Boyle's Manic Punch There used to be a kind of guy who must have dropped off the face of the earth, though 15 or 20 years ago these guys were everywhere. Frequently they were the neighborhood pot dealers or their most enthusiastic customers; their favorite hour for social calls was circa 3 a.m. They'd perch on the edge of the living room couch, nervously bouncing their knees, telling stories that grew progressively wilder, more imaginative and funnier, as if they were playing “Can you top this?” with themselves. T. Coraghessan Boyle's third story collection, “If the River Was Whiskey,” reminded me of why I so liked those guys and never (or hardly ever) minded their unique approximation of the social graces. Boyle's fictions are fueled by that same manic energy, that fevered inventiveness, that giddy, reckless humor and its close buddy, rage. His plots don't so much develop as escalate and explode. Entropy is the operative principle in this narrative universe; life devolves rapidly toward chaos or at least massive disorganization. Perhaps that's why it's no surprise that the children in these tales include a serial killer named Damian, a half-pint social deviant with a psychopathic passion for bees and the “sorry lardassed spawn of a sorry tattooed beer-swilling lardass of a father cutting through the yard with his black death's-head T-shirt.” Boyle's characters bravely keep hoping the world will pull out of its tailspin long enough to satisfy their private longings for fame or love. A show biz Hungarian “Human Fly” devises increasingly torturous media events in his quest for publicity: clinging to the wing of an “Aero Masoquisto” DC10, then riding from Bangor to Pasadena strapped to a truck axle. (“There he would emerge from beneath the truck, wheel a motorcycle out of the back, roar up a ramp, and sail over twenty-six big rigs lined up fender to fender in the middle of a parking lot.”) An ambitious chef craves the approval of a restaurant critic who hates everything she eats. A family discovers the horrifying limitations of its expensive new home security system. The hypochondriac couple in “Modern Love” tires to keep romance warm despite the chill of precautionary blood tests and a “full-body condom.” Clearly the wise thing to pry for here is that one's prayers will go unanswered; an epigraph from Calvino warns, “You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.” As he prods his characters toward the unavoidable worst, Boyle—whose novel “World's End” won the 1987 PEN/Faulkner Award—keeps things moving with nasty-hilarious jabs, language and description honed to a stiletto point. A character slicks back “thinning, two-tone, forty-year-old hair, that looked more and more like mattress stuffing every day”; another shaves his “to a transparent stubble over a scalp the color of boiled ham.” Trouble comes in the form of a rouge moose—“a huge brown thing like a cow on stilts”—or a lunatic who lives in a house that looks “as if it had been bombed, partially reconstructed, and then bombed again.” Boyle knows how our neuroses express themselves through food, from a gourmet fantasy menu of choice cuts of endangered species (“Breast of California condor aux chanterelles…medallions of panda alla campagnola”) to a spartan health-conscious repast: “cold cream-of-tofu carrot soup and little lentil paste sandwiches for an appetizer and a garlic soufflé with biologically controlled vegetables…” My favorites among the stories are the least antic, the less contrived and more conventional (keeping in mind that Boyle's conventionality begins where most other writers' eccentricities leave off). Notably successful are the moving title story and poignant “Thawing Out”; in these, humor seems less an end in itself than a vehicle to some greater depth. At his weakest Boyle also recalls those manic, late-night visitors: the fatiguing, brittle jokingness that makes one wonder, Why is he telling me this? A few stories—like the bilious “The Little Chill”—seem more like funny ideas for fiction than fully realized work. And yet what keeps us reading are Boyle's humor, his imagination, his narrative gifts: the pleasure of watching a writer make each story more inventive than the last one. It's exciting to hear echoes of those tall tales in the small hours, of those nights when we'd wake from sleep to hear those guys wheezing at their own jokes, stopping only to catch their breath and say, “Okay, listen to this .” |