Kid Coole by M. G. Stephens, and: King Ezra by M. G. Stephens (review)

Abstract

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Reviewed by:

• Kid Coole by M. G. Stephens, and: King Ezra by M. G. Stephens
• John Schertzer (bio)

kid coole M. G. Stephens
Spuyten Duyvil
https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/kid-coole.html
280 pages; Print, $20.00 king ezra M. G. Stephens
Spuyten Duyvil
https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/king-ezra.html
314 pages; Print, $20.00

Poet, novelist, critic, memoirist, and playwright, Michael Gregory Stephens has written over twenty-five books in just over fifty years. He grew up in Brooklyn and on Long Island, and after teaching at Princeton, NYU, and Columbia he spent a number of years in London, where his plays were performed, as they were as well as in Chicago and Los Angeles. His novels Kid Coole and King Ezra were recently published by Spuyten Duyvil.

Kid Coole is cool, meaning you can trust him with your fifteen-year-old daughter. Ya think, though you have your suspicions. He doesn't drink, smoke, or stay out late at night, and he might prefer you, her thirty-year-old mom, who thinks she wants nothing to do with him. Nah, Kid is living the straight and narrow, though he at times cannot find his way back to his corner, maybe because he is punch drunk, or has blood in his eye.

His story is a boxing story, and that's because boxing is his way of being, of navigating his way through life. But his trainer, Bill Flaherty, or Billy Farts, still needs to hire the massive Ralph Half-Dog as the third corner guy, the spit guy, because he's something you can't miss, and Kid does seem to have a bit of trouble finding his way back to his corner after taking a few punches. [End Page 67]

Ralph is Mike White's son-in-law, and Mike works for Billy. Mike's face is pretty scarred up, as is his body, from fights, but also from things unrelated to the ring, living on the street as a man of color, getting stabbed, shot at. He's much safer in the gym. But his biggest scar is the one he has on his chest down to his gut from heart surgery, a thing he shares with Billy.

Compared to them, Kid is young and fresh. And always cool. A likable guy, always respectful, very coachable, works out all the time, running this way and that through the streets of some small town called Sticks in Upstate New York, throwing punches at the wind, at no one, as he skitters to and fro when he's not at his job cleaning up the park or mopping floors at the Catholic school.

The characters of Kid Coole are embodied with a credible grit, a novel that follows from Stephens's much earlier Season at Coole (1972) and The Brooklyn Book of the Dead (1994), about a large, problematic, and freakish Irish American family from Brooklyn, Long Island, and seemingly the rest of the world. Kid is the youngest of them, and he's all about one thing: the ring.

It's a story that lives viscerally, as though recounted—life among the not-quite-desperate nobodies who crackle like somebodies by virtue of their desperate spirit. He may not be a tough guy, but Kid is tough enough. He's not quick, but he's quick enough. It's his will and stubbornness that could make him a champ if nothing else. These are not celebrities, but they burn and shine like they could be. They've got hustle, and they know all there is to know about fighting.

Kid's distinction is that there are fighters and there are boxers, and he is the latter. It's his technique, his knowing how to dance around the ring, but that doesn't mean he doesn't get clocked hard in the head from time to time, and he's always faced with the possibility of getting cut on the eye too much, of gaining a vulnerability that would end his career. It's bad enough being blinded by having blood in your eye, or the blur because you've been thumbed, but losing an eye because...