A new volume of short stories from T.C. Boyle
Lin Rolens
Santa Barbara News Press 9/9/01

He is Coyote the Trickster. Or the dazzling high-board diver easily executing triple, twisting, backward summersaults before disappearing neatly into the water. Or the wry-to-cynical fop, someplace between Oscar Wilde and the Marquis De Sade.

Santa Barbara's T.C. Boyle has assembled a new volume of short stories as lively and quirked as his own wildly fertile imagination. (It would be a wonder to spend some time in that head, rummage the ideas, peer at the world through those eyes.) Sometimes he takes his characters, tosses them into the air and serves them like tennis balls; you get the feel of these stories early on with an uneasy bit of foreshadowing, and it can prove difficult to look as he rushes some ill-fated or hapless soul to story's end. Other stories are oddly sweet-natured tales of surprising little triumphs or of life's pieces fitting neatly into unexpected patterns.

Aging and its insults reappear as a theme in these stories. In "Mexico" an alcoholic, over weight widower, just middle aged, heads to "the fecund embrace of Puerto Escondido" to reread "Under the Volcano" and finds himself an unwilling participant in a skewed version of that tale. A tender ghost watches as his frail widow, gracefully unpretentious and holding on to the structure of her beauty, surrounds herself with cats and waits out her days shopping and nattering about the house until she is given the opportunity to test her mettle against a would-be robber in "My Widow." "Rust" finds a startled, octogenarian stroke victim sprawled in the backyard where 40 years earlier he planted a tree to mark his son's birth; his wife spends the after noon sipping cocktails in front of the television, musing about their past, and then, concerned and a little tipsy, wanders into the backyard in search of her man.

"Peep Hall" explores the uneasy relationship between intimacy and voyeurism while "The Love of My Life" ("They wore each other like socks.") does a take on the shocking developments in the relationship between two very young lovers, much like one we saw in the newspapers a few years ago. In "The Underground Gardens," an imaginative and willful Italian immigrant simply shifts his vision when the woman of his dreams spurns him.

And then Boyle gleefully exorcises demons. He sets characters who are not bad but fatally flawed in situations that push them beyond their limits. "She Wasn't Soft" finds a kicked-back surfer dude leveling the playing field with his tight-lipped and driven, triathelete girlfriend. A plane full of Los Angeles single women, to be auctioned for dates, lands in Alaska's most desolate reaches and triggers a well-meaning man of apparently gentle temper to extreme measures in "Termination Dust" Caught in a life that diminishes her, a young woman suffers the "Friendly Skies" of long-distance air travel and a hysterical jackass making impossible the lives of all around him; patient to a fault for her whole life, she is driven to take things effectively into her own hands.

As always, much of Mr. Boyle's magic is based on his still exuberant and gloriously baroque sense of language. He's having fun here, and the language alone will carry you through. Some of his sentences stop you and require re-reading just for the joy of a thing beautifully made.

He possesses an almost unfailing instinct for metaphor and hyperbole. In the unrelenting heat of the San Joaquin, "The Siagris children lay about like swatted flies." An antique widow answers the phone, "her voice like the clicking of the tumblers in an old lock" A vodka and soda sipping geriatrix watching afternoon soaps observes. "the clip-jawed actor with the ridge of glistening hair that stood up from his crown like a meatloaf just turned out of the pan."

Mr. Boyle's creations are often grotesques, characters and images almost like the people around you but with the volume turned up on all their (read: our) quirks and foibles. He even takes the opportunity to poke at himself, straight from the cover photo. The son of a prominent novelist describes his father as "A skinny man in his late forties with kinky hair and a goatee who dressed like he was twenty-five and had a dead black morbid outlook on life and twisted everything into the kind of joke that makes you squirm."

Nothing seems particularly out of the ordinary here until, all of a sudden, it is. These stories have the qualities of interesting drugs: Ingest one and you may wind up someplace you hadn't anticipated on arriving, someplace wickedly amusing to visit, but sufficiently uncomfortable and/or bizarre that you wouldn't want to call it home. If you're a seasoned fan of T.C. Boyle, this highly varied collection will confirm his place as your drug of choice.