You Would Have Told Me Not To

May 25, 2020
Across six stories and one novella, Coake (You Came Back) addresses well-worn themes like divorce and death, yet writes with a flair that keeps his narratives engaging. In the title story, Suzanne drives through the night in swirling snow “she could only describe as malevolent” to help care for her estranged son, Sean, after he’s been shot. Once she arrives, she learns he is married; his wife, Abby, is pregnant; and Suzanne’s ex-husband has also been summoned. “Waste,” the best of the bunch, concerns a group of hard-up men hired to illegally remove barrels of toxic waste from an Indianapolis building to make room for a new church (“Harvey follows God’s law, but he’s a little more flexible about man’s”). Mick, the narrator, can’t help wondering if another worker is his son, the result of his sleeping around decades earlier. And in the novella, “Big Guy,” Doug, a divorced, overweight high school English teacher, forces himself to diet. He dates another overweight teacher, and as he loses weight, he desires a skinnier partner. These stories are never dull thanks to rich prose and sharp dialogue. With humor and heft, Coake hammers home the ways the past can boomerang to change the present.

May 15, 2020
Seven sharp stories that dwell on relationships both good and bad but never fully resolved. In "That First Time," the first entry in Coake's bittersweet story collection, Bob, a middle-aged man in a dying marriage, learns that Annabeth, a high school fling, has died. She didn't mean that much to him, but Bob was the first person Annabeth had sex with. Her friend Vicky, who delivers this news, seems oddly on edge about Bob's relative lack of emotional investment, but the twist ending is both crushing and shows just how differently our pasts can shape us. Coake, who won the PEN/Bingham Prize for his debut collection, We're in Trouble (2005), has developed a deceptively simple style that nicely serves his setups, which turn on simple tensions that grow increasingly complex. In "Waste," a day laborer is joined by a new employee who looks remarkably like him, sparking questions about whether they're father and son and about the fate of the young man's mother. Lisa, the protagonist of "This Will Come As a Surprise to You," learns that her abusive ex-husband is planning to remarry and is at odds about what she should say (if anything) to his new fiancee. The conflict is predictable in "Getaway," about a wayward young man working at a summer resort who's torn between his budding relationship with a girl and his admiration of the Don Juan who brings a new beauty to a deluxe cabin every weekend. But with room to play with, Coake can make simple conflicts sing: The closing novella, "Big Guy," concerns an obese man (336 pounds at his heaviest) whose weight-loss plan opens new frontiers for him physically and romantically but leaves unresolved his anxiety over sex, accomplishment, and how to address past romantic wounds. Fitness can make us better, Coake suggests, but what if it just makes us better at cultivating resentment and spite? Clean, unfussy storytelling in service of messy lives.

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