After The Plague Brings In New Era Of T.C. Boyle
Kevin Guilfoile
The Hartford Courant 9/2/01

Twelve years ago, three classmates and I ferried T. Coraghessan Boyle in a red Chevy van from a literary festival reading to a post-reading dinner. One of us, possibly me, handed Boyle a pen and a Playboy opened to his story "King Bee." It was a rude thing to ask of an author on tour - he was trying to sell books, after all but Boyle grinned, turned the page to the centerfold and squeaked his name in Sharpie across LaToya Jackson's stomach. We cheered.

You could construct a useful date book based on Boyle's stories, which seem to appear with the regularity of paychecks: The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, The Paris Review. For a measure of his prolificacy, think Michael Caine making movies in the '80s, or Barry Bonds hitting dingers in May.

This collection, "After the Plague," comes three years after "T.C. Boyle Stories," the definitive, 700-page retrospective that came out in 1998. As it turns out, that book was just Boyle backing up his hard drive. The new era, it seems, begins now.

That's marvelous news. Boyle may write like he's trying to keep giddy pace with a leaking pen - six story collections and eight substantial novels to date - but despite the creative gusher, Boyle is consistently entertaining, his phrasing always smart and his protagonists wonderfully odd.

Across 16 stories (nine of which appeared in The New Yorker), "After the Plague" introduces us to a wilderness man with plastic feet; a sexy, female boxer named "Gina the Puma"; middle-aged sisters draining color from their sight; and a bartender obsessed with the neighborhood Internet voyeur operation.

So great is Boyle's love of goofballs that they sometimes monkey with his skills when his prose is lifted from its glossy, native habitat for display in a book-length collection. Likewise, his tendency to turn his tales upside down with unexpected gunplay can provide diminishing returns when his stories are read by the handful. Throughout most of these pages, however, even the best oiled saws in Boyle's toolbox cut through the pages with precision. Boyle has something new on display - a finer interest in the subtleties of character - and the result is a collection with more texture and depth than any that preceded it.

In the opener, the terrific "Termination Dust," we track lonely Alaskan men who have been waiting for a matchmaking service to deliver a planeload of mainland women. The climactic violence uproots our expectations and then feels inevitable given Boyle's satirical, black logic. The explosive ending of "Killing Babies" (a story about the contagious nature of violence, which was included in the Best American Short Stories of 1997) is almost over the top, but Boyle gets credit for the save by not soaking himself in politics, and by following it up with the understated "Captured by Indians," a story with parallel themes, and characters painted in richer shades of gray.

In Boyle's world, people don't have existentialist angst over the choices they're forced to make; they commit existentialist atrocities, choosing again and again to do the worst thing possible. When you realize there is no apology for what good-for-little Jason Barre does to his girlfriend in "She Wasn't Soft," your hairs, up and down, will go rigid. These repeating stanzas in "After the Plague" are bridged by the presence of character-driven stories like "The Love of My Life," "The Underground Gardens" (set in Fresno at the turn of the century, it feels like a set-up for one of Boyle's historical novels) and "My Widow." The last of these, in which Boyle imagines himself as a watchful ex-husband keeping a journal on his once-wife's days from beyond the grave, is clever, touching, innovative and funny. The volume wraps with the title work, which somehow manages a quarter-teaspoon of sweetness as a former schoolteacher adjusts to the not entirely unpleasant role of survivor in the wake of an apocalyptic Marburg virus.

Perhaps the most intriguing development here - I'll bet it's the one Boyle fans will be talking about - is "Mexico," a New Yorker story about a biotech employee and the woman he meets on vacation. A different version of "Mexico" appeared in the Stories collection three years ago, and between then and now, Boyle has made more than two-dozen changes to the text, most of them minor - all of them for the good - but a simple name change on the final page puts a counter twist on the original plot. It's great fun to watch him rethinking, reshaping, revisiting his published work. Most importantly, for him and us, the new story is better.

As a dark and observant chronicler of California life, Boyle has established himself as a sort of West Coast Flannery O'Connor, and although his landscapes don't hold the same myths of the soil that made O'Connor's South so magical, California is its own metaphor for 21st century America.

"It's a good and fitting universe I'm constructing here," Boyle tells the reader as an elderly woman stands, spent mace in one hand, over a home intruder "writhing on the floor in a riot of cat feces." That's a line, I think, that would have made Flannery giggle.
Of course, Flannery never would have signed our Playboy, had we been insolent enough to ask.