On Being Shocked By Reality "Some of you will be shocked by what I report here, others moved," says one of T. Coraghessan Boyle's narrators, prefacing his story about a torrid love affair between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Khrushchev's wife, Nina. "Still others—the inevitable naysayers and skeptics—may find it difficult to believe. "But let me remind you how unthinkable it once seemed to credit reports of Errol Flynn's flirtation with Nazis and homosexuals, FDR's 30-year obsession with Lucy Mercer, or Ted Kennedy's desire for an ingenuous campaign worker 11 years his junior. The truth is often hard to swallow." Some time in the '60s, reality began surpassing: What novelist could have thought up the Vietnam War, say—or imagined Watergate? In this, Boyle's second collection of stories, a baseball game goes into inning after inning, apparently never to end; punked-out teenagers discover real death and destruction; a huge flock of starlings settle in a farmer's orchard - and refuse, like Hitchcock's "The Birds," to ever leave. Though the tales share the author's distinctly manic voice, they remain remarkably eclectic in form, disparate in subject matter - a testament to both Boyle's range as a storyteller and to the reach of his ambition. There are reworkings of classic genre pieces—"The Overcoat II" takes the 19th century Russian short story, translating its characters and their dilemmas into the present-day Soviet Union; meditations on such real-life figures as President Eisenhower and the blues singer Robert Johnson that effectively transform biography into myth; and there are satiric fables so funny and acutely observed that they might have been written for the old "Saturday Night Live." In "One for the Long Haul," Bayard, a fairly ordinary fellow given to apocalyptic visions, moves his family to a cabin in Montana, purchases survivalist gear (yogurt powder, radiation suits, a pair of Russian-made AK 47's, and a four-wheel drive vehicle that will run on paint thinner or rubbing alcohol), and gets himself and his wife appendectomies so they'll be prepared for the day when doctors and hospitals are vanished luxuries. Now, Bayard feels secure, but his sense of peace is short-lived: His neighbor is not only a fellow survivalist, but also a maniac with an aversion to children and small animals—in particular, Bayard's. Many of Boyle's stories share a brooding, Pinteresque atmosphere of menace. What saves the darkest tales from becoming morbidly grotesque is Boyle's infectious humor. His is a delicious sense of the absurd; and he is also a master of overstatement and hyperbole. One of his characters describes the loss of his car keys as "a tactical error, as damaging and irreversible in its way as Westmoreland's decision to dig in at Khe Sanh." "I was overdramatizing," says the narrator of '"Iwo Ships," speaking on Boyle 's behalf. "For effect. Overdramatizing because humor resides in exaggeration, and humor is a quick cover for alarm and bewilderment." The story of two childhood friends who grow up and grow apart, "Two Ships" remains one of the weakest in this collection. One became a Marxist radical, the other a well-heeled suburbanite. But it refuses to penetrate the surface details of its heroes' lives. The reader doesn't notice, though, for Boyle conjures up, with equal facility, the adrenalized atmosphere of a baseball dugout, the snide posturings of teen-age rebels, the cocktail-party chatter of East Side liberals. |