Stories II by TC Boyle review

January 2021 · 4 minute read
ReviewBrilliance is undermined by haste in TC Boyle's collected stories

TC Boyle is a machine. At 915 pages, Stories II brings together the three short-story collections he has produced in the last 12 years, plus a brand new 14-story collection. This, combined with his first Collected Stories of 1998, takes his short-story page count to more than 1,600. That's in addition to the indefatigable US writer's 14 novels. In his preface to Stories II, Boyle states that for him "everything … is fair game for exploration", and it is hard to imagine an experience he wouldn't salt away as a story idea. That leads to diverse subject matter, but also results in an uneven body of work that makes a complete edition feel like an indulgence. This voluminous mixed bag might have been a 350-page essential selection.

Stories II covers a lot of ground, from folkloric whimsy ("Swept Away") to semi-autobiographical stories about junkies and drunks at the fag-end of the hippy dream ("Up Against the Wall") and modern Gothic (the excellent "Thirteen Hundred Rats"). Boyle's earlier short fiction was similarly heterogeneous, but tended towards the high-concept – a public image overhaul for the Ayatollah Khomeini ("Hard Sell"); Gogol's "The Overcoat" updated to Soviet Russia ("Overcoat II") – and the more obviously comedic. It bore the influence of postmodernists like Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme, as well as a fondness for violent conclusions that prompted Lorrie Moore to describe Boyle as "Flannery O'Connor with a television and no church".

The Boyle of Stories II is more willing, and better able, to place character at the centre of his work, but the violence remains. A hiking guide in the very fine story "Slate Mountain" acts as spokesman for much of Boyle's work when he reflects, "The whole world was just chance and misstep … A bear wandered too far afield and wound up gutted and dead, you took the wrong turn and died of exposure on the flank of a mountain under a thin black sky that was no covering at all." In these pages disaster is always imminent, be it violent beatings in "Here Comes", or outright global disaster via "some sort of ebola mutation" in "After the Plague". The latter – a brilliantly imagined account of the apocalypse with a disappointing, hurried ending (a recurring problem in Boyle's work) – is one of many stories that address the conflict between nature and civilisation. This is Boyle's most prominent theme, patterning his body of work like tiger stripes. Memorable examples in Stories II include "Jubilation", where a luxury Everglades development is overrun by alligators and giant mosquitoes; "Chicxulub", which draws a parallel between personal grief and arbitrary extinction; and "Dogology", in which a zoologist turns her back on a suburban life straight out of the pages of Cheever (who taught Boyle creative writing in the 1970s) in favour of running with a dog pack.

Boyle's restless invention can exhilarate, but also manifests as a lack of care. Some stories are marred by insubstantial characters (the Japanese subjects of "Ash Monday"), or by being overly contrived ("Question 62"), sentimental (the García Márquez pastiche "Sin Dolor"), or superficial in their depiction of foreign locations ("The Unlucky Mother of Aquiles Maldonado", which suggests no knowledge of Venezuela beyond what can be gleaned from a TV show and Wikipedia).

Despite a recurrent sense of brilliance being undermined by haste, the pleasures Boyle's better stories offer can be so intense that it makes hacking through the less successful work worthwhile. Boyle can place us, with superb immediacy, at a mudslide (where the mud is "the consistency of pancake batter … And it smelled of something long buried and dug up again") or put a new-fallen fragment of satellite in our hands ("it wasn't hot … it was as lukewarm as a carton of milk left out on the counter"). Like Rudyard Kipling, who can confidently relate that "the first shock of a bullet is no more than a brisk pinch", Boyle has a talent for describing events we may never experience with an arresting matter-of-factness. There is a thrill to this, and to not knowing where he will take us next, even though we might sometimes wish he would cover less ground with greater care. In this the final comparison may lie with Guy de Maupassant, another writing machine who produced too much too fast, interspersing his gemstones with paste.

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