Beckett’s Children: A Literary Memoir

In this probing hybrid of literary analysis and memoir, Coffey (Samuel Beckett Is Closed), the former co-editorial director of Publishers Weekly, uses the rumor that Nobel winner Samuel Beckett was the father of poet Susan Howe as a springboard to explore themes of inheritance in his own life. Acknowledging that Howe reported establishing definitively she’s not Beckett’s daughter in the 1990s, when she was in her 50s, Coffey suggests that the decades of uncertainty may have nonetheless colored their oeuvres and explain the “presence of absence” that characterizes Howe’s poetry. An adoptee, Coffey draws parallels between Howe’s circumstances and his own uncertainty about the identity of his biological parents. In the book’s most affecting passages, Coffey compares the fraught parental relationships in Beckett’s fiction with his own struggles to support his son, Josh, through drug addiction, mental health problems, and prison stints. The elliptical prose evokes Beckett’s style (“Now to Josh, now out, now in, now back out, now me to him: somehow on, no how on”), and reproductions of text exchanges between Coffey and his son give the proceedings a profound sense of intimacy (one of Josh’s messages reads: “Nothing i do will ever be enough for you to just be happy for me”). The result is a potent and personal reflection on paternity. (July)