AHV
R.J.
San Diego Magazine, May 1984

In his early thirties, living alone and lacking any real sense of direction. Felix is worried. All his life he has been a quitter. He has quit baseball leagues, a doctoral program, marriage, jogging, eating read meat—virtually everything that demands constancy. Everything up to now, except “summer camp.”

The “camp,” a necessary euphemism, marks Felix's one venture outside of middleclass routine and into the subculture of crime. Conned into a term of indentured servitude on a farm hidden in California 's wooded north country, Felix figures he finally has it made—tending a crop of “controlled substances” rumored to be worth a kind's ransom. However, Felix has landed not only in a lush growing environment but in an environment: lush with paranoia and betrayal; hysteria blossoms at the sound of an unexpected automobile. Summer camp drastically changes Felix's life. He incurs the wrath of a crusading beast of local law officer; attracts the fascination of a 300-pound neighbor boy with the intelligence of a small child, who, incidentally, tears up Felix's tool shed like an armload of junk mail; and eventually wins affection of a beautiful Greek potter. (All this I orchestrated by a demented genius from Bolinas who prowls the woods in NASA jumpsuit, armed to the teeth and escorted by a punk rocker done out in leather and striped hair.)

This is a world as twisted as a nightmare, always on the verge of violence and betrayal. Yet, with Boyle's sure narrative hand—and timing worthy of a stunt man—Budding Prospects is one of the most entertaining comedy adventures to make an appearance in quite a while. It's like J.P. Donleavy reborn in jeans and T-shirts, munching bean sprouts to Grateful Dead tapes. T. Coraghessan Boyle has the stroke of a surgeon; he cuts, always, directly to the nerve.

Felix, by the way, emerges as a kind of hero. He survives a series of deceptions as thick as red California mud to develop a renewed sense of priorities in his life an eventually trades his dream of infinite wealth for the touch of a potter's educated hands.