Synopsis
A collection of sixty-eight short stories written between 1972 and 1997 by the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of The Road to Wellville features three previously unpublished tales, including an American tourist's amorous adventures with a female boxer. Tour.
Reviews
A premier practitioner of short fiction, Boyle (Water Music) gathers two decades worth of work in one volume of almost 70 stories, adding seven pieces (three previously unpublished) to the contents of his previous four collections. The entries are organized thematically, evenly divided among "Love," "Death" and "And Everything In Between"; thus chronology is jumbled and early pieces flank more recent ones. The "Love" stories are so polished and sophisticated they all but glitter. In them, very often a hapless male, modestly hoping merely to get laid, encounters an obsessed woman and finds himself eventually undone. Sex itself is not especially important to Boyle, but obsession is. Obsessions of one sort or another (animal activism, germophobia, Elvis, frogs, squirrels, whales) inform these stories, which sparkle with wicked wit and exuberant prose. The last "Love" story serves as a sad transition to the tales of "Death." "Juliana Cloth" chronicles the way a sexually transmitted virus decimates an African town, and a girl goesAknowinglyAto an embrace that will kill her. The cumulative effect of the "Death" section, though, is numbing, repetitiously grotesque and finally gratuitous. However, the collection's texture quickens in the last section, "And Everything In Between," a potpourri of chilling fables. Throughout Boyle's work, real people (Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Carry Nation, Robert Johnson, Mao, Jack Kerouac, Jacques Cousteau) appear in narrative out-takes that are invariably amusing and, like Boyle's more serious work, mordant, worldly and irreverent. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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contents of Boyle's four collections (Without a Hero, 1994, etc.), four more, uncollected, tales, and three previously unpublished.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. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Boyle fans will be delighted by the release of this collection of 68 short stories, spanning a period of more than 20 years and including all stories published in previous collections as well as 4 stories not previously published in book form and 3 stories not previously published at all. For those not yet introduced to Boyle, or readers whose interest has been piqued by the recent success of The Road to Wellville (1993) and Riven Rock , there is plenty of variety in this collection, showcasing the wide range of Boyle's imaginative dexterity. Always entertaining, often provocative, Boyle's work combines verbal athleticism and comedic insight to illuminate the darkest corners of the human psyche. The stories are arranged in three broad sections: "Love," "Death," and "Everything in Between," with much unavoidable overlap among the categories. Of the three previously unpublished stories, "Little Fur People" pits an old woman's caring for sick and injured squirrels against the long arm of the same body that sanctions "no bag limit" killing of the creatures--in season with a valid license, of course; mutinous culinary frustration, as only the French could feel it, erupts among the crew aboard the Calypso in response to Jacques Cousteau's unceasing compulsion to dive deeper in "The Rapture of the Deep"; and the awkward romantic adventures of an American tourist are set in the vacation backdrop of "Mexico." Terrific storytelling and amazing artistry throughout. Grace Fill
This retrospective collection assembles all the short fiction of California postmodernist Boyle, including some early magazine work that has not previously appeared in book form. The tales are arranged thematically instead of chronologically, in three broad categories: "Love," "Death," and "And Everything in Between." Most are lightweight riffs on pop culture icons in the tradition of Max Apple's The Oranging of America (1976). In "I Dated Jane Austen," from 1977, the tee-shirted narrator chauffeurs Miss Austen to a punk club in his Alfa Romeo. "Beat" (1993) imagines Jack Kerouac and his mother sharing a bottle of Mogen David wine and listening to Bing Crosby records on Christmas Eve, 1958. "The Rapture of the Deep" (1995) is the story of Jacques Cousteau's mutinous galley chef. Boyle works in the self-consciously hip, name-dropping style of Jay Leyner and stand-up comedian Dennis Miller. Unfortunately, the thematic grouping used in his anthology emphasizes the formulaic aspects of Boyle's fiction and makes its manic inventiveness seem forced and predictable. Libraries with any of Boyle's earlier story collections can skip this one.
-?Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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