15 stories all over the lot T. Coraghessan Boyle is one of our better young writers of short fiction, and if you haven't read him yet—his work has appeared in such disparate publications as Esquire and Twilight Zone—the Greasy Lake collection would be a good place to start. These 15 stories are all over the lot, both in subject matter and style. And that's Boyle's strong point—he can be very funny in one story, deathly serious in another, and in a third he can be satirizing modern Soviet society with a deft hand. Unlike some contemporary writers of short stories, who seem to have a single, droning voice, Boyle's several voices are refreshing. There is, for example, the college-age punk in Greasy Lake, the title story of this collection; the Elvis imitator in All Shook Up, which features a pathetic young man whose wife has an affair with the guy next door; the Russian worker in The Overcoat II, the story of a middle-aged bachelor who bitterly discovers that the Soviet system doesn't live up to its Marxist ideals; or the two warring survivalists in On for the Long Haul, a chilling look at paranoia in the thermonuclear age. Whether he's writing about an aging baseball star or Eisenhower or an imaginary presidential candidate, Boyle is convincing and satisfying. If you're into contemporary short fiction, and would appreciate a change from the droning material The New Yorker offers all too frequently, Greasy Lake is a must. |