Stories in Which the Unusual is the Usual The America of T. Coraghessan Boyle is a wild and crazy place, where anything can happen. In his most recent novel (“World's End”), a garrulous epic that chronicled the fortunes of several generations of a single family, “the barbaric new world” of America spawned ghosts and demons, not to mention every imaginable variety of human eccentricity and prejudice. His collections of short stories (“Greasy Lake and Other Stories,” “Descent of Man”) have also tended to pivot around the strange and the surreal: neighboring survivalists, holed up in the wilderness to await the apocalypse, come to blows; a group of hippies watches television and smokes marijuana as the skies begin to rain blood; a rowdy gang of teen-agers discovers a bloated corpse in the neighborhood lake. Similarly disturbing events surface in his latest collection of stories, “If the River Was Whiskey”: a couple receive a death threat from their adopted son, who suffers from the delusion that he's a killer bee (“King Bee”); a Hungarian circus performer achieves fame and fortune by scaling a skyscraper and by tying himself to wing of an airplane (“The Human Fly”); a retired primatologist tries to settle down to normal life in Connecticut with one of her chimpanzees (“The Ape Lady in Retirement”). On the surface at least, it appears as though Mr. Boyle has changed narrative terrain, trading the 60's backdrop of communes and crash pads that figured so prominently in his earlier fiction for a new yuppified world of a suburban houses and upscale restaurants. His characters pay less attention now to the quality of their dope and stereo systems than to the brand names of their clothing (Fila sweats, Nikes, hand-knit hand-and-scarf sets imported from Scandinavia) and the purity of their designer food (forest mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, fennel sausage). One woman is so obsessed with cleanliness and health that she makes her lover wear, “a full-body condom.” Another couple, who have quit their tenured teaching jobs to start a fly-by-night adoption agency, vote for Ronald Regan, though they won't admit it to their friends. Indeed the acquisitive, image-obsessed values of the 80's permeate these stories. In “Hard Sell,” a press agent attempts to upgrade public perception of the Ayatollah. “Tell him,” he says to an intermediary, “beards went out with Jim Morrison—and the bathrobe business is kinda kinky, and we can play to that if he wants, but wouldn't he feel more comfortable in a nice Italian knit?” In “The Devil and Irv Cherniske,” a bond trader makes a pact with Satan, and goes on to become one of the wealthiest men in New York . And in “Peace of Mind,” a fast-talking young woman preys on her wealthy clients' worst fears in order to sell them elaborate burglar-alarm systems. Of course, neither they—nor the young woman, as it turns out—can buy real “peace of mind,” for in Mr. Boyle's America, one's worst paranoid worries have a terrible way of coming true. A prospective client turns out to be a psychopathic con man. A suburban neighbor turns out to be a madwoman, intent on flooding herself out of her house by turning on every available faucet. A man in a black BMW turns out to be the Devil. It's no wonder that Mr. Boyle's characters continually feel menaced. As he writes of one man, who has just seen a stranger in his backyard: “Though he wasn't nearly the bruiser he'd been when he started at nose tackle for Fox Lane High, he was used to wielding his paunch like a weapon and blustering his way through practically anything, from a potential mugging right on down to putting a snooty maitre d' in his place. For all that, though, when he saw the size of the man, when he factored in his complexion and considered the oddness of the circumstances, he felt uncertain of himself. Felt as if the parameters of the world as he knew it had suddenly shifted. Felt, unaccountably, that he was in deep trouble.” As his previous fiction as amply demonstrated, Mr. Boyle is richly endowed with a n old-fashioned storyteller's gifts (a hyperactive imagination, and exuberant way with language, a penchant for exaggeration), combined with the self-consciousness of a good, card-carrying post-modernist. In his strongest work, these talents come together to create a compelling—and often very funny—tale that's both a portrait of contemporary reality and comment upon earlier fictional forms. Some of the stories in “Greasy Lake” and “Descent of Man” stand as small satirical marvels; and for all its windy effusions, “World's End” evinces an admirable ambition—a desire to take apart and reassemble the clockwork of the American dream. In Mr. Boyle's weaker efforts—which this volume, unfortunately, seems to feature—his disparate talents are used, singly, for showy, but shallow effects. “Me Cago en la Leche (Robert Jordan in Nicaragua),” for instance, is a cynical parody of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” transporting Hemingway's hero, Robert Jordan, from the Spanish Civil War to Central America, where he's supposedly engaged in fighting the contras. “Sorry Fugu” is a cutesy diatribe against critics, staged as a battle between an earnest chef and a stupid restaurant reviewer. And “The Devil and Irv Cherniske” is nothing but a tired retelling of the Faust legend, gussied up with contemporary references to insider trading, real estate and krugerrands. Curiously enough, two of the more persuasive stories in this collection eschew Mr. Boyle's trademark pyrotechnics. The title story, “If the River Was Whiskey,” is a dark portrait of a family in disrepair; “Thawing Out,” a similarly somber examination of romance gone awry. In the past, the author's efforts in the naturalistic territory have always seemed somewhat insincere and forced, but the deeply felt emotion in these two tales points to a new direction in the career of this gifted and highly versatile young writer. |