The Business of Naming Things
Michael Coffey
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 1934137863
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Superb. . . . Startlingly original.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“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, author of Jesus: The Human Face of God and The Last Station
“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, author of Self Portraits: Fictions and Tintin in the New World
“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, author of Inside a Pearl and A Boy’s Own Story
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.
Michael Coffey is the author of three books of poems and 27 Men Out, a book about baseball’s perfect games. He also co-edited The Irish in America, a book about Irish immigration to America, which was a companion volume to a PBS documentary series. He divides his time between Manhattan and Bolton Landing, New York. The Business of Naming Things is his first work of fiction.
river would fill the valley with water destined for the suburbs of Boston. Mrs. White, out there in Iowa, west of Dubuque, would often imagine their basement back home, the one now solid with sludge, a small, packed room at the bottom of a vast lake; at other times it would suit her to think of their old family rec room, which her husband had built, its paneled walls and dry bar and slate pool table sitting unchanged in a cube of clear lake water—though they sold the table, that’s how I see it.
solid, beveled head and accusing eyes, came through the door, his cashmere coat swinging from his broad shoulders like the cape of a warrior, a garment he seemed to expect someone would relieve him of, so that then he could fire off a few quick combinations like a fighter, or, presto, produce a handkerchief from a sleeve and release a dove. An elegant woman with a cap of short silvery hair followed in his wake, looking bemused. She did not remove his coat and they did not stay for a drink, as I
the outset that this was to be an inquiry into writing style and its connection (if any) to the experience of adoption. I would take Profane Friendship for him to sign. I was certain he loved this book—because it was a clear embrace of love between men, and here he was, dying of AIDS and being accused of being a publicity bitch even as death made its way toward him, and of floating a fallacious chronology of when he got AIDS (in the 1970s, he wrote). I thought immediately, This is a time frame
says Clem. He produces a bottle of VO from beneath the counter. “There’s 7 Up and Coke and Fanta in the machine. Ice-cold.” Father Paul, surprising himself, declines, but does ring up a Coke bottle, which dropped out of the big red machine like ordnance. The bleakness of it—man and soda, November afternoon. “Ice-cold all right,” he says, palming it. “Thanks, Clem. Bless you.” Halfway through the door, Father Paul turns. “Clem, Inn of the Nations. What nations?” But Clem has retired to the
stool and spread his shit. —Ya, excuse me, you say, not budging. He wobbles, the plastic groans, but he’s not moving. —Gimme a cherry Coke, Sam. And a Danish. Now what’s wrong with the rebel Robert Emmet Doherty? He sniffs, like he could deduce. —I don’t know that anything’s wrong. I’m standing here. —Sam, says Big Mick. His jowls jiggle like there’s small rodents shifting around. Herman Beilan, he bellows. One of yours, Sam? Gotta be. —That I don’t know. That’s fifteen cents. Want a straw?