Serious Fun The scarcity of literary humor sometimes gives rise to a subtle critical prejudice-when an author's comic imagination is cited, it's cited to the exclusion of all else. Such praise, much like being tagged a "writer's writer," cuts you off from as large an audience as it wins you. It's no simple matter, then, to discuss Greasy Lake, T Coraghessan Boyle's short-story collection since humor is only one among an array of skills at this writer's disposal. Boyle evokes compassion for the broadest, most degenerate of targetsElvis imitators, over-the-hill athletes, survivalist yahoos, swastika-painting white trash. Yet his protagonists reserve their harshest judgments for themselves; a sympathetic act from which these stories draw their strength. "Ike and Nina," a howlingly funny tale, reveals the details of the torrid, secret romance between then-President Eisenhower and the wife of Nikita Khrushchev. There are a few barbs at the expense of these ancient icons ("Ike was sixty-five, in his prime, the erect warrior, the canny leader, a man who could shake off a stroke as if it were a head cold"), but the humanization of the star-crossed pair, the sense of private tragedy commonly forbidden to public figures, gives this fantasy its lingering charm. "I think of the Cold War," the narrator concludes, "of nuclear proliferation, of Hungary, Korea, and the U-2 incident, and it all finally pales beside this: he loved her, and she loved him." In a handful of the stories, Boyle toys with genre fiction. "Rupert Beeraley and the Beggar Master of Sivani-Hoota" starts off as a pleasingly familiar suspense story in, the Sherlock Holmes mode, told by a bewildered and reverential Watson. Beersley and sidekick are summoned to colonial India to solve the mystery of the local nawab's rapidly disappearing children. But instead of dis-covering the culprit, Beersley discovers opium; utterly unhinged, he is dragged away from a drawing room full of assembled suspects, screaming accusations which are self-rightous, logical, and completely wrong. The wonderful "Hector Quesadilla Story" similarly under-mines convention when a fat, achy baseball player who should have retired years ago finds his moment of glory not in winning the big game but, in prolonging it. Hector is a worthy stand-in for his creator, who resuscitates the genre through sheer love of it—the difference being that Boyle's best days are clearly ahead of him. The humor is darker and more momentary in the best of these stories. It is, as the narrator of "Two Ships" says, "a quick cover for alarm and bewilderment." When that cover is blown, Boyle's ill-prepared characters are left to circumstance; the stories complete a fateful trajectory into fear and sometimes tragedy. The title story-best in the collection begins as a light, slightly wistful reminiscence of the narrator's naughty teenage nights: "I drove. Digby pounded the dashboard and shouted along with Toots & the Maytals while Jeff hung his head out the window and streaked the side of my mother's Bel Air with vomit." By dawn though, when two separate encounters with death have left the boys terrified, nothing seems funny anymore. The story is haunting in a way more somber fiction could never be. If there is a vision uniting these disparate stories, it's an old one, of men and women adrift in a natural world which will always be foreign to them. Sometimes they're aggressors, sometimes victims, but they are forever at odds with their habitat. In "Rare Avis," a child awed by the beauty of a bird roosting on a .roof sees that it is wounded and turns on it; in "The New Moon Party" a presidential candidate rallies the country around the proposed construction and launching of a man-made moon ("Jupiter had twelve moons, Saturn ten, Uranus five. What were we?"), with disastrous results. In the moving "Whales Weep," a man's discovery of nature's primal beauty leads him to an imitative act which sets off a chain of all too human misfortunes; Nature resides in man as well, according to Boyle, and even there is tampered with only at great peril. Among his contemporaries, Boyle reminds me most of Tom McGuane. Both yoke a swift, masterful style to a hip sensibility that guards with humor what it holds most dear. Boyle is the more forthrightly comic of the two, but Greasy Lake suggests that he may move away from the genre stories—which he can take only so far, before descending into parody—and refine the darker vision of his novels, Water Music and Budding Prospects. If that happens, a more apt comparison might be to Evelyn Waugh--heady territory for any writer.
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