'Greasy Lake': Diverse, witty, sensitive The New Yorker is not funny anymore. Kurt Vonnegut used to be funny. Woody Allen infrequently produces a very funny short story. Wodehouse, S.J. Pereleman, and Thurber are all dead. It has become very hard to find a funny writer. Until now. T. Coragheesan Boyle is a rare bird—an intelligent, sophisticated writer with a marvelous sense of humor. Greasy Lake, his second collection of short stories (The Descent of Man was the first), shows Boyle at his best. He jumps from place to place, moving in the stories from New York City to New Jersey to Southern California to Russia. He moves through time. Now he is in some contemporary suburb sipping a martini and leering at a neighbor's wife, now it is the 1950s and there is grease and sex in the air, and now it is a mournful dustbowl evening and a blues singer is dying. Some writers, people like William Kennedy and Raymond Carver, write from a specific time and place. If Kennedy wrote science fiction, aliens would come from a place that was suspiciously like Albany, N.Y. Carver could make a profile of Mother Teresa remind the reader of a beer-drenched table cloth in a smoke-filled cabin somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. It is part of Boyle's talent that he can capture and convey the feel of diverse times and places in such. a way that the stories seem autobiographical. Stories about Holmes-like detectives, Elvis Presley imitators and fading baseball players are not only funny. They are intimate and familiar. "Ike and Nina"—keep the title in mind—is a one-concept joke but it maybe the funniest one-concept joke since Woody Allen attacked Madame Bovary. A junior official in the Eisenhower White House is summoned to a private meeting with the President. Ike is recovering from a recent heart attack, but he is filled with an almost youthful vitality. The great love of his life is coming to town and "Dwight D. Eisenbower—Ike—virile, dashing, athletic..." wants the junior official's help in arranging secret meetings with Ike's lover—"...a svelte and seductive schoolmistress from the Ukraine." Ike and Nina Khruschev are lovers. Just think about that for a minute, and then go back and look at the adjectives Boyle uses to describe the couple. If you are not smiling, Greasy Lake may not be for you. "The Hector Quesadilla Story" is one of, the best mystical baseball stories this side of Ray Kinsella's. Shoeless Joe. An aging Latin baseball player, years past his prime, is put into an extra-inning game that looks, literally, like it will never end. The story is a bittersweet excursion into dream, failure, the loss of youth, and the faint arc a baseball follows from bat to left field. "The Hector Quesadilla Story" also has what may be the best description in all of baseball fiction of a successful bunt. Hector "... laid down a bunt that stuck like a finger in jelly." In "The New Moon Party," a politician runs for the presidency sad suddenly realizes that both himself and the American electorate, with ample justification, have become jaded. Nothing moves them anymore. People are tired of left, right, and center. What people need is something to capture their imaginations, something to galvanize their spirits. Colleen McCullough took hundreds of pages in her dreary ACreed for the Third Millennium, to deal with this problem. In eighteen pages, Boyle comes up with a riotous solution to the problem: What this country needs in a new moon. The old one is, well,. . . old. There are fifteen stories in this collection. Some are simply and straightforwardly, funny. Others, about a Russian worker's vali |