Boyle Redeems Life's Shady, Sorry Sneaks People do such mean and sneaky things to each other in T.C. Boyle's latest collection of stories that reading them all at once may be enough to sour you on humanity. But the stories are so good, you'll want to read them all at once anyway. In "She Wasn't Soft," for example, Paula, a young athlete, hooks up with Jason, a slacker guy, in a kind of opposites-attract relationship: "Just as she got a little frisson of pleasure from the swell of his paunch beneath the oversized T-shirt and his sleepy eyes and his laid-back ways, he admired her for her drive and the lean, hard triumph of her beauty and her strength." But where Paula is ruled by an iron determination to succeed, Jason lives by his impulses, and they cause him to pile up offense upon offense against her, while he justifies to himself his misbehavior. It's as complete a portrait of male resentment o£ women as you'll find, and Boyle's mastery of characterization enables him to make it both darkly comic and appalling. Drama of Resentment Beware the solitary male stewing in his own testosterone, Boyle seems to be warning. In "Killing Babies," the narrator, Rick, gets out of drug rehab and goes to work as a lab orderly for his brother, Philip, an obstetrician whose clinic is besieged by anti-abortion protesters. Philip's dedication to his work and determination to overcome obstacles is completely alien to Rick, who, like Jason in "She Wasn't Soft," has nothing but his own internal drama of self-justification and resentment to sustain him. Eventually Rick becomes fixated on a young patient at the clinic, and the howling protest mob drives him to a chilling act of vengeance. But not all of Boyle's stories are about sociopaths. Some are about aging, such as "My Widow," in which the narrator imagines the woman he has left behind to live out her days, surrounded by her cats and threatened by con artists. On the tour de force "Rust," cats and threatened by con artists. Or the tour de force "Rust," in which an elderly man falls in his back yard and is unable to summon his wife to help him get up. He lies there,' helplessly raging and reminiscing until she discovers he's gone - whereupon she trips over him and joins him in mutual helplessness. The story manages to be poignant and horrifying and very funny all at once. It's not just the elderly who suffer from the passage of years. In "Death of the Cool," a former rock star and TV writer-producer bitterly confronts his growing has-been status as he reaches middle age and is taunted by kids on the beach and a cocky burglar. And in "Going Down," when a blizzard causes a power failure, a man who has just turned 50 starts to read a science-fiction novel set in a world in which people start getting young again when they reach 50. He is so enthralled by the story that his concentration on the book never falters, eyen when he becomes aware that his wife, who went out shopping before the storm hit, has failed to return. Boyle intercuts his portrait of the solitary reader with excerpts from the novel that has him in its grip; the two layers of narrative result in one of the book's most haunting stories. The sense that civilization is on the brink of collapse is never far away in many of these stories. In "Friendly Skies" the awful discomfort and tedium of air travel is exacerbated by an extreme case of air rage. In "Peep Hall," a man discovers that a house in the neighborhood is the venue for a Webcam that continually spies on the nubile young women who have agreed to live there; he logs onto the site and is soon caught up in an obsession. Other stories are like moral fables, though Boyle's sureness of technique saves them from feeling didactic. "The Love of My Life" is a story about teen passion that takes a harrowing, tragic turn because of the characters' narcissism. The exquisitely creepy "The Black and White Sisters" is a comic parable about humanity divorced from nature. In it, a man agrees to help two women purge all color from their lives: They want all the grass, trees, flowers and shrubs removed from their yard and replaced with blacktop surrounded by a whitewashed fence. What's more, the crew that the narrator supervises is to consist of only white men in black jeans and T-shirts or black men in white jeans and T-shirts - "No Mexicans," the women order, and they want a too-tan guy named Sorenson replaced with someone "a little less sallow." This title story, placed at the end of the book, brings into focus many of the - themes that run through the others in the collection: the endless capability people have for making destructive choices, the sad vulnerability of human relationships, the emptiness of contemporary civilization, and the simultaneously corrupting and tenuous hold human beings have on the planet. But even if the cumulative effect of these stories is to make you feel that humanity may not be worth saving, there's the paradoxical consolation of art: After all, if people can write with the wit and insight and passion that T.C. Boyle possesses, they must be worth something, right?
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