T.C.B., baby Move over, William Bennett. There's a new Book of Virtues, and its author is T. Coraghessan Boyle. Just don't look too closely into his eyes, staring out from the back cover frozen in a dare above the satanic point of his warlock-thick Vandyke. It is an omniscient gaze, haunting proof that the contents of Stories (Viking, $34.95) is more than merely the author's four previous collections and three uncollected short fictions. Scattered among the nearly 700 pages, secrets, desires and fears await detection like land mines. Boyle has, in his short fiction, calculated the pi of modem human life deep into the digits, achieving with scientific accuracy a set of twisted vignettes in which fallacies prevail and then injure or destroy. Like a photo negative of Bennett's moralizing tome, Stories inverts the nagging collective uplift of that literature and offers a vision of everything the average Book of Virtues reader is trying to escape. At his most literal, Boyle comes on like a giddy Harlan Ellison. "Bloodfall," from 1972, is a disturbing little sci-fi number that destroys the world. without explanation. Just plenty of gory detail as a house full of stoners discovers that it's raining blood outside, then waits to die as the filthy tide rushes over everything. That it was written almost a decade before AIDS comes as a shock. Boyle the fantasist also causes a sinner to crumble at the feet of a suddenly animated Virgin Mary statue who causes his sins, literally, to rain down on him. These two stories are part of the final third of the book, which has been divided into "Love," "Death" and "And Everything In Between." The first two sections are no more redemptive of human error. It is to Boyle's credit that these things go unexplained. From the behavior of the first story's character, who demands a full body condom and a comprehensive battery of medical tests in exchange for physical love, to the presumed acts of God described above, Boyle refuses to wallow in causality. He prefers effect. Unfortunately, Boyle also likes affect. His stories often hunker in prose that hyperextends the ambition of his subjects. In that first story, "Modern Love," he telegraphs the ridiculousness of the proceedings with a heightened attention to detail that not only names every destination of the couple's first few dates, but names them fabulously. "Helmut's Old Tyme Ice Cream Parlor in Mamaroneck" is one such spot. But the story is narrated by the scorned party, not the fastidious one. Boyle also likes references, so several of his characters "wake from... dreams," inserting adjectives into the phrase that vividly recalls the first line of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." It's a strong hint that Boyle is often thinking of Kafka or trying to think like him. His work similarly uses hapless characters to service set pieces designed to demonstrate the various persecutions we visit on each other and ourselves. And there is a similar dread of authority in his stories, from the religious power of that statue, to the Mexican police moonlighting as street thugs elsewhere and a bureaucratic organizer seizing property in the finale, "Filthy With Things." Boyle also swats at Elvis impersonators, cuckolds, the Beat poets and vegetarians. He can be admirably, hilariously cruel in his neat compartmentalization's: a fault or a wound for everybody. The more passionate they are the more they suffer. Individually, the stories can be impressively inventive, even as they siphon the humanity from their characters in long, funny draws. But the whole is exhausting and brutal, and the feeling emerges that Boyle undoes his people so he can stand over them in victory. Boyle seems willing to invest only his imagination, not the emotions he describes so aptly, further showing off by writing most entertainingly in first person. At a blow, Stories is just that: entertainment. Boyle's short fiction is less a well to be plumbed, the results sipped and savored, but a fire pump spraying with dangerous velocity. Individually, the stories can knock you down, but the overall impact leaves the reader dazed and wet. |