In his darker fiction Thomas Hardy subscribed to the opinion that the deity guiding human events was malevolent rather than benevolent in character. Christopher Coake seems to share this conviction in We're in Trouble, his debut collection of short fiction. Auto accidents abound, playing major roles in at least three of the seven stories, with adverse weather a close second. People commit adultery, get cancer, brave elements. People die. These traumas are counterpoised by a detached, almost Soviet realism that is satisfying without being beautiful. Coake pays careful attention to the relationships between his characters, even if he sometimes does not have names for them beyond "the boy" or "the man". In "Solos" for example, a story about a mountain climber with a death wish, the narrator describes her father-in-law:
He smells like cigarettes and too much cologne. He is almost eighty years old, completely bald. He has Jozef's eyes, which are icy blue--but in Papa's head they are hard, frightening. Maybe this is because I know how growing up with him was. Papa seems to like me, but sometimes he looks at me, and I shiver, because he knows what I must know.
Most of the book is narrated in the present tense, making the moment of crisis just that much more visceral. Yet this is not edge-of-your-seat fare. In "Abandon", for example, we are filled more with anxiety than suspense as Brad and Mel, likable young outsiders, are trapped in an Upper Peninsula Michigan cabin by an early snow storm. It's the best piece in the collection, even considering the implausibility of a cabin in the UP that doesn't have a fireplace, or a young man who can't walk a mere 8 miles to town with light jackets in snow and 20-degree weather.
The other stories are over-sensationalized, recklessly crossing the line into tabloid fiction. Take "In the Event", where a perfect couple, killed tragically in a car accident (what else?) state in their will that their son should be cared for by a shiftless musician friend. Or the horrendous "All Through the House", grimly backing into the history of a murder-suicide. Babies flying out of cars? Dogs jumping off cliffs to chase balls? Coake, like many young writers, seems not to understand that a story has to be more than something to shock readers, that narrative actions and outcomes should be a direct result of flaws and strengths inherent in the characters. What puzzles me is that We're in Trouble was published by Harcourt, a premier literary house, and lauded by the likes of Kirkus Reviews and Believer. If this is what New York considers great literature these days, they're in trouble.