We're in Trouble

We're In Trouble by Christopher Coake is one of those books - a collection of short stories - that just grabbed me absolutely from the moment I started reading (the opening story, In the Event, was perfectly pitched at me I think, and affected me more than a story's done in a while). Coake's just been named one of Granta's Best Young American writers, and on the basis of this, I look forward to seeing him live up to that in the years to come.

These stories are all about people faced with moments of transition, often deaths, and how their loves and lives buckle, bend and either take the strain or don't. Coake's characters stare death in the face and they react in the most human of ways; the book is filled with a sense of over-powering show more fear, with the possibility of strengthening as a result of it. It's an often bleak read, but there is something redemptive in how many of the characters face their situations; as much as Coake writes of death and how we face it, he also gives a very real sense of love and how it can both shatter and persist. Though not all of the stories carry that tinge of hope, in those that do, it is the strength of the character's relationships that hints at how they will endure.

Some of the stories are more ambiguous...Cross-Country, in which a boy is driven across the States by a man who may or may not be his father ends on a deeply haunting image that juxtaposes a protective love with something far more menacing.

Though they share a common theme - characters in some sort of trouble, facing change and death - the stories are varied in style and tone. This is a writer already working at a high level, and these are the sorts of images and stories that are going to live on in my head for some time to come. show less

Seven short stories about people in trouble after witnessing or dealing with death, with superb dialogue. In Back Down to Earth, during a bedroom chat, a man tells his lover the story of his failure to rescue his dog at the edge of a precipice, and his witnessing the fall, feeling that he should fling himself after his dog, and that his act was so wrong that he had condemned himself. in All Babies Come From Heaven, a lesbian couple arguing about whether to have a baby find their positions reversed when one of them witnesses an automobile accident in which a toddler dies. Cross Country depicts the kidnapping of a child from the point of view of the kidnapper, the child, and another child on a different trip with his father. Ambiguities show more and subtleties abound. In A Single Awe, at a Christmas party, a wife realizes she no longer likes the husband she fell in love with and married because he saved a mother in a terrible accident and suffered burns as a result. I found the final story, All through the house, the weakest. Here, a police chief deals with the aftermath of his best friend killing his wife, his sons, and his inlaws. The scenes around the murder are well drawn. It's just that the murder itself strains credulity.

But all in all, a great debut. However, not something to read when you need some cheer. Because in one way or another, aren't we all in trouble? show less