Boyle views the human animal as evil… or silly The age demanded an image/Of its accelerated grimace. said Ezra Pound, through the voice of his alter ego. Hugh Selwyn Mauberly. What was true in 1920 is even more true today. We of the late 1980s; and 1990s demand an image of our own strange facial contortions-and that is exactly what we get from the cruel pen of T. Coraghessan Boyle. Boyle has the special talent needed to flicker our image back to us. and if we cringe at the likeness. That is a testimonial to his special skills. Boyle is a very special modern satirist; he painfully shows us where we went wrong, and he knows how to chide our frailties and mock what we like to think of as our better selves. At the end, Boyle leaves us very little in the way of comfort for having fought the good fight. In Boyle's eyes. when we are not bad. we tend to be silly. In order to succeed at this and have any readers at all, a writer has to be funny. Boyle is-excruciatingly so in the black humor that began during the 1920s and now is the stylistic choice of almost all the best humorists. Like an appendectomy patient, we L laugh and feel the pain at the same time when we read Boyle. Boyle is probably at his meanest and funniest in his short fiction. His novels are wonderful too, and in the same satirical vein--particularly "The Road to Wellville," about health fraud in the early years of the century, and "East is East," about a Japanese ship- jumper in the Carolinas. But the stories spray the venom wider as they examine seemingly every portion of our society. It is very hard to feel comfortable while reading Boyle. "Without a Hero" is Boyle's fourth volume of stories, following "Descent of Man," "Greasy Lake" and "If the River Was Whiskey." With every book, his touch becomes surer, his skills funnier and nastier. It doesn't take long for Boyle to set the stage in this new volume, as he parodies Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" in the hilari-ous "Big Game." Once again, there's a triangle in a hunting camp-a pompous would-be hunter, a bored but beautiful wife and a jaded big game hunter. Except the whole thing's a nonsense; the camp is not in Africa it's in Bakersfield. Calif. It's stocked with retired circus animals who are old and frequently, toothless. The hunting is as sham as the hunters; that makes the tragedy even more shocking when it comes. What about our newly discovered enthusiasm for the environment-how does that impress Boyle? Not much. In "Hopes Rise," perhaps the funniest story in the collection, Peter, a finicky young man with environmentalist sentiments, and Adrian, his frustrated girlfriend of many years, discover a tragedy-the toad and frog population is decreasing. Finally, in a scene that is pure Boyle, the pair come across a pulsating sea of toads: "There they were-toads, toads uncountablehumping in a frenzy of webbed feet and seething snouts ... stacked up three and four high. Their eggs were everywhere, beaded and wet with the mucus of life, and all their thousands of eyes glittered with lust. We could hear them clawing at one another, grunting, and we didn't know what to do. And then a single toad at the edge of the pond started in with his thin piping trill and in an instant we were forgotten and the whole pullulatmg mass of them took it up and it was excruciating, beautiful, wild to the core." So what were the environmentalists to do, confronted with all this. Jump in. of course. If Boyle is less than impressed with environmentalism. bow does he look at the other side of the coin, the critics of environmentalism? Boyle doesn't care for them either, and he satirizes them in the wonderful "Top of the Food Chain," in which an in "The cats? That's where it got sticky, really sticky. You see, nobody realty lost any sleep over a pile of dead lizards-though we did the tests routinely and the tests confirmed what we'd expected, that is, the product had been concentrated in the geckos because of the sheer number of contaminated flies they consumed. But lizards are one thing and cats are another." Even love is not an unrelieved joy in Boyle's sad world. In the title story, an American yuppie finds the presence of a beautiful Russian siren to be pleasurable at first, but later something of a risk to his serenity. In "Carnal Knowledge," a man finds the favors of a beautiful animal rights activist to be not worth the difficulties involved in liberating turkeys from captivity. In "56-0," a huge lineman on a hapless college football team gets satisfaction from blocking an extra point after giving up eight touchdowns. Boyle's viewpoint is harsh indeed but his touch is so sure and his humor so on target that the only reasonable reaction is to demand more. |