Stories on the far side of reality T. Coraghessan Boyle's fiction is painfully illuminating, his humor pitch black. The stinging stories in his third collection, “If the River Was Whiskey,” aggressively take on broad social ills—emotionally abused wives, fast track financiers, American consumerism—while never letting go of the hilarious details of contemporary lifestyles. For every jab at America Boyle takes, there is a good laugh to be had. His forte is the fractured fairy tale, the modern fable of upper-middle-class folk who are almost caricatures, not quite unbelievable but well on their way. In “If the River Was Whiskey,” Boyle flirts shamelessly with absurdity, leaving the bleak ironies just a pinprick away. In a sense, Boyle's art is rooted in the sort of deadpan cartoon sophisticated enough to make its way into a magazine like The New Yorker. Peculiarities of life in the 1980s are exaggerated, stretched to a fine line, made funny and scary all at once. A man hungering for fame calls himself The Human Fly and suspends himself from a skyscraper for two weeks; he becomes a sought-after media star. A woman obsessed with germ protection forces her boyfriend to wear a full-body condom; she leaves him because of his high-risk profession—in shoe sales. One problem with Boyle's send-up fiction is the relentless moral point: Here's what's wrong with our country, he seems to be saying, while a soap box lifts him conveniently above the multitudes. Here are grotesque American values, here are materialistic superficial, opportunistic vultures. You can feel scolded, or privy to a cynical perspective you'd rather not share. At the same time, each story is masterfully shaped, constructed so adroitly Boyle's labors seem invisible: You can't help enjoying the telling of his tales. Of course, and even more important, there is more than a grain of truth in the morals he forwards. And that always hurts. “Hard Sell” is typical of most of the sharper stories in this collection. Hired to improve the Ayatollah's image in America (this was pre-Rushdie), a press agent sees great promise. “He's old, but he's a pretty sexy guy in his way,” the agent says. “A power trip like that, all those kids dying in the swamps, giving the Iraqis hell, that's a sexy thing. In a weird way, I mean. Like it's a real turn-on. Classic.” A farfetched premise, to say the least, and yet stranger things have happened. As news stories, Boyle's tales would land somewhere between The Wall Street Journal and National Enquirer; he shares with Rick DeMarinis a fancy for bold satire, those events just a tad over the far side of hard-core reality. Along with Boyle's seasoned technique, what saves this collection from shrillness is a number of uncharacteristically sincere pieces. “The Hat” is a somber portrait of an alcoholic misanthropy. “I liked the rest of humanity about as much as Gulliver liked the Yahoos,” Michael tells us, alluding to the great from who Boyle descends. Clearly, if Michael were a writer, he could have penned the caustic stories in this book. Sequesterd near a ski resort in the southern Sierras, he scorns the tourist activity in favor of a life in which nothing changes, not even his dissatisfaction. “The Hat,” like the excellent title story, addresses directly the problem of living a cynical life: Where can you go when you know too much? Drown in the cold, indifferent river of humanity, or drown yourself in whiskey? You won't find too many writers more equipped to ask that loaded a question. |