Mining the Absurd And Striking Gold. Many of T. Coraghessan Boyle's stories are wonderfully droll, the result of a quicksilver flow of prose in the service of wicked satire. A far smaller number of them issue from a more somber sensibility, one surprisingly willing to make allowances for foibles rather than make fun of them. Taken together, these two tendencies - to go for the jugular or to attend to the wounds - make up the complete Boyle and make him one of the nation's most engaging literary tricksters. In his new collection, "Without a Hero and Other Stories," Boyle keeps us laughing most of the time. Even so, he's got plenty of serious business on his mind. He's uneasy with difficult women, scornful of ideologues, baffled by materialists, apprehensive about the fate of the environment. Under the Boyle microscope is found a contemporary America riddled with contradiction and absurdity, and all the funnier and more fascinating for that. For sheer fun, Boyle offers up several wiseacre spoofs of literary predecessors. "Big Game" is Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", reimagined as an anti-hunting piece. By setting his story at Puffs African Game Ranch in California, Boyle shreds, dices and tosses into the dustbin of history the misguided ethos of the great white hunter. "So maybe it wasn't Africa," quips the ranch owner, who serves up as easy targets lions retired from the circus, "but who had the time to go on safari?" "Beat" is written in the unintentionally hilarious style of '50s hipsterism. When a teenage acolyte of Jack Kerouac shows up on the writer's Northport, Long Island, doorstep in 1958, he's treated to a night of local Dionysia-until Kerouac's Mom can't take the chaos anymore and kicks out the whole raucous crew, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. If these two stories are skillfully done but fairly lightweight, "Filthy With Things" is one of the best, probing eerily into the mysteries of materialism. The only way for a suburban husband to exorcise his wife's collecting addiction-the house, the garage and the lawn are overflowing with her useless possessions-is to hire a "personal organizer" with Nazi-like tendencies. "I am the purifying stream," she pronounces before throwing out the bentwood rockers, the early American whaling tools, the finde-siecle Viennese soap dishes and dispatching the couple to rehabilitation boot camp. (He's to blame too, as "the enabler.") Beneath Boyle's gleaming satire lies the recognition that the accumulation of things is too often a desperate stay against feelings of nothingness. In the title story the woman as wanton materialist is a Russian émigré. "Where I come from," Irina purrs, "we do not have," and so she's wildly eager to make up for lost time, no matter how high the cost to her first bewildered and then outraged American lover. So many voracious women turn up in these stories, in fact, that female readers not predisposed to laugh at their own kind may not be amused. In "Acts of God," the woman is an elderly vixen who terrorizes her husband into going out for an errand despite the threat of a hurricane. In "Carnal Knowledge," she's an animal liberation fanatic who woos the male narrator and seduces him into her anti-meat, anti-fur crusades before tossing him aside for another man more committed to the struggle-and leaving our hero contentedly back in the realm of meat-eaters. In "Hopes Rise," however, Boyle gives us an environmentalism compatible with romance. This time the woman's ecological consciousness leads not to abandonment of the male but to a joyous sexual encounter beside a pond filled with mating frogs. "Top of the Food Chain," in the form of U.S. Senate testimony, is a funny account of how bureaucratic bungling and inept science have upset the balance of nature in Borneo. Though Boyle wants to be as tough on machismo as he is on machisma, he misses the mark. Neither "Respect," on small-time Sicilian mobsters, nor "560," about a hapless college football team, are more than finger exercises for this ever-nimble author. Like "Filthy With Things," "Little America" rises above any category to achieve a memorable poignance. The story depicts a chance encounter between the elderly son of polar explorer Richard Byrd and a homeless man named Roger. Traveling by train from Boston to the National Geographic Society in Washington, the partially senile Byrd has mistakenly disembarked at Baltimore, where he becomes Roger's prey. In the final scene, we see Byrd, believing he is reenacting his father's exploits, huddling in a frigid warehouse while Roger, penniless again after wasting the money he's stolen from Byrd, mumbles about the injustice of a society divided into haves and have-riots. In literary society, T. Coraghessan Boyle can be counted among the haves. His possessions of ferocious humor and deep humanity-not only in this book but in the novels "The Road to Wellville" and "World's End," among others-keep piling up. Happily, they're for all of us to treasure. |