Here Lies Entertainment, If Not Complete Safety They sound like synopses of novels pulled randomly from the shelves of an eccentric reader's library: The aged, addled son of a famous Antarctic explorer gets hopelessly lost in a strange city and wanders the streets amid dazed memories of his father's glory: an average guy meets his dream girl on the beach, and to win her love joins her in a crusade against meat-eating, culminating in a botched midnight raid on a turkey farm: a defensive lineman for a terrible college football team, after being ground into the turf week after week, tries to inspire his teammates to arise to face yet one more pounding: a man and his wife, unable to navigate through their house for all the junk they've accumulated, hire a professional organizer to help them get a grip on their lives. These are a few of the 15 stories in T. Coraghessan Boyle's latest bag of slick, accomplished and deliciously perverse tricks. Boyle ("The Road To Wellville") seems to know a lot about everything, from toad genera to marijuana cultivation. snuff flicks to arcane New York state labor union minutiae. None of it however, comes across as showboating; rather, reading Boyle, we feel we're in the care of an outrageous, fun-loving, wellconnected tour guide. and we trust that in his hands we'll always be entertained - if not entirely safe. Roughly. Boyle's fiction falls into two categories: wickedly funny lampoons and tales more serious and soul-baring. He's been equally successful at both in his short stories as well as his novels ("World's End" being more traditional, "Wellville" an understated romp). And although he hasn't lost a comedic step, several stories in "Without a Hero" are perhaps more touching and poignant-and effective-titan anything he's ever written. "Little America" is a twisted take on "Midnight Cowboy," if you can imagine such a thing; Boyle did, and wonderfully so. Traveling by train to Washington for the unveiling of a stamp honoring his father, the elderly son of Admiral Byrd gets off at the wrong station and falls into the clutches of Roger, a wino rip-off artist Byrd hopes, vaguely, to sell to a museum artifacts such as his father's mukluk; Roger, oblivious to history, has eyes only for the old mans suitcase and Movado wristwatch. Weeks later Roger spots the old man again, confused, lost alone, shivering like his famous father at the Pole: "He was going to say something, goodbye or thanks for the ride or whatever, but in the end he decided against it. Somewhere, in some deep tunnel of what used to be his reality and was now somebody else's, he even felt a stab of pity, and worse, guilt Bul he comforted himself with the thought that if he hadn't been at the station, somebody else would have, and any way you looked at it Bird the Third would have been plucked. Then he made his way off through the drifts, thinking maybe he'd just goon down to the station to check out the trains." "Sitting on Top of the World" is an eerie erotic ma, terpiece. Elaine, a fire-spotter in a cabin high on a mountain, believes she is being stalked by an odd, overzealous suitor. With the fast snow due at any time, she could call it a season and abandon her post yet she doesn't Teetering between anticipation and terror, wondering if she's imagining things, blowing them out of proportion or truly in danger, she waits - and is rewarded, as is the reader, with a subdued yet at the same time electrifying ending. A couple of straight-ahead comic pieces fizzle -"Top of the Food Chain" is derivative at best as was a similar, earlier Boyle piece about a public relations man advising the Ayatollah. But when he's on, Boyle takes humor and paints it black about as well as anyone. "Big Game" and "The 100 Faces of Death, Volume IV" have intriguingly asymptotic approaches to truly sick humor, that is, they draw closer and closer and closer, but never quite cross the line, remaining, barely but masterfully, just within the bounds of comedy. "56-0," about a hapless team of (barely) walling wounded football players, will make you hurt when you laugh. Not to strain to create a football metaphor, but Boyle frequently executes an O.J. Simpson move: He'll change directions so suddenly and acutely it seems to have been impossible. Never make the the mistake of thinking that you know where one of his stories is going, because often as not youll end up in entirely different yet dazzling, eye-popping literary territory. With an expert guide as narrator. |