'Greasy Lake' shores up T.C. Boyle's dominance in fiction I would have a hard time carrying on any sort of effective, or even lengthy, argument with anyone whose premise runs along the lines that T.C. Boyle is probably the best of today's writers. If pressed, I could probably start out with something like, well, what about Raymond Carver's ability to kick your heart around in its cage? What about Max Apple's talent for taking some real-life character, say Walt Disney or Howard Johnson, and fabricating a believable and comical myth around them? No? OK, then, Thomas McGuane, who rides the reader like he would a cutting horse, dropping him off back at the corral dazed, broken, but sated and eager to go back for more. Pretty soon the argument would fizzle out and I'd be a brain-worn wreck, sputtering names in a last-ditch attempt at turning the debate in my favor: "Richard Yates. Annie Tyler. John Irving. Barbara Taylor Bradford, for God's sake. Bob Hop!" "Greasy Lake and Other Stories" is T.C. Boyle's second collection of quick, grabbing tales. Between his first collection, "Descent of Man," were two novels: "Water Music" is a semi-fictionalized, bawdy account of African explorer Mungo Park's two l8th-century journeys in quest of the source of the Niger River. In that work, he created a brilliant merging of his love of British history and Charles Dickens in a mixture of satire and homage. In 1983's "Budding Prospects," he put together an engaging tale of marijuana outlaws in Northern California that, if it weren't for its high humor, would devastate the reader with its paranoia. "Greasy Lake's" title story, which leads off this latest collection of 15 pieces, picks up with the same feeling of dread that we felt in the midst of "Budding Prospects." The title, taken from Bruce Springsteen's "Spirits in the Night," refers to a gathering night spot for a bunch of tough but naive teen-agers. "We were all dangerous characters then," writes Boyle. "When we wheeled our parents' whining station wagons out into the street we left a patch of rubber half a block long. We drank gin and grape juice, Tango, Thunderbird, and Bali Hai. We were 19. We were bad… At night we went up to Greasy Lake." And got in over their head, beyond their years. Found out what death is after you peel away all the tough talk. Boyle relaxes a little in the next story, "Caviar," a metaphor-drenched tragic romance in which he takes out Yates and possibly Carver in that argument. Max Apple falls out of contention after Boyle's "Ike and Nina," in which the author plays the part of a Russian-English translator for President Eisenhower, who is carrying on a clandestine and passionate romance with Madame Nina Khrushchev. Misfortunately for Ike and the modern world, Nikita finds out about the affair, consummated during the Soviet premier's 1959 trip to the U.S. "To his credit," writes Boyle, "Khrushchev covered himself like a trouper—after all, how could he reveal so shocking and outrageous a business as this without losing face himself, with-out transforming himself in that instant from the virile, bellicose, iron-fisted ruler of the Soviet masses to a pudgy, pathetic cuckold?" T.C. Boyle takes on A.C. Doyle the slyly satirical mystery Rupert Beersley and the Beggar Master of Sivani-Hoota" in which the brilliant detective hero confronts the dozen or so suspects in the library and reconstructs a complex plot with twisted motives and unveils the likely killer. If you're used to Sherlock Holmes, you figure it's elementary. It all makes sense. Sadly, for the opium-addled Beersley, though, it's all wrong. Brilliant, yes, but wrong. Boyle tries everything in this collection before he's through. In "Overcoat II" he goes Russian classic; tries a little McGuane in the steamy, uncomfortable "Not Leg to Stand On"; pops into the world of science fiction in "The New Moon Party." Throughout, though, there's the essence of Boyle, marked especially by the strange twists and brilliant simile and description. An unexpected scream in the dark cuts through a more than startled man who believes he has committed murder "like all the juice in all the electric chairs in the country." An aging Mexican Dodger ballplayer recalls hiss prime years when "Chavez Ravine resounded as if with the holy name of the Savior Himself when he stroked one of the clean line-drive singles that were his signature or laid down bunt that stuck like a finger in jelly." In "A Bird in Hand" a farmer's orchard is plagued by thousands of starlings and he wants to kill them all, but his wife doesn't share his concern because, after all, "her husband has always been an alarmist, from the day Jack Kennedy was shot and he istalled bulletproof windows in the Rambler." The 36-year-old Los Angeles writer's talent is such that the reader nearly sobs when reaching the conclusion of his books, knowing that it will be some time before the next appears. For Boyle fans—and they should increase by bounds with the recent paperback release of "Budding Prospects" (Penguin, $6.95)—the wait for the next epic begins. And the next epic, a historical fiction work about the intertwined destinies of three familes during 300 years of Hudson Valley history, will almost assuredly be worth the wait. As long as it doesn't take him too long. |