Boyle Plumbs Limits of Irony In ‘Pastoral' About Pot Farming “I'VE ALWAYS been a quitter,” beings Felix Nasmyth. He lists the people and situations he's walked out on: a marriage, graduate school, the military, a pregnant girlfriend, the Boy Scouts, glee club, marching band. At age 31, he is an itinerant bachelor. He teaches freshman English part-time at a community college and restores dilapidated Northern California mansions. “About the only thing I didn't give up on,” he continues, “was the summer camp.” There lies the touchstone of “Budding Prospects,” the second novel by the Los Angeles-based writer T. Coraghessan Boyle. “Summer camp,” in this case, is not a pre-adolescent romp through some absent authority's idea of wilderness, but rather a three-way business proposition worth “half a million dollars, tax-free,” earned in just nine months—the length of a single California growing season. To his credit, Boyle is probably the only writer this side of William Burroughs who could turn a “pastoral” about marijuana farming in the hinterlands of Reagan/Deukmejian country into a rollicking celebration of the American agrarian spirit. To this end, he populates the novel with a highly-idiosyncratic but not altogether implausible set of characters: Felix and his two camp-mates and pharmacological connoisseurs, Gesh and “sculpteur primitif” Phil Cherniske; a New Age entrepreneur and latter-day Gatsby named Vogelsang and his girlfriend, a blonde punk-rocker by the unlikely name of Aorta; a button-down botanist named Dowst who moonlights as a sinsemilla specialist; several picturesque California red-necks and proto-fascist California Highway Patrol Officer named Jepbak. That the “summer camp” ultimately falls as a get-rich-quick scheme is not so much for want of effort of enthusiasm as it is on account of human frailty, gullibility, and just plain dumb luck. The three principal “campers” are patient, resourceful, and, when necessary, heroically deranged. Even within the confines of this “realistic” narrative, Boyle does not find it necessary to abandon the rather unique moral viewpoint—one could call it celebratory irony—that he has developed in his previous work. In this book, however, that irony serves more as a function of the story being told than it does as an authorial imposition upon the story “from above,” as it were. Consequently, “Budding Prospects” seems a bit less manic and hard-edged than “Water Music,” Boyle's 1981 absurdist tour-de-force about the famed Scottish explorer Mungo Park and his (fictional) degenerate side kick Ned Rise, or his earlier collection of thoroughly bizarre short fictions entitled “The Descent of Man.” But for what Boyle trades off here in grotesquerie, he more than gains back in terms of character development and credibility. Stylistically, Boyle's strengths and weaknesses as a prose writer have always seemed to be flip sides of the same gleaming coin. As comedic ironist, Boyle's stock in trade has largely gravitated toward the kind of rhetorically “Baroque” (William Gass' term) narrative, a profusion wildly inventive and hyperbolic metaphors, colloquial rather than poetic rhythms, and a prodigious and recondite vocabulary that seems to owe more to the Reader's Digest “Towards More Picturesque Speech” column than it does to ordinary American usage. While all these mannerisms seemed perfectly well-suited to the unabashed grand scale of “Water Music,” or the wooly, experimental thrashings of some of his shorter fictions, in this “pastoral,” Boyle's hyperkinetic approach seems to chafe somewhat, especially at the outset. It's as if he were trying to downshift while keeping his foot on the accelerator. Fortunately, Boyle is an engaging enough story teller as to soon make one forget such things. We trust the tale, albeit against our better judgement, because Boyle, whose work always seems to promise us a good time, invariably delivers one. Though just now in his mid-30s, Boyle has staked out a considerable bit of aesthetic ground already. “Water Music” and “Budding Prospects” are as different in tone and structure as any two successive novels written by the same author in the same decade could possibly be. If the former represents Boyle at his dark, Saturnine best, the latter is almost allegorical by comparison—suggesting, among other things, that even if the “summer camp” was a bust (pun fully intended) in terms of cash crops, the life processes of growth and maturation were still not wholly thwarted there. At story's end we leave Felix smoldering over a final abortive meeting with his former partner Vogelsang, and then on impulse turning back towards the “campsite” in Willits where he plans a reunion with Petra “to think things over, break some new ground, and maybe even—if things went well—to plant a little seed.” It's as if Boyle has suddenly plumbed the limits of his own irony here, and the novel that he offers us now is a kind of token of his own good faith. Nowhere in his previous work has he displayed such generosity. In a writer of his age and caliber, this is a very promising sign indeed. |