Having a Good Time With Our Worst Fears HALF a dozen shysters, a talking three-foot-tall statue of the Virgin Mary, a mendacious adoption counselor, a Los Angeles public-relations man hired to “upgrade” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's image, a woman of makes her lover wear a “full-body condom” when he goes to bed with her—even the Devil himself—making appearances in T. Coraghessan Boyle's daring, irreverent and sometimes deeply moving new collection of stories, “If the River was Whiskey.” With the linguistic acrobatics and hip, erudite audacity we've come to expect from his two other story collections and three novels, Mr. Boyle here lampoons our most terrible fears—that our homes are not safe and our lovers are riddled with communicable diseases—and ridicules our cupidity, racism and cultural insensitivity. In his universe, those who live by the deal—the Ivan Boeskys, the snake-oil salesman—always get their comeuppance. But before the marshals arrive, the nice guys among us, saps and all, have been snookered out of our life savings. Only in the title story and “Thawing Out” does Mr. Boyle completely drop his comic persona and insistent cynicism and tell straightforward stories about human frailty, love and loss. “Humor resides in exaggeration, and humor is a quick cover for alarm and bewilderment,” a character says in “Two Ships,” a story in Mr. Boyle's second collection, “ Greasy Lake .” The sentiment still holds. In his choice here of conceits, characters and figures of speech, Mr. Boyle remains a four-star general of hyperbole. A woman gives a man “a look that would have corroded metal.” An explosives expert “waited till the flame was gone from his throat and the familiar glow lit his insides so that they felt radioactive.” A character's wife “clung to his arm like some inescapable force of nature, like the tar in the La Brea pits or the undertow at Rockaway Beach .” Mr. Boyle's plot lines are no less outrageous. A crazed Hungarian daredevil rides the axle of a truck from Maine to Los Angeles . A stock trader meets up with the devil in his backyard. Many of Mr. Boyle's characters, in their immensity and their colorful, inflated gestures, loom like Mighty Mouse in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. He's so huge that we have to pay attention, even marvel at how he was put together—and how he stays up there—but for all the space he takes up and the impression he makes, he doesn't leave us much in the way of depth to remember him by. SOMETIMES Mr. Boyle's parade is fun, sometimes it's hilariously funny, and often his imaginative leaps and midair somersaults are breathtaking. He is fluent in any number of slick American dialects: the hip patois of the vanishing 1960's counterculture, the sleazy patter of Hollywood agents and P.R. men and the lingua franca of those who speak haute nouvelle cuisine . And though he sneers at an inordinate number of his characters, putting them down with easy shots—corrupt businessmen who wear gold chains have become Mr. Boyle's Jewish-mother joke—he clearly feels a playful affection for others. He's fond of them not because they represent impulses more akin to his own than bilking people, and fears closer to his heart than, say, the threat of nuclear attack, which he exploited brilliantly in “On the Long Haul” in “Greasy Lake.” Call them impulses and fears writers can relate to. Albert, the chef in “Sorry Fugu,” believes himself to be “potentially one of the great culinary artists of his time.” When he's visited by the hardnosed food writer Will Frank, he's determined to win her over, to get a great review from the toughest critic out there. He distracts her lunkish boyfriend with burned steak and boiled peas—“shanty Irish” food, the chef calls it, like the fellow's mother used to make—and lures Willa into his kitchen for a supreme culinary seduction. She tumbles to his taglierini alla pizzaiola and admits that her negative reviews reflect her boyfriend's tastes. Why not her own? “To like something,” she says, “to really like it and come out and say so, is taking a terrible risk. I mean, what if I'm wrong? What if it's really no good?” Zoltan Mindszenty (a k a the Human Fly) couldn't care less about critical acclaim. Wearing tights, a cape, swimming goggles and a red bathing cap, he marches into the closet-size office of a Hollywood agent and announces, “I want to be famous.” In a series of wacky, death-defying stunts—including an attempt to ride on the wing of a jet—the Human Fly gets his wish. And his agent, who now and then feels ambivalent about watching “a man die for ten percent of the action,” gets his: a bigger office. In “Thawing Out” and the title story, Mr. Boyle reveals the naked “alarm and bewilderment” he usually cloaks in humor. “Thawing Out” is a somber, eloquent love story about the redemptive powers of water, and of love. A cocky young man abandons his girlfriend, Naina, and then returns. Naina and her mother belong to the Polar Bear Club; in the dead of winter, they swim the Hudson River . They are made, he comes to realize, of tougher stuff than he is. I know of no other story by Mr. Boyle that is nearly as powerful or as poignant as “If the River Was Whisky.” It's the last story in the collection, and so different from the others in texture and tone that it is startling to come upon. A young boy, Tiller, spends a summer month at a lakeside cabin with his parents, fishing and trying to become closer to his troubled alcoholic father, who has recently lost his job. After two weeks in the cabin, Tiller's father still hasn't “done one damn thing” with him. “You haven't even been down to the lake,” scolds his wife. “What kind of father are you?” As the story unfolds in vivid, tightly written vignettes told in alternating points of view—Tiller's and his father's—it becomes clear that the answer is “not much of one.” His attempts at being a better parent are occasions for heartbreak. After his wife's scolding, he vows not to drink and goes fishing with Tiller, who, with “the novelty of his father rowing, pale arms and a dead cigarette clenched between his teeth, the boat rocking, and the birds whispering…closed his eyes a minute, just to keep from going dizzy with the joy of it.” Mr. Boyle evokes their shared pain with a sure hand. I have no way of knowing whether the story is autobiographical, but it has the ring of something deeply felt. Its placement at the end of the book was a shrewd move, for if we wonder, as we read nearly all of the previous 15 stories, what makes Mr. Boyle run, what psychic forces drive his hyperactive prose, what childhood losses have inspired his cynicism, we can look on the title story as an analyst's gold mine. If we choose not to read it as autobiography, but simply as a departure onto the rocky terrain of emotional candor, we nevertheless come to the last page feeling a more profound respect for Mr. Boyle than many of his satiric stories inspire. Humor and exaggeration have served Mr. Boyle well. He is a consummate entertainer, a verbal showman, an explosively gifted satirist. If he uses humor to provide “quick cover” for his “alarm and bewilderment,” and for other more powerful feelings, it's refreshing now and then—it's almost a relief—when he ditches his cover, as he does in the last story, and allows use a peek at his heart. |