in contact with--including his dead wife's mother; in ``Wizard,'' a budding playwright's debut, a romantic tale about Thomas Edison's much younger first wife, opens a door into his fantasy life that the actress in the role willingly steps through. The most sustained story here, ``A Fair Trade,'' while having almost no men in it, still links thematically with the rest. Young Andie goes to live with her aunt Maggie on the rustic edge of Seattle after her father is killed in action in WWII. Wary of men, Maggie instills in her niece a love of independence, even though she falters by getting involved with someone who becomes more than merely possessive regarding Andie, forcing them to move. Andie grows up and out of touch with Maggie, marries, divorces, moves east, then returns to Seattle in her 50s a fully independent professional believing herself cut from the same cloth as her aunt--only to find Maggie's life not what it seemed. The sensitivity to simple human drama is acute in all of these stories, and rather than being ruined by a certain sameness, they offer steady reassurance that quiet determination can make a difference. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

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.

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.

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.