Bruce VanWyngarden Bored by the high tide of warmed-over chicken-soup-for-the-soul drivel that's infesting The New York Times best-seller list these days? Burned out on Oprah's relentless New Age literary noodling? Weary of inspirational sweetness and light? Well, here - try some of this T.C. Boyle, kid. It'll clear the fuzz from your brain faster than a naked roll in the snow. T.C. Boyle's stories arc as dark and pungent as a double espresso from the bottom of the pot, as irresistible as leftover Chinese. As soon as you finish one. you want another. There are GS pieces in this "complete" collection, written over the past 25 years. The book is divided into three sections - Love; Death; and Everything In Between-which admittedly just about covers the waterfront "front, subject-wise. But what Boyle really writes about are the dark comic absurdities of human existence. His characters are helpless against the random, indifferent cruelty of the universe; the casual and inevitable stupidity of their fellow humans. Boyle's is a fierce, Swiftian pen, skewering middle-class insurance salesmen, radical vegetarians, mob hitmen, mad scientists, Ernest Hemingway, and even Lassie and Timmy with surgical precision. In "Modern Love," a hapless schmoe falls in love with a woman whose fear of germs leads her to insist on love-making with a full-body condom. In "King Bee," a well-intentioned, middle-aged couple adopt, and then attempt to cope with, a satanically mad child. In "A Women's Restaurant," a man descends into obsession - and drag clothing - in an effort to sample the imagined delights of a restaurant that excludes men. Boyle is a parodist of a high order. His satire is spot- on in story after story, taking on materialism, faddism, religion, sex, cultural insensitivity, science, and even literature itself. In "Big Game," the target is Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," and Boyle goes after it with an elephant gun. A California real estate agent (a species who, in Boyle's world, seems to have a special place in the seventh circle of Hell) signs on to hunt African wildlife on a racky big-game ranch near Bakersfield. As he drives his Jaguar through the Southern California landscape, he brags to his wife, "Didn't I say we'd do the African thing in six months? Didn't I?" Well, of course, he has to die. His wife, Nicole, is a "former actress/ model/poet/singer whose trainer had told her just two days earlier that she had perhaps the most perfectly sculpted physique of any woman he'd ever worked with." Well, of course, she has to die. Along with the sleazy, lecherous, fake-British-accented guide, and halfofhisworn-out animals. In fact, the only thing left standing at the end of this story is an avenging elephant. And Boyle's acidic sense of irony. Reviewers have compared Bo yle's work to H.L. Mencken, S.J. Perelman, Donald Barthelme, and even Groucho Marx, just to name a few. To that list I'd add Evelyn Waugh, particularly the dark, comic novel, A Handful of Dust which Boyle himself cited as a favorite in a recent interview. But Boyle is a Force unto himself. and this is a collection that you'll want to own. The Hemingway quote that opens "Big Game" pretty well sums up Boyle's take-no-prisoners approach to writing: "The way to hunt is for as long as you live against as long as there is such and such an animal." |