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T.C. BOYLE STORIES

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE

A fine, fat gathering of 68 stories, including the contents of Boyle’s four collections (Without a Hero, 1994, etc.), four more, uncollected, tales, and three previously unpublished. The pieces are grouped thematically, under the conveniently broad headings “Love,” “Death,” and —And Everything in Between.” Even this organizing device carries a whiff of Boyle’s ironic sensibility and bold, resonant voice. He’s a satirist, of course, with a deadly eye for faddishness and pretension, but he’s primarily an inventor whose outrageous narrative premises pay homage to the spirit of Groucho Marx and the examples of such predecessors as the British fantasist John Collier and our own Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover. The volume begins with “Modern Love,” Boyle’s triumphantly wry take on contemporary sexual timidity, and ends just as enjoyably with his loopy burlesque of conspicuous consumption and suburban guilt, “Filthy with Things.” Along the way, it’s fun to re-encounter his mischievous revisionist portrayals of well-known figures: Dwight Eisenhower fixated on Mrs. Khrushchev (“Ike and Nina”); a retrograde Lassie (“Heart of a Champion”); Mao-Tse-tung in fine physical fettle (“The Second Swimming”); and Carry Nation in full eruption (“John Barleycorn Lives”). There are also acute comic distortions of politics (“The New Moon Party”), pop culture (“All Shook Up”), the sex wars (“A Woman’s Restaurant”), and science and technology run amok (“Descent of Man,” “De Rerum Natura”)—as well as pitch-perfect homages to Kafka (“The Fog Man”), Hemingway (“Robert Jordan in Nicaragua”), and Gogol (“The Overcoat II”). Of the newer stories, “I Dated Jane Austen” is in Boyle’s best gently mock-heroic vein, and “Little Fur People” observes with bemused tenderness a spinster’s passion to save her beloved “pet” squirrels. Boyle is of course too young for a summing-up, but this seems as good a time as any for a mid-career display of the antic wares of our most versatile and prolific radical comedian.

Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1998

ISBN: 0-670-87960-6

Page Count: 690

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998

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THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.

Pub Date: March 28, 1990

ISBN: 0618706410

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990

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SIGHTSEEING

STORIES

A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.

Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.

In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.

A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004

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