American writers tend not to be the most forgiving of individuals. However erudite, few can resist a playground scrap, in print or in person. Sinned against, even fewer can resist retaliating. Ezra Pound's verdict on e e cummings (a "razor blade without a handle") met with an equally tart riposte: "You're humane without being human."
But Christopher Coake, author of this new short-story collection, is a Very Nice Man. Even negative reviews - an infallible touchpaper to wounded writerly vanity - fail to provoke him. "If someone spends money on my book and doesn't like it, I'd tell them thanks for giving it a shot," Coake recently told an interviewer.
Such affability sits oddly with the ostentatious noir of We're In Trouble. The collection deals with death - which arrives in a variety of unpleasant guises, inclu-ding a head-on car collision, a multiple murder and the ravages of terminal cancer. Having conjured up these miseries, Coake is determined not to flinch. "We've Come To This" describes the planned suicide of a 79-year-old man in the final stages of bowel cancer, and features a graphic catalogue of medical horrors, including a gruesome description of a suppurating, fist-sized bedsore. Coake is fond of these quasi-clinical details - car-crash victims' eyes have haemorrhaged to black, while the face of a suicide is grey, with stinking bile streaming from the mouth.
Fuelled by these details, the stories explore the private thoughts of Everyman - or, as all but one of the stories are set in Middle America, Every Area Man - in moments of crisis. A feckless musician whose two best friends die in a midnight car crash, leaving him legal guardian to their three-year-old son, is "pretty damn well freaked out". A drifter on parole, whose girlfriend has been "bugging him all day to get his ass in gear", wonders why he's treating their fatal road trip "like some big fucking tragedy".
Coake accurately renders the attenu-ated lingua franca of malls, highways and offices, but offers little beyond it. It would be glib to allow him the Bret Easton Ellis defence of reportage - contempor-ary American culture is uniformly bland and featureless/shallow and unpleasant, so my writing can be, too. The monotony of We're In Trouble is Coake's fault, not that of his characters.
Reading on, however, it becomes clear that these stories seek to justify them-selves on emotional, rather than aesthetic, grounds. "All we have to put between us and horror is love and loyalty," Coake has said. "Even the bleakest of my stories is bleak because of love." The book is, in fact, bullishly anti-literary. It manufactures significance by invoking the word "love" - most often, and least imaginatively, between lovers. It never questions the sanctity of feelings, especially The Feeling.
Despite the cliches, these stories are the product of long years in creative-writing academia. Coake has an MA in creative writing from the confusingly named Miami University of Ohio, an MFA in fiction from Ohio State University, and has just been appointed assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada in Reno. These were not wasted years. At Ohio State, he befriended a British guest instructor of creative writing. "The indefatigable Mr Hornby," says Coake, "is responsible for my UK and Italian contracts." The bestselling author reciprocates with an emotive (if ambiguous) soundbite for the book's cover - "Sometimes, when you're reading these stories, you forget to breathe." So perhaps Pound and cummings had it wrong. As a new trend in American letters, niceness definitely makes business sense. Unfortunately, it does little for the writing.
