An American Delight Though born in Peekskill, N.Y., in 1948, T. Coraghessan Boyle went to college in Iowa and has taught at the University of Southern California since 1977. This personal replay of the opening of the Western frontier shows itself in the consistently American preoccupations and settings of Boyle's compulsively readable stories. Yet he shares little of the cockeyed optimism that we like to imagine as a driving force behind our historic need to strike out for the territories. Boyle includes a compulsory story about baseball (one of the best in the collection), but in "The Hector Quesadilla Story" the team is markedly multicultural, the protagonist fat and not much of a star to anyone but his family. Boyle's take on the American character, in fact, shows itself more clearly in such stories as "Greasy Lake," a wry reworking of Thoreau's Walden Pond that replaces idyllic self-discovery with a rotting corpse in fetid water. In this impressive volume. Boyle has gathered together all the stories from his four earlier collections, and has added seven new ones-68 stories that concentrate his talents more powerfully than his seven novels. He plays with famous stories by Gogol, Kafka, Chekhov and Joyce, and imitates some of the best of his contemporaries-Barthelme. Coover, Lorrie Moore. He is very funny and Dickensian in his clearly drawn characters and in the cornucopia of plots that tumble out onto page after fascinating page: There is the imagined affair between Dwight Eisenhower and Nina Krushcheva, the hilarious story of a man who falls for a militant antivivisectionist Vegan and becomes involved in the liberation of Thanksgiving turkeys, the firsthand account of a date with Jane Austen, and the Swiftian account of a very unorthodox appearance by Our Lady to the inhabitants of a little town in Ireland. There are several memorable stories about food-one about Jacques Cousteau's Parisian chef, who is driven to distraction by the endless months aboard ship, following his captain's Ahab-like obsessions; the cook begins serving tuna noodle casserole to express his unhinging mind and to foment mutiny among his French compatriots. My favorite is "Sorry Fugu," about a food critic who so distrusts her judgment that she pans everybody. She laments the "coulibiac made in hell," the "blasphemy of baby lamb's lettuce, frisee, endive," the pasta with the "consistency of mucilage." "To like something, to really like it and come out and say so, is taking a terrible risk," she confesses. "I mean, what if I'm wrong? What if it's really no good?" At the heart of the fun, however, persists a grim view of the human (specifically American) condition. Boyle's men are typically shysters or dupes; his women, aggressive emasculators. In "Little America," the aging son of Robert E. Byrd makes the wrong turn at a bus station and is taken advantage of by a couple of young men; after emptying his wallet, they abandon him to die in the city's frozen landscape. In "Peace of Mind," a confident saleslady for home security systems stumbles into the home of a sociopath. who listens carefully to her spiel and the next day savagely breaks into her home. Charles Darwin, more than anyone else, breathes through these stories. The collection seems not just a zoo of loony next door neighbors, but a Jurassic park where "nature, red in tooth and claw" (as Tennyson put it), blurs any nice distinction between the human and the animal. The trend begins innocently enough, with a story like "Big Game." Here the aging ex-circus animals that make up the safari quarry on Puff's African Game Ranch (situated on 2,500 acres just outside Bakersfield) find some last vestiges of dignity when they rise up against their effete hunters. But then there is "Descent of Man," in which someone very much like Jane Goodall finally gives up her husband for the far more compelling ape she has come to know rather too well. Even an icon like Lassie falls from grace when she gains "Carnal Knowledge" of a randy coyote. And most disturbing of all is "King Bee," reminiscent of Stephen King or The Silence of the Lambs. This is an account of a foster child with eyes like "two poked holes," who increasingly courts the friendship of bees, moving each day farther from anything recognizably human. These stories find echoes in "The Human Fly," "Back in the Eocene, " "The Ape Lady in Retirement," "The Extinction Tales," "Rara Avis," and "Top of the Food Chain," and culminate in "De Return Natura." In this last, in what might be seen as an aggregate of all the Dr. Faustus tales from Frankenstein to Species II, a scientist does what humanists have all along been fearing one of them might do: He provides definitive proof (color slides, in fact) of God's corpse. "God stretching below the lens like a colossus.... Eye sockets black, nostrils collapsed, the stained hairs of the beard, lips gone, naked hideous teeth." The townspeople don't like it one bit. They burn the scientist's house to the ground, with him in it. Perhaps it is no surprise that Boyle chooses to end the collection with the story, "Filthy With Things." With his typical steady bead on American culture, he here concocts an agency that will arrive with moving vans and rid one of all possessions-so that one's eyes can again see. But at story's end there is some disagreement as to what is there to be seen. The wife is "clinging to him as if he were the last thing in the world, the only thing left her." But the husband "knows this: It is cold out there, inhospitable, alien. There's something out there, nothing contained in nothing. Nothing at all." The incredible richness of the human imagination that can produce such a collection of stories suggests that the husband needs to take another look. |