Boyle bursts our protective bubbles
Rob Thomas
The Capital Times 9/21/01

Nobody does the random encounter like T.C. Boyle. The characters in his stories try to glide through life in a protective bubble, not bothering anybody and not wanting to be bothered.

And then a stranger comes along with a sharp sewing needle and an unsettling smile.

Many of the 16 stories in Boyle's sixth collection deal with hot-button cultural subjects that we're used to seeing in Newsweek or "Dateline NBC," things like air rage, Internet spy cams and the abortion battle. But most of them boil down to that single, unwanted intrusion.

In "Killing Babies," for example, a ne'er-do-well trying to go straight moves in with his brother, an obstetrician who performs abortions. The main character's disruptive effect on his brother's sedate family life plays darkly against the larger threat from the anti-abortion protesters who dog the doctor's every step through the story.

At times, these encounters pull otherwise sympathetic characters to the point of madness. The well-meaning widower on vacation in "Mexico" is driven into an alcoholic rage by a mugging on the beach, while the seemingly meek passenger cornered by an abusive seatmate in "Friendly Skies" ends up drawing the most blood.

When a seemingly good Samaritan comes to return a lost purse to the elderly woman in "My Widow," the reader has been conditioned to see this guy coming. "He steps through the front gate, a pair of legs like chopsticks in motion, his hair a dyed fluff of nothing combed straight up his head as if he were one of those long-pants comedians of her father's era, a face gouged with wrinkles and a smile that makes his eyes all but disappear into two sinkholes of flesh." Our mistrust is earned.

Even in the title story, which takes place after most of the world's population has been decimated by plague, solitude is hard to come by. The narrator meets just two other people in the course of the tale, but that's all that's needed to form a vicious love triangle.

Of course, not all the unexpected encounters are bad. In "Peep Hall," a bartender who rejoices in backyard solitude meets, and becomes obsessed with, his next-door neighbor, who lives in a fictitious "Internet dorm" where Web surfers can watch her and her housemates cook, shower and sleep.

Not all the stories fit this formula, thankfully. "The Underground Gardens" is a wonderful story about an impoverished Italian-American immigrant who digs an elaborate underground palace for the object of his affections. "Achates McNeil" is the collection's one really weak link, a surprisingly by-the-numbers telling of the strained relationship between a famous author and his estranged son.

Boyle is a consistently imaginative and dazzling writer, and his stories churn with sharp descriptions, knowing characterizations and often brilliant turns of phrase. There's a heck of a lot of contemporary fiction out there, but you know you're in a T.C. Boyle story from the word go.

"Can we afford compassion?" asks the ruthlessly pragmatic lecturer with the fantastic name of Dr. Toni Brinsley-Schneider in "Captured by the Indians," and that's the essential question Boyle's characters ask themselves with straight faces.

He's fascinated with the very American idea of personal space, that notion that the affluent can carve out a chunk of the world, spruce it up the way they want and leave the rest of humanity outside. As Boyle shows us, no matter how many "No Trespassing" signs you put out, somebody always comes knocking.