Breaking the barricades Fences have it rough in T. Coraghessan Boyle's world. With neither ceremony nor exception, they are torn down, trampled upon, compacted and discarded. Conventional boundaries, characters and scenarios are not his forte, as he again illustrates in this, his fourth collection of short stories and first anthology in five years. Seven years ago, with his stunning "World's End" - a novel that masterfully chronicled three generations of Dutch settlers, a vanishing Indian tribe and a young man's search for his lost father - The New York Times proclaimed Boyle an author with no limits. The reference was to his potential as a literary figure; it is as appropriate for his range of subject matter. "Without a Hero" opens with "Big Game," a smoothly constructed story of how young Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose Bender becomes orphaned. Her father is an Encino real estate broker torn between his lust to hunt in the African wilds and the reality of his station in life-upper-middle-class rat-racer. He settles for a short vacation with his wife and daughter at a cheesy, pay-for-prey fake safari game ranch outside Bakersfield. The main character is a '90s update of Hemingway's tragic Francis Macomber complete with easily bruised ego and a date with destiny when he stalks more than he can handle. "The 100 Faces of Death, Volume IV" has elements of Hollywood's "The Big Chill." A longtime friend's death brings back the writer's memories of youth; including an eerie image from a sadistic film the two had watched together. Racial intolerance rudely intrudes upon childhood innocence in "The Fog Man," while "Beat" features a pair of hopelessly "outthere" teens realizing their wildest fantasy-a successful pilgrimage to the home of Jack Kerouac. Their bliss, however, occasionally is interrupted when the Beat poet's mother scolds them for making too much noise. And in "56-0," the story of the last game for a perennial loser of a college football team, Boyle performs a feat rare among fiction writers, relating a sports story that captures drama without sinking to melodrama. As a whole, "Without a Hero" is typical Boyle-stories born from a rich imagination, peppered with a formidable but not stodgy vocabulary; smart, lively and oftentimes insane. It's the stuff that takes literary fences down and makes us loath to put them back up. |