Material Guys A novelist friend recently described the short story as "a highly artificial form," a literary contrivance limited by its nature to sketching out "a situation, a character, a relationship, or an ambiance." Rarely, he claimed, can it do justice to more than two such elements at once. Luckily for those of us who like the short story, there is T. Coraghessan Boyle, who clearly takes no such dim view of the form. In Without a Hero, his fourth collection since 1979, Boyle presents 15 sterling tales marked equally by a keen sense of the absurd and a startling compassionate awareness of human frailty. Throughout, his indecently lavish gift for the language is as distinctively and gleefully displayed as ever in his novels. Several of these new stories play with themes that seem to be favorites for their author. In "Hopes Rise," Boyle writes with a previously demonstrated fondness for the primordial mud and the things that creep and crawl and slither in it; in "Top of the Food Chain" and "Big Game," he skewers again in his mock-heroic way those who would abuse technology in bringing the wilderness to heel. Mike and Nicole Bender, the Los Angeles real-estate royals who go lion-hunting in the wilder reaches of Bakersfield in "Big Game," are in fact second cousins to the relentlessly yuppie Jeffcoats, who cart the whole baggage of civilization deep into the Okefenokee in Boyle's novel East Is Fast-but the Benders, unlike the luckier Jeffcoats, prick Mother Nature once too often. Boyle's fiercely ironic view of modern American foibles lends bite to most of these tales, but in a few, including the collection's title story, he opts for a less judgmental, more ruminative tone. "Without a Hero;' about a shallow and ill-fated affair between an emotionally hardened man and a self-indulgent Russian woman, and "Acts of God,", about a henpecked construction contractor who nearly loses life and wife to a hurricane, are rich with plangent insight into their characters' humanity. "The Fog Man," which just might be the best of these new offerings, is another example of this kinder, gentler Boyle, which may very well surprise those readers who have seen him heretofore as an icy and unforgiving critic of the national character. One of the particular pleasures of reading T.C. Boyle is that he never lets lexicographic whimsy overwhelm his narrative. To be sure, he indulges his infatuation with vocabulary and his is comprehensive-throughout his work, but the result is always balanced and effective; in most of these stories, Boyle has a point to make, and each linguistic extravagance nudges readers in the direction he has chosen for them. On rare occasions, admittedly, his verbal prodigality is itself the point (witness "Beat," a deliciously, deliriously sharp-witted tall tale about spending Christmas with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs). But even in such instances there is distinct shape and momentum to each story. If there are weaknesses in Without a Hero, they have to do, perhaps, with one of those themes Boyle addresses regularly. The obsessive materialism he satirizes so unforgivingly in "Big Game" and "Filthy with Things," for instance, seems mildly anachronistic, a quality associated with the decade that gave us Reagan and recession. (But then, both stories are set in Reagan's own state of California, where even in the '70s people acted as though it were the '80s.) Still, this collection is on the whole reassuring. That novelist friend had suggested that, although budding writers still cut their teeth on the short story, it might come one day to be a literary curiosity as moribund as the epic poem, a mere exercise undertaken for the sake of tradition. The razor-edged passion T. Coraghessan Boyle brings to the form in Without a hero makes me think he is probably wrong. |