Take Woe and Blend It With Humor "It was like all nature had turned against us," says the narrator of "Top of the Food Chain," a hapless scientist testifying before a Senate committee about how his handiness with DDT has somehow wreaked hav- oc in Borneo. It's often that way for the characters in "Without a Hero," the latest collection of sharp, rueful, malevolently funny short stories from T. Coraghessan Boyle. As this tale goes on to explain, the DDT eliminated Borneo's mosquitoes, which in turn hurt its caterpillars, ruined its geckos and poisoned its cats, to the point where rats ran amok and new cats had to be parachuted in from Australia- This last was meant as an American good will gesture. "But the weevils and whatnot took a pretty heavy toll on the crops that year," the narrator continues, "and by the time we dropped the cats, well, the people were pretty hungry, and I supposed it was inevitable that we lost a good proportion of them right then and there-" As with most of these stories, woefulness and black humor color the narrative in equal measure. Mr. Boyle's wry sense of the unnatural is so highly developed that it shows up everywhere. It's apparent in tales of extinct toads, racial pre udice, animal-rights advocates, a prejudicenatical neatness expert and an aggrieved elephant, to mention just a few of the engaging oddities found here. And although he is a skillful satirist ("Beat," 1 of the book's 15 stories, is narrated in the wickedly slavish voice of an ardent Kerouac fan), Mr. Boyle presents even his most misguided characters with real sympathy. Surely it's easy to be bewildered within the nature-defying universe this book describes. In following up his elaborate, oddity-filled 1993 novel "The Road to Wellville," Mr. Boyle underscores his facility with shorter fiction. These stories are lean and focused, with slender, eccentric premises that need no further elaboration. Take "Big Game," which describes an African hunting preserve that has all the conveniences of home, including an actual location just outside Bakersfield, Calif. This pace has a proprietor who speaks "in his best British Colonial accent (though he was British by ancestry only and had never in his life been east of Reno)" and drinks quinine water "for effect rather than therapeutic value: there wasn't a malarial mosquito within a thousand miles." The ranch also makes a point of stocking weary animals, like "Claude. who must have been something in his day but was now the leonine equivalent of a nonagenarian living on a diet of mush in a nursing home." This makes trophy-hunting easier for lazy, well-heeled hunters, like the woman who complains that a pair of zebras have been made to look like colanders after a messy shooting. When one animal gets even at the end of the story, Mr. Boyle deftly makes the most of such poetic justice. All it takes is one brief glimpse into the mind of an elephant who is at risk of having her feet turned into umbrella stands. One of the more remarkable endings in "Without a Hero" (which takes its title from Anna Akhmatova, after the poet is invoked by an enterprising Russian party girl) is brought on by a ferocious storm. Hurricane Leroy becomes the deus ex machina in "Acts of God," in which a henpecked elderly husband very nearly gets his dearest wish. His wife, Mr. Boyle reports, with his rare gift for withering description, "was impossible in the morning, crawling out of the blood-red cave of her insomniac's sleep like a lioness poked with a stick." It is on just such a morning that she sends her mate to the post office despite heavy-weather warnings, which she refuses to recognize- By the time he returns home, all that remains is an empty lot. "The house was gone, but he'd lost houses before -- mainly to wives, which were a sort of natural disaster anyway; that he could live with -- and he'd lost wives too, but never like this," Mr. Boyle writes. He describes this tragedy with no small appreciation of its appropriateness, then saves one last beat for a perfectly bated ending. "Beat" is the story in this collection that comes closet to satire, with a 17-year-old narrator who shows up in Northport, L.I., to annoy Jack Kerouac and his mother at Christmastime. "So what it Bing Crosby and Mario Lanza were blaring square Christmas carols from the radio in the kitchen and Jack's big hunkering soul of a mother maneuvered her shouldery bulk into the room every five seconds to give me a look of radiant hatred and motherly impatience?" he asks. "So what? I was at Jack's. Nirvana attained." Mr. Boyle makes this as poignant as it is ridiculous by setting the story many years later, couched as a reminiscence. The main character has long since settled down to a non-Beat existence with his many children, including sons named Jack, Allen, Neal and Bill. Whenever Mr. Boyle's characters make such desperate efforts to become what they are not, they retain a faint, endearing glimmer of their own preposterousness. Consider the carnivorous ad-copy writer who, in "Carnal Knowledge," falls in love with a beautiful animal-rights zealot and does his best to make her happy. He liberates turkeys and eats strange foods ("a breakfast of brewer's yeast and what appeared to be some sort of bark marinated in yogurt"). And he takes part in a Beverly Hills anti-fur protest demonstration in which he corners a fur-wearing "wizened silvery old woman who might have been an aging star of a star's mother or even the first dimly remembered wife of a studio exec" and is decked by. her kick-boxing chauffeur. In setting the stage for this escapade, Mr. Boyle shows off the best of his book's sardonic spirit. "The day was unseasonably warm," the adman observes as the rally begins. "The Jaguars glinted in the sun and the palms nodded in the breeze, and no one, but for a single tight-lipped salesman glowering from behind the store's immaculate windows, paid the slightest bit of attention to us." |