No One's Willing to Die for Love Readers of T. Coraghessan Boyle's amazing stories are probably most familiar miliar with the salacious Lassie in "Heart of a Champion," the Bruce Springsteen song run amok in "Greasy Lake" or the updated Gogol of "Overcoat II." Mr. Boyle situates his fictional ideas at the center of an available culture and then bursts forth with strange, engaging narratives that neither deconstruct nor reconstruct but perhaps, skeptically and inventively, deconstruct. His dreamed-up reconfigurations seem nocturnal, pouched, alternatively formed and conceived - like animal life in Australia or a half-mad cousin from Dubuque. In "Without a Hero," Mr. Boyle's fourth collection of stories, once more there is nothing casual or tired; the literary performances here retain Mr. Boyle's astonishing and characteristic verve, his unaverted gaze, his fascination with everything lunatic and queasy. His stories are artifacts of psychic aberrance, lampoons fashioned in shadow and void, and they fill a reader (as they are intended to do) with the giddy nausea of our cultural and theological confusions. In "Big Game," a Hemingwayesque story impossibly reset in Bakersfield, Calif., a man runs a "safari" hunting range filled with decrepit elephants and lions from downsized zoos and circuses. For large sums, he allows rich people to shoot the poor beasts, though, in a rare pang of conscience, he still regrets "the time he'd let the kid from the heavy-metal band pot one of the giraffes." Nonetheless, he reminisces, "he'd taken a cool twelve thousand dollars to the bank on that one." In "Filthy With Things" the protagonist - a man who wants to "go up to the mountains and let the meteor showers wash him clean, but he can't" - hires a "professional organizer" to help him make neatness and sense of his myriad possessions. The organizer, a chic, black-garbed woman (dressed much like the figure of Death in Jean Cocteau's film "Orpheus"), treats her clients as addicts and their spouses as co-dependents. She catalogues and removes the man's belongings. He may have one thing back each day for 60 days, but he has to ask for them specifically, one by one. "You'd be surprised how many couples never recall a thing," she says, "not a singie item." Stripped of his material clutter, he is left with nothing of substance to take its place - except, perhaps, litigation. "When he shuts his eyes he sees only the sterile deeps of space, the remotest regions beyond even the reach of light. And he knows this: it is cold out there, inhospitable, alien. There's nothing there, nothing contained in nothing. Nothing at all." In "Hopes Rise" a young man, after a lecture by an eminent biologist, becomes obsessed with the dying frogs of the world But when at last, searching for some, the young man finds a pond full of them, they function merely as an aphrodisiac for him and his increasingly exasperated girlfriend. In their attempt to outwit the bad news of the world, the couple enact and express what seems to be even more bad news: a false rapture, a road-show holiness. In the title story, one of the book's best, a divorced man tells the story of his "passionate Russian experience" with a Soviet emigre lover named Irina: "Slovenly, indolent, nearly inert, she was the end product of three generations of the workers' paradise, that vast dark crumbling empire in which ambition and initiative counted for nothing. Do I sound bitter? I am bitter." Irina consumes large quantities of sushi and Grand Marnier, she quizzes her lover about mutual hinds. She bemoans a world in which no one is willing to the for love."I am the one who can die for love," she says finally to the narrator. "Then die for it," he says, and the reader feet the intended violence of the moment so purely, strongly and sadly that it is a surprise: such moments are rare in the brash, wacky world of Mr. Boyle's fiction. The reason, of course, is that Mr. Boyle is not typically that kind of writer. He is not psychological. He's all demography and Zeitgeist, a nerdy wizard of literary what-ifs (given the whavares). He is fairly bored, it seems, with the nuances of the ordinary human heart; he does not linger there for long, or without tap shoes and sparklers. Indeed, it is hard to think of writers to compare him with. In his sheer energy and mercilessness, his exuberantly jaundiced view, he resembles perhaps a middlebrow Donald Barthelme, or Don DeLillo crossed with Dr. Seuss, or Flannery O'Connor with a television and no church. The emotional complexity that could secure his characters at a safe distance from caricature confines him, slows him down. In his few stabs at poignancy or earnestness, as in one story here, "Acts of God," he cannot shake the mean and theatrical habits of irony, the repudiating hiccup of sarcasm: "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. It hit him then, a wave of grief that started in his hips and crested in his throat: Muriel." Part P. T. Barnum; part F. Lee Bailey, Mr. Boyle here is the dying Mercutio, unable convincingly to leave the stage. He is the biologist from his own tale, pulling dead frogs from his pockets and crying, "We're doomed, can't you see that?" while "the audience sat riveted in their seats." There are writers who intend to satirize a thing but then forges. They tip their hands. They reveal too much affection for and participation in the very object of their satire and their literary performance falters. Mr. Boyle is the opposite of such a writer. His prolific pen is, perhaps, in satirical overdrive. He may try to smile warmly, wisely, sadly, but his Cheshire grin won't go away. One of the most successful exceptions here is the story "The Fog Man," an evocative first-persat narrative of one suburban boy's brief foray into racism. It is a beautifully narrated story of the misty demarcations in a child's knowledge and innocence, in a neighborhood's poison and magic, and the telling seems almost to overflow the form. It seems to want, as novels do, to recreate exhaustingly a time and world within our own, rather than make quick reference to the one we already inhabit - a necessary aspect of stories. One can imagine a whole novel spilling forth from this tale; it constitutes a strange and lovely fusion, a collision with another book entirely, and it is evidence of the author's true range. Elsewhere in this collection, Mr. Boyle's impulses - his penchant for the sardonic, for the put-on, for the manic unanswerable question - are perfectly suited to and accommodated by the short story's brevity and force. God knows, Mr. Boyle can write like an angel, if at times a caustic, gum-chewing one. And in this strong, varied collection maybe we have what we'd hope to find in heaven itself (by the time we begged our way there): no lessening of brilliance, plus a couple of laughs to mitigate all that high and distant sighing over what goes on below. |