AT NIGHT ALL CATS ARE GREY

This Irish writer whose Any Other Man appeared last year, again turns up some hyperacidity in the Irish turf and gizzard. Within the triangle run of home, pub and windscreaming coast, Boyle's boys and oldsters, cutups and mild-wild women fight off boredom and insidious certainties.. . . In one story a miserable husband relives a badger hunt while attempting to extricate himself from his wife's heavy sexual pursuit. . . . Another husband, severely hung-over, reconstructs the previous evening (during which he had apparently made advances to a neighbor's wife), with growing exhilaration in the midst of his wife's syrupy consolations. But his cat confidant ends the dream. . . . In other stories losers sporadically fight the pack. An old woman, caught in terminal madness, outwits her rapacious daughters; a young boy watches the clerical baiting of the village half-wit; an old man (in one of the best stories) defiantly escapes into drink at his wife's wake, yet there is a hint of triumph as he sweetly falls into slumber on the two pillows his wife had forbidden; a gentle man loses the love of an unbridled girl and fine-bred horse; and in the pubs tongues wag with the poetry of scatological nonsense. Better at biting humor than predictable tragedy, Boyle nonetheless has caught the ragged edge of the restless Irish bind.