Through a Gifted Storyteller's Kaleidoscope From the ambitious scope of his novels "World's End," or the recent "The Road to Weliville") through his wildly varied stories, T. Coraghessan Boyle has joined technical flair with a peripatetic, and often blissfully macabre, imagination. In his last few outings, Boyle has allowed his established command of technique to share the limelight with a newfound understatedness. In 1989's "if the River Was Whiskey" he reined in his pyrotechnical prose and fashioned some of the simplest, most effective and most affecting stories of his career. "Without a Hero" is the author's strongest story collection yet. Despite once or twice trying the tricks that never really served him well in the past - such as the unfunny story-as-monologue-Boyle displays to advantage what had too frequently been missing from his brilliant but often cold and distant earlier works: humor without viciousness and a willingness to suggest rather than tell. In almost every piece in the book, Boyle sounds less like a gifted smartass and more like a mature writer making full use of his talents. The stories in "Without a Hero"-weird, unsettling and kaleidoscopic-are vintage Boyle: a retelling of Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," complete with African big-game hunting, set in Bakersfield ("Big Game"); a dawn raid on a turkey farm by militant vegetarians ("Carnal Knowledge"); a lovely and painful portrait of a childhood poisoned by bigotry ("The Fog Man"); an eerily erotic tale about a couple distressed by frogs-on-the-brink-of-extinction ("Hopes Rise"). Boyle's inexhaustible curiosity and his willingness to try anything once are here in abundance. The collection is not uniformly terrific. Some of the stories, in fact, don't work at all. "Top of the Food Chain," for example, is a mercifully short piece written entirely in the voice of a chemical corporation flack. But even here, in a story not half as clever as its self-satisfied tone warrants, Boyle wins a sort of pyrrhic victory, wringing some humor from a narrative that is, at heart, as lively as a stone. Testifying before a Senate subcommittee about an ill-conceived plan to eradicate mosquitoes on Borneo, the narrator responds to a senator's shock at the spraying of DDT to control "a little problem with the insect vector there": "Just because we banned it domestically, under pressure from the birdwatching contingent and the hopheads down at the EPA, it doesn't necessarily follow that the rest of the world - especially the developing world - is about to jump on the bandwagon." "The Fog Man," for instance, beautifully captures without sentimentality the sense of danger, wonder and loss one summer can hold in the life of a child. A young white boy is goaded by his friend Casper into vandalizing the house of a young black girl and her family. Race, fear, sex, rebellion-Boyle handles the elements of the story like a juggler, tossing flaming sticks in the dark. We see the flames spinning and crisscrossing one another, in control, but we never see the juggler. By the time the narrator and his friend stand, eggs in hand, ready to hurl them at the girl's house, Boyle has prepared the reader for the confusion, shame and undeniable excitement of the act, but not for the perfection with which he summons its effect: "My eggs, palpable, smooth, fit the palm of my hand as if they'd been designed for it. I raised my arm-baseball, football, basketball-and Casper stirred beside me. The familiar motion, the rush of air: I will never forget the sound of that first egg loosing itself against the front of the house, a wetness there, a softness, the birth of something. No weapon, but a weapon all the same." |