Michael Coffey - In this book, part memoir, part criticism, and part poetry, Coffey deftly weaves multiple voices into a fractured but unified whole that strongly resonates with the digital age. Highly addictive, fiercely challenging, and lusciously readable—if you ever wondered what Beckett might sound like in the twenty-first century, this is it

 

Michael Coffey, Samuel Beckett Is Closed, OR

Books, 2018.

http://michaelcoffeyauthor.com/

excerpt: http://michaelcoffeyauthor.com/excerpt/

A powerful, genre-defying meditation, with Beckett at its origin, that touches on mysteries as varied as literary celebrity, baseball, and why we feel the need to be cruel to one another

Like a Picasso or Einstein, Samuel Beckett is one of those few paradigm-shifting figures who reshaped how we think and create.

Following the schema of Beckett’s unpublished “Long Observation of the Ray,” of which only six manuscript pages exist, Michael Coffey here interleaves multiple narratives, and does so in sentence units of increasing and diminishing quantities, according to an arithmetic sequence laid out by Beckett in his notes. This rhythmic interpenetration of themes and genres—personal memoir, literary criticism, Beckett studies, accounts of state-sponsored torture, plus an Arabian Tale and even baseball play-by-play—produces a construct at once sculptural and theatrical, and by turns mathematical, lyrical, and brutally artless, a new form of creative narrative answering to a freshened rule set.

In executing Beckett’s most radical undertaking—one scholar referred to “Long Observation of the Ray” as a “monument to extinction”—Coffey salvages a Beckett project from a half-century ago and brings it to the surface, with the contemporary markings of its hauling. Although Beckett, like any writer, had his share of abandoned works, he was in the habit of “unabandoning,” on occasion. Coffey’s concluding Part Three gives the complicated proceedings over to what seems to be a single voice, one distilled from all the others, speaking in an empty theater of the need, the wish, to keep speaking. In the long battle that is the book, a settlement is reached between Being and form, a kind of mutual foreclosing, like a curtain dropping.

“Coffey joins Beckett in a ghostly collaboration . . . a rewarding challenge. . . . Coffey takes 'a colossal figure' whose 'form-shattering masterpieces' can seem hermetic and obscure, deliberately closed off, and opens him up in a way we haven’t seen.” - The New York Times

In his new book–part memoir, part criticism, and part poetry–Michael Coffey deftly weaves multiple voices into a fractured but unified whole that strongly resonates with the digital age. Highly addictive, fiercely challenging, and lusciously readable—if you ever wondered what Beckett might sound like in the twenty-first century, this is it.— Kenneth Goldsmith

“Samuel Beckett Is Closed makes us experience simultaneously several narratives deployed in subtle counterpoint. These varied voices show the relevance of Beckett’s oeuvre in a world dominated by exploitation, torture, state violence and unbridled capitalism. Such a polyphonic mode of engagement with literature and history. . . opens all the doors at once, turning Beckett’s alleged minimalism into a vibrantly maximalist Irish critique.”— Jean-Michel Rabaté

Ashape-shifting fictional tribute to the novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett (1906-89), borrowing its structure from one of his works.

In 1976, the elliptical, Nobel-winning writer started an unfinished piece, “Long Observation of the Ray,” that proposed a method of writing around nine “themes” in a highly precise way, prescribing the number of sentences in recurring sections. Like Oulipo and other fussy literary organizational schemes, the end product risks becoming cold and abstruse, but Coffey (The Business of Naming Things, 2015, etc.) generates a decent amount of warmth adapting the concept and weaving alternating Beckett-themed story threads, distinguishable by different fonts. Among the strands: a critical essay on Beckett’s work; an unnamed narrator trying to imagine a story that’ll help his lover fall sleep; a fictionalized story of Beckett bemusedly attending a 1964 Mets double-header at Shea Stadium (“There’s a lot of futility in this game,” Beckett notes); and narratives of post–9/11 terrorism, from reports on treatment of Gitmo prisoners to recollections of the 2015 Paris attacks. Coffey doesn’t labor to make each section connect in obvious ways, but over the course of the book the fragmentary pieces help construct an overall defense of Beckett as more of a moral author than he’s given credit for. The abstract fatalism that defined works like Waiting for Godot was shaped by Beckett’s experience of World War II, Coffey argues, pushing him to contemplate both a sense of defeat and the need to press on after catastrophe, “an aesthetic credo that secured the moral ground enabling art to continue after Auschwitz.” Deep familiarity with Beckett's work isn’t essential to appreciate Coffey’s, but an affinity for Beckett’s worldview and gamesmanship helps; Coffey sustains a dark, contemplative mood but leaves a few cracks for humor and optimism to enter.

A complex but emotionally effective tribute to the Irish author. - Kirkus Reviews

Coffey (The Business of Naming Things), former co-editorial director of Publishers Weekly, blurs genre and form in a clever exploration of the ways in which art gives life meaning. He pulls inspiration from Samuel Beckett, framing the book with a sequence detailed in Beckett’s notes and utilizing some of Beckett’s “failed” work, including an unpublished manuscript called “Long Observation of the Ray.” Braiding criticism, biography, memoir, literary excerpts, global terrorism reports, and other appropriated texts, the independent narratives begin to evince similar themes. As one of the book’s unnamed narrators resolves to better understand the obsession with Samuel Beckett—“Why Beckett?”—moments arise in which the multiple narratives fit together. These intersections act as a reminder that, while searching for purpose, “even if you think you are caught going nowhere, you are going somewhere.” The book demands active reading and participation in its abstractions. Ultimately, readers must make the connections between Coffey’s personal reflections, the texts he has culled, and Beckett’s abandoned projects. The poetic deconstruction of language is shrewd and prompts consideration of how a given story is interpreted, resulting in a stimulating and singular work. - Publishers Weekly

ONE REASON FOR WRITING is to transmute suffering, to tame it, cauterize it with words. Naming things gives us power, reassurance. So does form. As Hannah Arendt puts it: “The story reveals the meaning of what would otherwise remain an intolerable sequence of events.” Joan Didion expresses a similar idea — paradoxically, in an essay that dramatizes the breakdown of narrative form: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Samuel Beckett’s work is unique in part because it refuses to manacle what he calls “being” into standard narrative forms. “If anything new and exciting is going on today, it is the attempt to let Being into art,” Beckett said, “to let in chaos and what is not ordered.”

Michael Coffey finds evidence of Beckett’s anti-narrative streak in a little-known text written and abandoned in the mid-1970s, “Long Observation of the Ray.” In it, Beckett meditates on the difficulty of objective observation, attempting to document a ray of light passing through a closed cube (in later drafts a sphere). For Coffey, the closed space of the sphere evokes the interior of the body or mind, a dark chamber through which light and images from the outside flicker. By choosing to model his fictional tribute to Beckett on “Ray,” Coffey foregrounds one of the most important, if uncomfortable, characteristics of Beckett’s work: its rejection of whatever salvific, soporific, or anesthetizing pleasures narrative offers. Beckett’s mode of writing drives us deeper into the restless rhythms of living, rather than whisking us off to a chaos-free world like Yeats’s Byzantium. This isn’t to say that Beckett’s work is devoid of beauty. It isn’t. But it refuses to make sense — I mean syntactical, semantic sense — of human suffering. Comedy, yes — for comedy allows us to face what is, not bury our heads in the sand — but sense, no.

Coffey opens Samuel Beckett Is Closed (OR Books, 2018) with an epigraph from Beckett: “Being is constantly putting form in danger.” The sentiment finds ample resonance in a hybrid work that blends literary criticism, personal narrative, prose poetry, and reportage. Coffey is no stranger to literary experimentation, and here he picks up Beckett’s own experimental thread and continues to spin it.

But perhaps “thread” is not the best metaphor for anti-narrative. Instead of one thread — a unified, linear story line — Samuel Beckett Is Closed features contrapuntal voices, differentiated by subject matter, style, and (thankfully) typeface. The book is delightfully aware of its metaphors — “‘Fugue in E Minor,’ please,” requests Samuel Beckett’s character. The voices in Coffey’s book are independent yet speak across to each other, creating thematic, rhythmic, and phonic areas of overlap. The book’s conceit is complicated enough to drive a reader to frustration, but Coffey is solicitous, teaching the reader his form. The book opens with an introduction to the four voices that make up its first section:

Four scenarios: 1) Samuel Beckett attends a baseball game in New York City. The Mets are playing. It is 1964. 2) A Coffey-like writer spends three years reading Beckett. 3) An unnamed narrator is asked to devise tales to put his beloved to sleep. 4) An interrogation is launched into interview tactics at Guantanamo Bay. Samuel Beckett, mentioned explicitly in two of the four sections, serves as a fil conducteur through the work as a whole. Once initiated, a reader can relish clever “cuts” between sections, humorous transitions, and returns to favorite scenes. An example:

The most congenial of the voices is also the most patently autobiographical. At the age of 62, with a limited number of reading years left — he estimates 20, if all goes well — Coffey describes his decision to spend three years reading Beckett. What the reader wants to know is also what Coffey’s narrator wants to know: why Beckett? So we’re launched on a literary quest with the affable narrator through the evolution of Beckett’s oeuvre: World War II, the postwar years, the tortuous deviations of his style, and Beckett’s troubled engagement with literary form. We encounter red herrings, critical watersheds, and academic conferences where Beckett’s works are enacted by literature professors in fugue (yes, it happens). This literary-critical journey is also an investigation into the heart of the self, as questions of identity and filiation emerge for Coffey (an adoptee) as they do in Beckett: “Yes, I was my father and I was my son, I asked myself questions and answered as best I could.” Coffey’s reading project takes him not only through the poetry, plays, and prose, but also into the voluminous “gray canon” of unpublished writings: notebooks, diaries Beckett kept during a trip to Germany in the 1930s, love affairs recorded in personal letters, self-translations, and abandoned works (including “Long Observation of the Ray,” which Coffey finds in the University of Reading’s Beckett archive).

Counter to this genial, autobiographical narrator runs a shadow voice, which, like a Shakespearean fool, inserts itself at intervals, thwarting the quest with whispers of doubt. We’re privy to the meta-monologue of a storyteller who invents tales to help his beloved sleep. In a self-consciously Beckettian style — the dangers of imitating Beckett for young and seasoned writers alike are discussed in a different section — the voice draws upon events from childhood, such as discovering the stiffened corpse of the neighbor’s cat under a porch: “Tom was dusty, yes. Hard as a suitcase, yes. Use the language, go ahead, use it all up.” With charming humor (“Love is an auditor, but not much of an editor”), the voice touches on the weather, the art of reading homes — spitiromancing, from the Greek spiti — and, predictably, The Arabian Nights, all the while probing what a story is and does: Does it put us to sleep? Stave off our execution? Perhaps in an effort to make sense of this, the narrator recounts one of Scheherazade’s tales, “The City of Brass,” in which the khalif’s explorers visit a splendid city deep in the desert. The city is full of riches, but its inhabitants are corpses, bearing signs of their destruction. Coffey’s narrator asks: “Will fiction keep the truth at bay or usher it forth? Does truth usher forth fiction or keep it at bay?”

The two remaining voices seem to be in a similar relationship of opposition, foils to each other. A dialogue between Beckett and his friend Richard Seaver at a Mets game is undercut by accounts of prison interrogations and terrorist attacks. Here, Coffey blends fact with imagination. In the summer of 1964, Beckett flew to New York to help with the shooting of Film. He didn’t particularly like the United States: “This is somehow not the right country for me,” he said. “The people are too strange.” But by all accounts he enjoyed his afternoon with Seaver at Shea Stadium watching the Mets, and he asked to stay through the whole doubleheader.

Coffey balances this scene of leisure and humor with descriptions of threats to culture and civilization, threats perpetrated by military personnel and by terrorist cells. Accounts of political violence in a book about Beckett and storytelling feel like reminders of our duty to remain awake to our political reality. Such an idea is in tune with Beckett’s political conscientiousness; he wrote Catastrophe (1982) to show support for Václav Havel, then in prison for his political activities. Coffey draws on the story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian man cleared of terrorism charges but imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for 14 years. He follows this with survivors’ accounts of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, then tells the story of 9/11 from the perspective of a 10-year-old. The tone of this section is factual, much like a news article, yet its unflinching treatment of its subject matter points to literature’s power to excavate terror: violence, persecution, and the universal predicament of living with numbered days — in other words, what many stories shield us from.

Aside from Beckett, Coffey’s most important interlocutor is Proust. Part two of Samuel Beckett Is Closed includes animated pastiches of the Recherche, including a drawing room scene with an artist named Peter Swan. Coffey playfully creates and dismantles literary characters, evoking the work of Beckett’s Malone (in Malone Dies), who tells himself stories as he waits for death, changing his protagonist’s name from Sapo to Macmann according to his whim. Imagining a heat blast incinerating his Proustian drawing room, Coffey asks what will accompany us “at that last instant, as we know it, when the dust and nonsense hardens into glass?” Coffey’s final section is a short play, featuring a character modeled on David Warrilow, the Beckett actor best known for his innovative staging of The Lost Ones. Throughout the book, Coffey compensates for what is lacking in his story line by focusing intensely on that one question: why Beckett?

Like any good quest, Coffey’s includes red herrings. As an adoptee curious about his parentage, Coffey follows with interest the rumors surrounding an avant-garde American poet whose mother had an affair with Beckett. But DNA tests indicate that Beckett is not the father, and Coffey wisely drops the inquiry: “[I]t is her story,” he writes, “not mine.” But filiation is an interesting topic to encounter in a book so hell-bent on reinventing narrative. Narrative demands continuity and requires the passing down of tradition. Beckett’s work, on the other hand, resists futurity. What to make of this? Inspired by the French critic Pascale Casanova (author of Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution), Coffey imagines Beckett to be a paragon of literary abstraction. Yet he finds irreducibly human components even in Beckett’s most abstract work, Worstward Ho. And so he settles on a middle course, reading Beckett neither in terms of a search for origins nor in terms of austere literary abstraction. He reads Beckett in terms of a search for the self.

Indeed, the most compelling answer to the question “Why Beckett?” has to do with Beckett’s way of writing about the self, what H. Porter Abbott calls autography — self-writing as opposed to life-writing, or autobiography. In 1945, on Dublin’s Dún Laoghaire pier (Beckett later changed this location to his mother’s room), Beckett had an epiphany about the role the self would play in his work: “[I]t was his self that would be his topic or at least the occasion for his explorations of the conditions and the impulse for expression.” But what Beckett does with this impulse is different, more radical than autobiography (I did this, I went there, this happened to me). Instead, his writing grapples with the act of living itself: what does it mean to be an I, to have a self, to look from the perspective of the self onto the world, to train one’s gaze on the within or the without, to inhabit cells that are decaying, dying, showing their age and their fragility as matter? Consider the opening of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing 4: “Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me?”

¤

What is it that makes Beckett an important figure for our time? Dirk Van Hulle asks this question in his introduction to The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (Cambridge, 2015). He speculates that it is the “unsentimentalized, humorous persistence of [Beckett’s] characters,” characters who go on “in spite of themselves, in spite of the world, in spite of death.” Thinking about Beckett’s “Long Observation of the Ray,” Coffey asks whether the work’s too-perfect form led Beckett to abandon it. For how could the “high priest of failure” create a “machine […] set in such a way as to pertain forever, defeating entropy”? This leads Coffey to identify Beckett’s “key philosophical, biological, and literary insight”: “Sustaining failure is the art of living […] facing failure and not surrendering to its darkness.”

A paean to the art of failure may seem grim, but there is a silver lining to Coffey’s work, which stems from his reading of Proust and from the title of Beckett’s late novella, Company. Citing the “‘company’ of which Proust wrote, the company of art that makes death ‘less bitter, less inglorious, and perhaps less certain,’” Coffey implies that what began for him as an interest in filiation has transformed into a discovery not of lineage but of company, of a fellow poet’s inspirational willingness to confront what is terrifying and vital.

Coffey’s book also speaks to how contemporary writers might stage an unmaking and remaking of form — one that serves as an ethical reminder of authorial limitations and of the porousness between the worlds we create and the political reality in which we live. By breaking rules of genre and narrative, by embracing experimental form, Coffey’s work raises questions about how contemporary artists might work to resist the status quo through a subversive, fragmentary style that makes it impossible for us to look away from our political reality. Now, more than ever, we have much to learn from Beckett. - Amanda Dennis

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/life-writing-samuel-becketts-literature-of-disorder/

You ask several times in the book, ‘Why Beckett.” So, why Beckett?

You could ask not only why Beckett but why mention it. I mention it because I think that being transparent about the genesis of such a project is important. It is being honest. Not everyone cares to see process in a work of art, but there you have it. And in Beckett’s work itself, the mechanics of things are stripped down, laid bare. There is very little artifice. But plenty of invention. A principle interest of mine was really “What Beckett?” That is, what would such an innovator be doing today, given today’s technologies and global politics. Whatever I have learned thus far is in this book, to a point. I am still at it.

What are you learning?

For one thing, I’m learning about what’s not possible and how that can be an assertion. And how to go forward from there. Beckett makes camp in negation, and builds a fire there. He looks out from there into a dark. The famous end toThe Unnamable—“You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”—is no joke. Go to those places in those many dark weird texts where identity comes apart and realize what going on means.

And in any attempt to get a handle on Beckett takes you to into interesting territory—to classical music, Irish history, Continental philosophy, World War II, abstract painting, the French language. For a quiet man his interests were voracious. Beckett scholarship has ranged far beyond those seminal early essays by Maurice Blanchot and Theodor Adorno and the studies by Ruby Cohn and Lawrence Harvey. Now, with James Knowlson’s authorized biography, the recently released four volumes of letters, and the digital manuscript project going on in Antwerp, the study of his works is vibrant all around the world.

How does this book relate to your other works?

Since my first book of poems, Elemenopy in 1996, I have been interested in influences, looking for my own voice through that of others. In that book, Jackson Mac Low and Gertrude Stein held enormous sway, and I now realize that I was appropriating texts (Stein’s “Portraits and Repetition”) back then. In subsequent books, the influences of Ron Silliman, Steve McCaffery, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, James Joyce, and some lesser writers like Harold Brodkey and J.F. Powers are rather clear.

What inspired you to import a formal organizational scheme from an abandoned Beckett work and then transform by both extension and contraction?

When I ran across Steven Connor’s essay on Beckett’s abandoned work, “Long Observation of the Ray,” I was thrilled to realize that Beckett clearly played with systems. Having read a lot of Mac Low, and John Cage and several of the Fluxus and Language poets, I liked systems. I felt there was virtue in some compositional restraints, but I had never thought Beckett would agree. Yet in his scheme for “Long Observation,” he appeared to explore an interior space—an absolutely closed space—by mechanically visiting nine themes about that place and doing so in orderly waves of prose. At this time, I was working on eight or nine ideas all having to do with Beckett. After reading Connor’s essay, I thought of interleaving my ideas per the Beckett plan. I thought—impossible! But one night, I dreamt that my job was to make large towers out of layers of felt and stones, one upon the other upon the other, and so I got up and cut-and-pasted four themes, one upon the other and so on. I could see that it was working, that the rhythmic delays and resumptions of themes was both exciting and agitating. Its disruption of normative narrative allowed light and silence to splash through.

Although you have used found texts in the past—or as we now say, appropriated content—you have deployed it here, it seems, in large scale—torture diaries, military interrogation manuals, newspapers reports of terrorist attacks, a tale of Scheherazade’s. What does this bring to the book?

I thought a lot about what Beckett might be doing today as an artist. He died in 1989, before email, before the Internet. But is his career he reacted quickly to new technological developments. When it became possible to write for radio, he did; when it became possible to write and design for television, he did; when it became possible to make a movie, he did. What would Beckett do today? I cannot help but think that the dispersion of self in social media would have interested him and he might just have thought text and image in some cloud were themselves material to be worked with, places to explore. Would he appropriate? Would he be organizing appropriations? All I can say is that my deep immersion in the Beckett aesthetic emboldened me to do so. That’s one reason for the appropriations.

The second reason is less about the justification for such a formal intervention than the specificity of what I chose to appropriate, and why. I wanted my book to be true to something that is true of a typical Beckett work. My decision to appropriate the Guantanamo diaries of Mohamedou Ould Slahi seemed the best way to honor true suffering, and also was another way to convey a central experience of several Beckett works–What Where, How It Is, Endgame, Happy Days, Not I. They depict forms of torture, some stylized, some direct. I guess there is another reason as well, not for appropriation as such but for the terror themes, and this is simply the times we live in. Sometimes historicizing is inevitable.

I must ask you about one of the story lines in your book that is abruptly dropped, that of the rumor that Beckett fathered a child.

I heard that rumor at a dinner party some years ago. It was stated as fact. Of course, I knew different! I had read three biographies of Beckett: he was childless. I had even read essays about his anti-natalism. But I did my own research and it was tantalizingly plausible that he had had a child in the late 1930s, but it has never been proven. It seems to have been disproved. Yet it persists as a kind of myth in certain quarters.

But why is it in the book, and in the book only to be dropped?

Well, the book’s first spark was the Beckett quote, “Being is constantly putting form in danger.” This statement can resonate in countless ways—philosophically, aesthetically, politically, socially– but for me it had a personal resonance. Much of my life has been marked by a formal mystery—who I was spilled beyond what I knew of my origins. It was the mystery of who my parents were and where I was from. Until I was 50, I did not know. The issue of inheritances has always preoccupied me, and as a writer, literary inheritances even more. In that “Beckett’s daughter” is a writer, I was fascinated by that dynamic, that is, an aesthetic developing in the presence of gaps and silences. In that this preoccupation was an important engine in the book’s early going, I was unwilling to erase or suppress it–to quote from my epigraph, it is part of the “context of the continuum it nourished.”

What about the baseball game chatter between “Sam” and “Dick?”

Beckett and Richard Seaver—during Beckett’s only trip to America, in the summer of 1964, to make Film starring Buster Keaton—went to a Mets game at Shea Stadium. Seaver tells the story in his memoir. Seaver worked at Grove Press, but had known Beckett since his days in Paris. The two of them sat through a doubleheader featuring the two worst teams in baseball, by far. And since Beckett is, soi-disant, a connoisseur of failure, Sam’s witnessing of such futility on the baseball field seemed too good a thing to pass up. And the nine innings—I cover each inning—helps orient the reader through the first nine sections of the book.

Lastly, tell us about the title.

I went through a few working titles–Why Beckett? Sam Beckett’s Blues, Statement—until I saw a photo of a traffic sign on the approach to the Samuel Beckett Bridge in Dublin: “Samuel Beckett Closed.” It was exactly right, as by that time I had come to understand that Beckett’s late work was all about closed spaces. No more wandering the countryside, or living in London, or running around within big houses with surrounding parkland, as in Watt. Even the language, never mind the scenery, begins to foreclose on itself via subtraction in the very last works.

Is Beckett now closed for you?

Yes, but there’s no getting out.

http://michaelcoffeyauthor.com/interview/

Michael Coffey, The Business of Naming Things, 

Bellevue Literary Press, 2015.

excerpt: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/moon-over-quabbin/

 Among these eight stories, a fan of writer (and fellow adoptee) Harold Brodkey gains an audience with him at his life’s end, two pals take a Joycean sojourn, a man whose business is naming things meets a woman who may not be what she seems, and a father discovers his son is a suspect in an assassination attempt on the president. In each tale, Michael Coffey’s exquisite attention to character underlies the brutally honest perspectives of his disenchanted fathers, damaged sons, and orphans left feeling perpetually disconnected.

 “Once I started reading these stories, I couldn’t stop. They absorbed me thoroughly, with their taut narratives and evocative language—the language of a poet.” —JAY PARINI

“Sherwood Anderson would recognize this world of lonely, longing characters, whose surface lives Coffey tenderly plumbs. These beautiful stories—spare, rich, wise and compelling—go to the heart.” —FREDERIC TUTEN

“Whether [Coffey is] writing about a sinning priest or a man who’s made a career out of branding or about himself, we can smell Coffey’s protagonists and feel their breath on our cheek. Like Chekhov, he must be a notebook writer; how else to explain the strange quirks and the perfect but unaccountable details that animate these intimate portraits?” —EDMUND WHITE

 “Coffey name-drops some serious literary heavyweights in the pages of his stories. Harold Brodkey, J.F. Powers, Henrik Ibsen and James Joyce all make an appearance. But that doesn’t mean that these stories are only for ‘pointy-headed’ literary types. Coffey’s writing hearkens back to stylists of 40 or 50 years ago and his subject matter is ‘meat and potatoes’ basic: the relationships between men and women and fathers and sons.” ―WAYNE ROYLANCE

The riveting prose in Coffey’s first collection of stories leaves the reader feeling unsettled and unmoored. In “Sunlight,” a man named Michael who works for Publishers Weekly (where Coffey was co-editorial director before retiring earlier this year) visits Harold Brodkey as he’s dying of AIDS. Michael believes that being an adoptee is the “source of all his problems” and asks Brodkey, who’s also an adoptee, whether being adopted prevented him from writing a “conventional narrative.” This sense of unrest and disquiet adds depth to the eight stories, which are varied but share certain themes, returning repeatedly to relationships between fathers and son and husbands and wives. There is no conventional narrative here. Coffey brilliantly examines the efforts of a mother to cope with her son’s death in “Moon Over Quabbin”; he uses the J.F.K. assassination as a backdrop to a tale about a sinful priest in “Inn of the Nations”; and, in “Sons,” he explores a difficult father-son relationship in the context of a possible Obama assassination attempt. This collection, which features first-, second-, and third-person narration, is vibrant and unsparing. - Publishers Weekly

A clutch of well-crafted stories, thick with literary references, that turn on busted relationships between men and women and fathers and sons.

Harold Brodkey, James Joyce, J.F. Powers, Henrik Ibsen—each of these writers finds his way into the eight stories in this first work of fiction by Coffey (Days of Infamy, 1999, etc.). The name-checked authors hint at some of Coffey’s chief concerns—masculinity and faith most prominently—as well as his approach to style. “Inn of the Nations” centers on a priest who’s lost his passion for his calling and pursues an affair with a nun; set shortly after the JFK assassination, the brief story describes how “he’d become hardened to his own sin” but is without religious sanctimony. The broader “Sons” pursues a similar theme, following an alcoholic poet as he worries that his son is complicit in a calamity that makes national news; in Coffey’s hands, the man’s drunken fog reveals his self-loathing even while he busily labors to obscure it. This collection's stories are carefully chiseled, and the prose is sometimes stiff, but Coffey will occasionally cut loose, as in the closing “Finishing Ulysses,” which follows a professor eager to teach Joyce’s classic who’s out on the town in Philadelphia. Though short, the story has an appealingly jazzy, impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness rhythm. (“Smokes you need and why not the bennies. Some jump. Setting sun crashing into the façade of the church over there.”) Most of these stories capture men in decline, but one of the collection’s best is more tender: In “The Newman Boys,” the narrator recalls his brief childhood acquaintance with a neighbor boy diagnosed with hydrocephaly; the story captures the narrator’s narcissism, fears, confusions about adulthood—and, in its closing pages, a sense of how small kindnesses can resonate across decades.

Sober and smart writing that evokes the more mannered American stylists of the 1960s and '70s. - Kirkus Reviews

Michael Coffey, Blue Moon

Blue Moon: The First Collection Of Short Stories by Michael Coffey is an original work of fiction.Inside you will find thrilling stories crossing a variety of genres: adventure, crime, mystery, sci-fi, horror, and even some dark comedy. A must read for all those that enjoy strange tales and are intrigued by the unknown.

Michael Coffey, CMYK, O Books, 2005.

"Michael Coffey's CMYK is a sort of domino theory or primary-color Braille using word replacement for sounds--that is, his words are as if movable spaces, it being possible for these word-spaces like open, brilliant blanks or Guston blocks to be plugged in elsewhere in space. In that sense the text 'adds to' reality"--Leslie Scalapino. "Check out CMYK. It is odd in a strange way, and that's something hard to come by these days. A very particularizing and kind collaboration with it all--a roving, roaming, & re-reading risk--multicolored 'like' words. It says here: 'we belong to the page or the wall.'"--Rod Smith

Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black—with forms that mimic the basic tones from which all colors are blended and printed, this third outing from New York poet and PW executive managing editor Coffey returns to the experimental, procedure-oriented methods of his first, Elemenopy , and synthesizes them beautifully with the autobiographical modes of his second, 87 North . Much of the volume adapts or radically abbreviates preexisting texts: "Verbum" arranges verbs (just the verbs) from the Biblical creation story ("said Let be was saw was/ divided called called was was"). "Irish Love Poem" and "Imagisme" replace poems by (respectively) Mebdh McGuckian and Ezra Pound with (respectively) black and white squares and sets of ones and zeros—the binary code that is the foundation of word processing. The book's second half, if less cerebral, is just as rigorous and materials-oriented: "Holiday à la Carte" uses a dining journal from a European vacation to reflect on adult development: "When/ will I be/ what I've become? Ham,/ bleu cheese, baguette,/ Leffe Blonde and straw-/ berries." The longer "Datebook 2002" takes on the contemporary art scene and the legacy of Andy Warhol along with daily life in post-9/11 New York, achieving a low-key insouciance reminiscent of James Schuyler. With apparent self-revelations that turn out to be quotations, and jigsaw-like verbal constructions that depict pathos almost despite themselves, Coffey finds "what's in the brain that ink may character." - Publishers Weekly