Roughhouse Friday

Starred review from March 25, 2019
Coffin’s lyrical account of his eventful initiation into the world of amateur boxing takes readers to southeast Alaska. Unsettled after college, Coffin (A Chant to Sooth Wild Elephants) sets out westward from Maine, finally landing in Sitka after a thousand-mile solo sea kayak trip. He tutors at-risk students and, feeling isolated, takes up boxing at the local gym, eventually signing up for a Roughhouse Friday, an event in which anyone can fight for three one-minute rounds. As Coffin measures himself against a motley assortment of local fighters—including a 57-year-old ivory carver and the “Hoonah Hooligan,” a high school legend from a Tlingit village—he confronts his own emotional displacement caused by the childhood divorce of his Thai mother and tough Vietnam vet father, who imparted ideals of manhood through “his versions of Arthurian legends.” In measured, lucid prose, Coffin writes of fight night scenes (“The fight ring stood in the middle of the barroom, over the dance floor, glowing beneath neon tubes of light”) and of the insecurity of angry young men. He finds that he is losing faith in his father’s heroic myths even as he struggles to embody them; nevertheless, it’s his father to whom he continually turns for answers up until the end. This is a powerful, wonderfully written exploration of one’s sense of manhood.

April 1, 2019
Adrift in Alaska, a young man confronts his past and seeks direction by competing in a barroom boxing show in Juneau. In his second memoir, Coffin (Creative Writing/Univ. of New Hampshire; A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants, 2008) interrogates his close but conflicted bond with his father and his mythical ideals of masculinity. The author was a year out of college when he impulsively embarked on a solo kayaking journey from the San Juan Islands in Washington to Sitka, Alaska. There, he landed a job tutoring at a local high school. One evening, he met and sparred with Victor, a local boxing legend and coach. As Victor recognized the author's innate toughness, he encouraged him to enlist in a boxing event called Roughhouse Friday. Through these physically demanding, adrenaline-soaked matches, under Victor's expanding influence, Coffin began to unleash a long-suppressed rage, mainly directed toward his father but also against the subtle bigotry he experienced as the child of a white American father and a Thai mother. His father, a military psychologist, left his mother and their two children in Maine while Coffin was still a young boy and started a new family. The author's anger toward his father, though intently explored, feels somewhat unprocessed; there's a raw nerve left under the surface that the author may address in future writing. The strength of the narrative derives from Coffin's vivid and perceptive accounts of the boxing matches and the participants, each with varying boxing abilities and their own individual scores to settle. "Even the most raw, unskilled bouts," writes the author, "when watched with any empathy at all for the people in them, reveal a tender story about each fighter: what they are made of, who they are, what sadness they carry, what joy....I sometimes found myself leaving the ring feeling numb and dull while, on other occasions, I went back to my corner on the verge of confused tears." A compelling story of small-town boxing in Alaska and a complex examination of masculine identities.

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May 15, 2019
Coffin's Thai mother and GI father met during the Vietnam War, but, later, his father ended up living with the author's mother's best friend. Coffin never quite fit in his mother's world when she'd take him back to Thailand to visit her family, and he never felt completely comfortable with his father's new family. As a young man, he landed in Alaska, where he became involved with a group of amateur barroom boxers who competed in something called Roughhouse Fridays. Coffin's battles in the ring became a way for him to find a firm footing in the adult world. This is a very introspective memoir in which Coffin, who now teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire, dissects his family issues, especially those regarding his relationship with his father. There are some details about Coffin's training for his fights and a few blow-by-blow accounts of the fights themselves, but this isn't a boxing book. Instead, it describes a fascinating personal journey that takes place within the boundaries of makeshift, ragtag boxing rings. Beautifully written throughout, with a heartfelt, realistic conclusion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)