The Dammned Outnumber the Rest The fact that I've just negotiated almost 700 pages of T. C. Boyle's short fiction - who else of his generation could have assembled, by this point, a "Collected Stories" the size of the Phoenix white pages? - and I'm not sick to death of it attests to its overall inventiveness, flash and just plain entertainment value. Everything is here, each of the stories from Boyle's four previous collections plus seven new stories, a staggering 68 in all: the blasphemous and the hilarious, the maddening and the moving, the weak and the strong. Over the course of his career, Boyle has been compared to everybody but Sappho, and there's probably no escaping name dropping when discussing his fiction, since he's always trying on voices and forms, rummaging through the toy box and pulling out, for his own purposes, other people's shticks. He has S. J. Perelman's affection for the absurdities of pop culture as starting point ("De Rerum Natura" begins, "The inventor is in his laboratory, white smock, surgical mask, running afoul of the laws of nature") as well as his understanding of the comic potential of craven narrators propelled mostly by their baser instincts: libido, hunger, self preservation. He has Robert Coover's wicked sense of the flimsiness of our received cultural representations of goodness and virtue. (In the early and hilarious "Heart of a Champion," Lassie's rigorous A.K.C. morality and trouble-at-the-dam heroism give way to her darker impulses.) He has Donald Barthelme's gift for deadpan comic premises ("The Hit Man" begins, "The Hit Man's early years are complicated by the black bag that he wears over his head") and for Osterizing high and low culture: "The son threatened to waste his father. He did not, restrained no doubt by considerations of filial loyalty and the deep-seated taboos against patricide that permeate the universal unconscious." And then there are the parodies, which have as their usual M.O. the collision of the canon with the mingy, stature less aspects of contemporary culture. Kafka's hunger artist becomes a publicity-grubbing cross between one of the Wallendas and Evel Knievel. "The Overcoat II" puts a Soviet spin on the travails of Gogol's hapless protagonist. Hemingway takes a double beating, once for "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (this time the female sports Banana Republic shorts and an N.R.A. marksmanship award) and once for "For Whom the Bell Tolls," with Robert Jordan's cowardly and inept slacker of a grandson fighting contras in Nicaragua. "We Are Norsemen" posits a Woody Allen type as a warrior bard singing of mayhem and plunder. ("Some of us wore our twin-horned battle helmets, the sight of which interrupts the vital functions of our victims and enemies and inspires high-keyed vibrato.") And "Green Hell" levels the whole travel-disaster subgenre with one swipe, confirming that no one does cartoon catastrophe with more panache: "The plane is nosing for the ground at a 45-degree angle, engines wheezing, spewing smoke and feathers. Lights flash, breathing apparatus drops and dangles. Our drinks become lariats, the glasses knives." Boyle is drawn to that "look of the mad saint," to the obsessive, the mortifier of the flesh. He's like "Flannery O'Connor with a television and no church," as Lorrie Moore once put it, and at first glance his landscapes - full of comic ignorance, incipient violence and the continual oppressive sense of an unsparing judgment about to be rendered - strongly resemble O'Connor's. But setting his energetic godlessness aside, Boyle's work seems more Calvinist than Catholic: most of the time, the question of who's among the elect and who's damned-the latter stupendously outnumbering the former-seems inexorably predetermined. In a world divided into predators and a kind of evolutionary backwash that constitutes their prey, the socioeconomic group that can be described as "the end product of psychosomatic dieting and the tanning salon" is singled out for repeated scourging. Special contempt is heaped upon "the miser, the hoarder, the burrowing squirrel." The collection opens with "Modern Love," about a woman who brings disposable sanitary sheets to public theaters and requests a "full body condom" when making love, and closes with "Filthy With Things," about a married couple suffering from "acquisitive disorders." A nether ring of Boyle's Inferno seems reserved for real estate developers. There's a continuing preoccupation with the approaching apocalypse, as well as the thematic motif of yuppie fecklessness and complicity in the face of disaster. In "A Bird in Hand," 10 million birds assault a homeowner's little grove of trees while his wife is "concentrating on a tricky picot stitch." Far better, in this worldview, either to get down into the muck, to "partake once more of the seething life of pond, puddle and ditch," or become the predator (animals throughout these stories - whales, elephants, even frogs - represent a Lawrentian model of decisiveness and passion) and be shaken to your primordial root by "the pounce, the slash, the crack of sinew and bone ... terrifying and wonderful." Accordingly, there's a lot of playing at badness - characters who "thought they were hip and depraved, thought they were nihilists and libertines, thought they'd invented sex" -and a lot of the real thing. Boyle is chillingly good at noncomic psychos, whether they're stalking a solitary forest ranger in her fire tower in "Sitting on Top of the World" or mailing apiarian death threats to adoptive parents in "King Bee." The apogee of this Darwinian strain may be found in what might be called the Konrad stories: in "Descent of Man," the evolutionary weakness of humans is enacted by the narrator's realization that he's losing his scientist lover to Konrad, an increasingly intimidating chimpanzee. In its sequel, "The Ape Lady in Retirement," Konrad returns to enact, with a different woman, one of the collection's most explicit versions of a thumb-wrestling match between Eros and Thanatos. Much of the comedy in Boyle's work resides in his similes, and in the offhand or theatrical harshness of the worldview they reveal: ice in a glass rattles like "loose teeth spat into a cup." Someone's eyes seem to "swell out of his head like hard-cooked eggs extruded through the sockets." Such similes can be strung together to further bury a still-twitching victim: a daughter's hand lies across a father's palm "like a demolished building, a cement truck, glacial moraine." It's hard to read 68 of these stories without becoming convinced of the advantages of a "Selected" - as opposed to "Collected" "Works." Some stories echo one another. ("Hopes Rise" seems to be a later and more successful version of "Whales Weep.") Boyle is a particularly premise-driven writer, and for every great idea played out with wit and ingenuity- "I Dated Jane Austen," or Idi Amin as the centerpiece of a Dada festival, or a Beat Christmas with Jack and the gang all underfoot in Mrs. Kerouac's living room while Mario Lanza blares carols on the radio - there's a premise so well trammeled that you can't help wondering if it was taken on as some sort of challenge. There's the warmed-over Sartremeets-Kafka of "The Big Garage" and the "Tales From the Crypt" tire-iron irony of "The Devil and Irv Cherniske, " in which a yuppie sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for more material goods. In "Hard Sell," a publicity flack negotiates a makeover for the Ayatollah. "The Little Chill" stamps flat the self-absorbed concerns of Lawrence Kasdan's film. It's like watching 16-inch guns blow long-sinceriddled wrecks out of the water. In the least interesting of these stories, the protagonists are straw dummies who get steamrollered and dragged to and fro to demonstrate that it's a ferocious world out there. In the best-stories like "If the River Was Whiskey," "The Fog Man," "Without a Hero" and "Stones in My Passway, Hellhound on My Trail" - a genuine sadness is glimpsed amid all the suffering, and the feelings generated are not simply visceral. The good news for Boyle fans is that his more recent stories suggest an increasing willingness to stay committed to the human beings under examination. "Mexico," one of the newest, renders with heartbreaking empathy, rather than contempt, "the voice of a loser, a fat man, the maker of bad guesses and worse decisions." Which is a development the author may have foreseen as far back as "De Rerum Natura" in 1976. In that story, an all-powerful and endlessly quirky inventor is asked, "And which of your myriad inventions gives you the greatest personal satisfaction?" He answers, "Those to come." |