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T(homas) Coraghessan Boyle

Denis Hennessy (State University of New York at Oneonta.)

Born: December 02, 1948 in Peekskill, New York, United States

Other Names: Boyle, Thomas Coraghessan; Boyle, Thomas John; Boyle, T.C.

Nationality: American

Occupation: Novelist

American Short-Story Writers Since World War II: Second Series . Ed. Patrick Meanor and Gwen Crane.Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 218. Detroit: Gale, 2000. From Literature Resource Center.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning

Table of Contents

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WORKS:

WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

BOOKS

· Descent of Man: Stories (Boston: Little, Brown / Atlantic Monthly Press, 1979; London: Gollancz, 1979).

· Water Music (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982; London: Gollancz, 1982).

· Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (New York: Viking, 1984; London: Gollancz, 1984).

· Greasy Lake and Other Stories (New York: Viking, 1985).

· World's End (New York: Viking, 1987; London: Macmillan, 1988).

· If the River Was Whiskey (New York: Viking, 1989).

· East Is East (New York: Viking, 1990; London: Cape, 1991).

· The Collected Stories (London: Granta, 1993).

· The Road to Wellville (New York: Viking, 1993; London: Granta, 1993).

· Without a Hero and Other Stories (New York: Viking, 1994; London: Granta/Penguin, 1995).

· The Tortilla Curtain (New York: Viking, 1995; London: Bloomsbury, 1995).

· T. C. Boyle Stories (New York: Viking, 1998).

· Riven Rock (New York: Viking, 1998; London: Bloomsbury, 1998).

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY:

Since 1979 T. Coraghessan Boyle has wondered, sometimes with a strong hint of the irony that pervades most of his fiction, why he has not become as popular a writer as John Irving , John Updike, or even Stephen King. Critics and readers have praised his short-story collections and novels, and his short fiction appears regularly in prestigious magazines. Yet, he has never become a household name. Boyle was quoted in DLB Yearbook : 1986 as saying, "I'm still a wise guy from New York. . . . I've always felt that I would never compromise. I'd do exactly what I wanted and still get my audience." This defiant side of Boyle might explain why his short fiction is not widely admired by the general public while it continues to delight his faithful readers by pushing further and further the power of the short story to lampoon American pretensions and obsessions.

Boyle was born Thomas John Boyle to a second-generation Irish American father and a mother of Dutch-Irish descent, in Peekskill, New York, on 2 December 1948. At seventeen Boyle, who was named after his father, changed his name to T. Coraghessan Boyle, largely as an attempt to distance himself from his alcoholic father and emerge from the lackluster background of a lower-middle-class upbringing. The pronunciation of Coraghessan (kuh-RAGG-issun), a name from the family of his mother, Rosemary Post McDonald Boyle, has been a source of confusion for readers, even providing the idea for a New Yorker cartoon in which a character asks for "a book by T. What's-His-Face Boyle." After a barely mediocre academic career at the State University of New York College at Potsdam, where he attempted to study music, Boyle graduated in 1968. Inspired by a creative-writing course he had taken at Potsdam, Boyle continued to write short stories while he taught English to tough adolescents in a Hudson Valley public high school. One of his early stories, "The OD and Hepatitis Railroad or Bust," was published in the North American Review (Fall 1972), easing the way to Boyle's acceptance in the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Boyle readily admits that drugs and alcohol were preoccupations before he attended Iowa. He had also begun to read widely and to be influenced by John Barth , Thomas Pynchon , Gabriel García Márquez , Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet . Other influences assert themselves humorously in stories that parody the styles of Edgar Allan Poe , Arthur Conan Doyle , and Ernest Hemingway , progenitors of the protean flexibility that characterizes the modern short story.

Boyle has built his career as a short-story writer on stylistic innovations and inventive subject matter, always displaying his respect for the power of short fiction to entertain. In a brief autobiography written for Amazon.com he described his literary heroes as Evelyn Waugh , especially in A Handful of Dust (1937); Gabriel García Márquez , especially in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and his short story "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" ; and Flannery O'Connor. Her "A Good Man is Hard to Find" (1955) is his favorite story, beating out short fiction by John Cheever , Raymond Carver , and Robert Coover by a narrow margin. "Accident rules the World," Boyle says, "accident and depravity, and I don't have O'Connor's faith to save me from all that."

In 1977 Boyle earned a Ph.D. at Iowa, using as his dissertation a collection of short stories later published as Descent of Man (1979). Since earning his doctorate he has taught at the University of Southern California.

Boyle has created a zany image for himself by accentuating his frizzy hair and wearing punk clothing while affecting a semiserious scowl. He also indulges his penchant for the rebellious music of the 1970s by singing lead in a rockabilly band. His flamboyant public persona contrasts with his personal lifestyle: he has been married to Karen Kvashay since 1974, and they have three children, Kerrie, Milo, and Spencer.

Descent of Man , which won the St. Lawrence Award for short fiction in 1980, displays Boyle's overriding theme: the unavoidable reversion of humankind to a prelapsarian animality, a state of being characterized by physical coarseness and the absence of conscience. The reader rarely hears Boyle's voice of judgment in these stories; rather he seems to be snickering behind a first-person narrator or alongside an ostensibly omniscient teller, not with the Joycean indifference of a creator paring his nails but with something approaching a blissful complicity.

The first-person narrator of the title story laments his sagging romance with Jane Good, a scientist whose study of chimpanzees has centered on the super-intelligent ape Konrad. The beast seems to be winning Jane's affections, but not through his intellect. Jane is regressing into coarse habits of hygiene and nutrition and is discovered having sex with Konrad. Boyle leaves the reader debating if the narrator is inferior to Konrad, too different from the Tarzan Jane wants. The irony of the story is intensified as the reader feels inclined to agree with her choice.

In "The Champ" the similarity of man's inclinations to the worst instincts of animals is exemplified by a champion eater with an ulcer who outeats his opponent in a crucial contest as his mother sits ringside encouraging him: "Eat, Angelo, eat . . . clean your plate." In "We are Norseman," narrated in an epic-sounding first person, Norsemen are killing and pillaging, gleefully burning the books right out of Celtic monks' hands as they try to preserve their brand of civilization. Both stories tend to diminish the reader's assessment of man's place on the food chain.

Boyle's voice and tone are more Joycean in these stories than in his later fiction. Yet, if he is the absent modernist creator defined by James Joyce , he is not objective, as Joyce wished to be. As in most of Boyle's stories, his virtuosic language gives the reader a sense of the author laughing behind the scenes. This language play is a major part of the Boyle style.

In this first collection Boyle cannot always achieve the same level of virtuosity. His themes get blurry when he begins taking potshots at man's foibles. In "Heart of a Champion" the language alone cannot sustain the weight of a Lassie-movie parody in which the dog is sidetracked from rescuing his master, Timmy, by a romantic attraction to a coyote. Nor can language sustain "Bloodfall," a story about hippies who cannot postpone their solipsistic lifestyle of drugs, alcohol, and sex just because the skies are sending down torrents of blood in place of rain. The variety of Boyle's themes in the collection, however, demonstrates a potential prowess for short-story writing.

One of the final stories in this first book returns clearly to Boyle's major theme, leaving the reader to question the right of science to meddle in the secrets of nature and ask if man must re-examine his hegemony in the food chain. "De Rerum Natura" offers segments of a biography of The Inventor, from his days as a prodigy in the scientific world to his violent, fiery death at the hands of an angry mob. The Inventor has toyed with nature, changing it in bizarre ways: he has developed a cat that does not eat, but just purrs and comforts its owner; he has turned rusted cars into food to feed India. Finally, he has solved the "big mystery"; he has killed God and has slides to prove it. His neighbors, representing mankind, riot in indignation, burning The Inventor's house with him inside.

Like the stories that end Boyle's later collections, "Drowning," the final story in Descent of Man, seems to have been chosen to summarize and emphasize his major theme. The story presents man as predatory, without free will, and totally deserving of the harsh destiny that awaits him in a cruel universe. Two people at the beach are presented almost as though they are displayed on slides under a microscope. One is a woman, naturally beautiful and healthy, an artists' model in her spare time; the other is a man, weak looking but a naturally good swimmer. The two are on the same lonely stretch of sand but catch only distant glimpses of one another. As the man swims, the woman sleeps in the sun. She is raped by a casual stroller and then by some passersby who have watched the first attacker's violent assault. Seemingly oblivious to the action on the beach, the swimmer is surprised by a larger-than-usual wave and drowns. Boyle leaves his readers with moral and metaphysical questions about man's inevitable struggle with fate. Because of his ill-preparedness and his weakness of will, he will lose in a struggle with natural disaster or with his own rapacious self-interests.

Boyle's second collection, Greasy Lake and Other Stories (1985), published when he was thirty-seven, seems to be his commentary on life from the late 1960s, when he was one of the rebellious baby boomers, until the mid 1980s. The first story, "Greasy Lake," which takes its title from Bruce Springsteen's "Spirits in the Night"--a song on his first album, Greetings from Asbury Park N.J.(1973)--also has a line from the song as an epigraph: "It's about a mile down on the dark side of Route 88." Greasy Lake is the setting for a darkly comic tale of self-inflicted trouble. The first-person narrator and his friends are drinking and looking for sex and violence by the shores of a polluted lake. They attack a man and attempt to rape his girlfriend, inviting reprisals that they cannot handle. Demonstrating the failures of youth in the era of the Vietnam War and unfettered sexual exploitation, "Greasy Lake" is one of Boyle's best and most chilling stories.

The stories that follow explore other issues of the 1960s and 1970s, following a pattern of hopes dashed by treachery and disillusionment, with Boyle's never-ending supply of surprises and ironies lightening the mood of the stories. In "Caviar" a young couple, Marie and Nathaniel Trimpie, try unsuccessfully to conceive a baby and then contact a Dr. Ziss to help them with finding a surrogate mother for their child. After artificial insemination, the surrogate, Wendy, has clandestine sex with Nathaniel. After the child is born, Nathaniel, driven by a passionate desire for Wendy, visits her and discovers that she is living with Dr. Ziss. In a rage he beats the doctor and is arrested. Out on bail and locked out of his house by Marie, he takes his boat onto the river, where he feels more natural, in his "element." He finds a sturgeon caught in one of his nets and in the process of cleaning it, "millions" of gelatinous eggs stream from its gut, reminding the reader of the seemingly generous outpouring of nature, which is denied to some, and causing the reader to think about the circuitous and devious means that humans use in attempts to right the inequities of nature.

"Ike and Nina," narrated in the awed and breathless voice of an aide to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, tells a story of a fictional affair Ike had with Nina, the wife of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, consummated during delicate negotiations between the two leaders of 1955. According to the aide, the premier's turn to bellicose behavior can be traced to jealousy triggered by the discovery of the affair. Boyle's imaginative use of narration saves a clever story from being just clever. It reminds the reader of how the course of events can be changed and disrupted by high-level weakness and scandal.

The theme of dreams shattered by reality and perfidy provides unity in Greasy Lake and Other Stories. "Whales Weep" deals with the fanaticism of some ecologists. In "The New Moon Party" a candidate who seems similar to George H. W. Bush promises the moon, a new one, during his campaign. After taking office, he has it constructed, losing face and credibility when the large reflecting orb, made of mirrors, almost melts his constituency. "Not a Leg to Stand On" and "Stones in My Pathway, Hellhound On My Trail" give frightening pictures of Americans' callous treatment of the aging and of the horrors of being old in an uncaring world. In "All Shook Up" Boyle returns to Upstate New York to depict Joey, a pathetically hopeful young Elvis Presley imitator, just at the end of the singer's postmortem popularity. The poignant story is narrated by a next-door neighbor, Carl, a high-school guidance counselor who coolly observes the boy 's failure and dejection and then slickly seduces Joey 's young wife, Cindy. Carl's dispassionate description of Joey 's youthful rage at his failure, cuckolding, and disillusionment is one of Boyle's most skillful uses of a deceptively disinterested participant-narrator.

"Rara Avis" seems to be Boyle's attempt to imitate the minimalist style of New Yorker short-story writers such as Raymond Carver and Richard Ford . It is one of Boyle's most effective descriptions of repressed life in a small town like Peekskill. The wounded rare bird perched on the roof of a furniture shop in a small rural New York State village draws a crowd of onlookers who are first curious, then cynically reviling, and finally angry enough to want to stone the creature. Even the twelve-year-old boy who is the narrator is drawn into the murderous urge to destroy this anomaly that has ceased to be interesting. The symbolism of the story is contrived, but the last line--"I threw the first stone"--is wrenching. The outcast rara avis represents a young artist who fails to recognize his talent.

The final story in Greasy Lake and Other Stories , "The Overcoat II," is an obvious takeoff on Nikolay Gogol's 1842 story "The Overcoat," about the frustrations of Akaky, a Russian office worker. Brought up to date by Boyle, Akaky is a file clerk in Soviet Leningrad during the 1960s, just as helpless, reviled, and suffering--and, as in Gogol's story, his new, warm overcoat is still stolen from him. The only difference with the modern victim is that he is a loyal communist who fully believes that the system will protect him. His enemies are coworkers who are cynical about communism, the sly thief of the tailor who sells Akaky his new coat, and the apparatchik who ends up with the coat. Akaky dies of pneumonia. As in other Boyle stories, cynical self-interest triumphs over innocence.

Reviewing If the River Was Whiskey (1989) for The New York Times (14 May 1989), Elizabeth Benedict wrote that Boyle succeeded in touching the reader with real emotion only in the title story. She praised Boyle's skillful and clever writing but wished he would be more forthcoming in uncovering the inner hurts that drive his restless energy. Benedict seems to have overlooked stories such as "Rara Avis," "All Shook Up," and "Greasy Lake" in Boyle's first two collections. Even for the casual reader these stories have obvious connections to Boyle's inner life. The same connection is apparent in "Sorry Fugu," the opening story in If the River Was Whiskey. While the story is hardly autobiographical, it gives the reader a glimpse at the lower-middle-class view of upper-class lifestyles that Boyle must have experienced during the years before he became a successful writer. The story is constructed much like a well-told joke. To save his restaurant from failure, Albert needs a good review from the powerful food critic Willa Frank and prepares extra-special meals for her. After two disastrous visits, he is desperate, realizing that her third visit must be good. Luckily, Albert has discerned that Jock, the hulking man Willa brings with her on each visit, is testing and tasting the food with her, perhaps for her. Willa Frank, Albert realizes, needs the primitive oaf to help her form her opinions. On the important night Albert pleases Jock with a coarse but satisfying meal while he plies Willa with carefully chosen delicacies, winning a favorable review and seducing her in the bargain. Albert seems to have found the formula for pleasing critics and the public, a formula that has eluded Boyle as an author.

"Modern Love," which was first published in Playboy (March 1988), seems to have been tailored to readers of that magazine. It is a silly story about a girlfriend so fastidious about disease-causing threats in food and the atmosphere that she finally demands a full-body condom. First published in Harper's , "Hard Sell" also seems to have been written for a particular audience, in this case politically current and sophisticated readers.

A contrived, obvious tale, "Peace of Mind" is redeemed only by slick style and recognizable characters. It is followed, however, by the masterful "Sinking House," as originally conceived and deftly structured as a Nathaniel Hawthorne romance. Boyle sets up two contrasting suburban American homes to show innocence and experience. Meg, a young wife, lives next door to Muriel, a much older woman whose husband, Monty, dies at the beginning of the story. Monty has abused and dominated Muriel, and after he dies Muriel turns on all the water taps in the house, flooding it so badly that the water seeps outside. She is cleansing the house of Monty. Meg at first is annoyed and then frightened by the flooding. Yet, in the end, after she and the reader have recognized a dark similarity between Monty and Meg's own husband, Sonny, she turns on her own faucets. The modern lifestyles Boyle has depicted in this story and elsewhere in his fiction seem to confirm a creeping loss of soul in the American middle class.

The epigraph to "The Human Fly," from Franz Kafka 's "A Hunger Artist" (1922), emphasizes the connection between Kafka's story and Boyle's. Boyle's updating of Kafka's tale emphasizes the plight of the artist in the unsympathetic world that Boyle depicts in many of his stories. His Zoltan sacrifices his life for fame in the eyes of an audience indifferent to his personal well-being. "Me Cago En La Leche" is a less satisfying, more puzzling updating of a work by a well-known author. Subtitled "Robert Jordan in Nicaragua," Boyle's story imitates Ernest Hemingway 's style in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) only superficially as it places a modern version of Hemingway 's Robert Jordan among revolutionary guerrillas in Central America, presumably to demonstrate the loss of idealism in late-twentieth-century fights for freedom around the world. In "The Little Chill," Boyle's retelling of the successful movie The Big Chill (1983), he adds his owns stiletto-sharp wit to lampooning his generation's hypocrisy and clownish failures.

"King Bee," the story of Ken and Pat, who adopt a monster child named Anthony, is one of the tales in which Boyle writes of the brutish side of humanity, which can horrify if not treated with love and compassion. Anthony is nine when Ken and Pat adopt him, toughened by the brutality of an adoption system that has made him unremorsefully violent, totally intractable, and obsessed with bees, his only interest. The efforts of Ken and Pat and the resources on which they call for help are laughably inadequate, scandalously so. Finally the increasingly suicidal boy causes his own death from the stings of killer bees.

The next story offers a kind of antidote to this senseless battle of man against his unrestrained animality and has an almost romantic resolution. Told by a third-person narrator, "Thawing Out"involves the half-hearted courting of Naina by Marty, a schoolteacher in Upstate New York. Marty declines the first invitation to join Naina's Lithuanian family on their swim in the Hudson River to celebrate the winter solstice, but after frittering away his chances of a warm and loving relationship with her, he presumably wins her by jumping into the ice-cold water with her and her family the following December. The inhumanely cold waves bathe him in warmth as he joins his smiling Naina and her hardy family. The love and acceptance Marty seems to gain in this story are significant among the rejections, disappointments, and frustrations of the other stories.

"The Ape Lady in Retirement" is another installment on ape-human relationships and a bewildering summary of man's ties to his Darwinian predecessor. Beatrice Umbo, a well-known scientist who has studied apes all her life, has returned to Connecticut to retire. Pestered by a local admirer of her work, a young stocky boy named Howard, she allows him to pilot her over Connecticut and Long Island in a small Cessna airplane. With her she takes Konrad, a cigar-smoking ape raised in captivity. After a comic contretemps, Konrad easily kills Howard, and the plane crashes as Konrad and Beatrice carry out their suicide pact. While the story might be read as a horrifyingly comic look at the inevitable victory of man's brutal nature, it seems more likely to be a parody of science and humans' misgivings about themselves.

The title story, which comes last in the book, is arguably the best in the collection, different from the others in tone and style. At times the third-person point of view is that of the son, Tiller, while at other times it is that of his mother, Caroline, or his half-drunk father. There is also an authorial voice arguing in the father's defense, especially at the conclusion. The story depicts the growing awareness of the young boy, whose emotions range from hope to disappointment mirrored in his attempt to have his father believe that the worthless carp he has landed is really a much-desired pike.

The stories in If the River Was Whiskey are not perfectly satisfying; there are too many repetitions of past themes. Still the force of Boyle's intelligent commentaries about modern life makes the collection another step in his progress toward a truly significant contribution to the American short story.

Without A Hero (1994) fails to show much broadening of themes. Rather it seems to put Boyle's purpose in a different light, to give his description of the disintegration of pre-baby-boom America a different rationale. Most of the stories in this collection describe the vacuum left by the disappearance of the hero, not only in fiction but in real lives. The first story, "Big Game," is entertaining and clever but ultimately disappointing. It seems too much like the stories in Descent of Man. Again Boyle is parodying Hemingway, this time "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1936). The setting is a game farm in California that caters to wealthy egomaniacs who crave killing for the bogus trophy of a good hunt. This theme is hackneyed for Boyle and obvious for the reader of his previous collections. The animals suffer ill treatment and an undignified death at the hands of Bernard Puff, the owner of the farm. Boyle's story closely parallels Hemingway 's, updating it by making Mike Bender, the Macomber character, a real-estate tycoon and giving the wife a video camera in place of a gun. Again Boyle's subject is the greedy, self-serving dominance of man over God's other creatures. In this story, however, the characterization is weak, and the point is belabored.

Throughout the collection, Boyle depicts an America bereft of her heroes. In "Big Game" the reader notices that even Wilson, Hemingway 's formidable guide, is transformed into Puff, an ineffectual bungler killed by a flea-bitten, enraged elephant. Not even the wife escapes with her life. Bender's estate will go in its entirety to their spoiled, cynical daughter.

In "Hopes Rise" Peter and Adrian are in the last stages of a decaying relationship. A flaccid friendliness has replaced all passion as they fret about the extinction of species after species, developments they follow from the comfort of their frumpy urban digs. Then they venture out into a quasi-wilderness to look for the disappearing frogs and discover these seemingly undoomed creatures in a bog, where hundreds of the little creatures are having an orgy of sensual play. Inspired, Peter and Adrian make love with unaccustomed abandon. The reader senses that love returns because of their caring for the humbler creatures but wonders whether Boyle is teetering on absurdity or laughing at his character.

In "Filthy With Things" John and Marsha are overwhelmed by the clutter of all their possessions and call in Suzanne Certaine, Professional Organizer. This hilarious story, in which Boyle takes potshots at an insanely materialistic world, is followed by the title story, in which Boyle offers a stark look at the hero-less world he laments. Irina, a Russian adventuress visiting the United States, is pampered by Casey, a Los Angeles bachelor, who tries to substitute material possessions for genuine emotion. No number of gifts or luxurious accommodations can make up for his indifference, his attentiveness to work and career, and his inability to love. He cannot be the man Irina wants, "a hero" who is willing to "die for love." Instead he shows the reader just how unheroic the American male can be.

"Acts of God" gives further sad news about the wimpishness of the American male, while Jim, the narrator and protagonist of "Carnal Knowledge," tries to rise to be heroic and fails. To win Alena Jorgensen, Jim converts to vegetarianism and even agrees to help her in her quests to eliminate the dastardly treatment of animals by meat merchants, furriers, and laboratories. Alena dumps Jim for Rolfe, an even more virulent animal-rights activist, whom Alena seems to consider more virile. When Jim realizes he has lost her to Rolfe, he returns to eating hamburgers with a vengeance.

"Little America" focuses on Richard Evelyn Byrd III, a pathetic descendant of the great Antarctic explorer, one of the most heroic Americans. Old and somewhat senile, Richard is lured to a warehouse by a vagrant named Roger. As Roger is relieving Richard of his belongings, they share a drink and end up having a drunken spree. Despite Richard's vulnerability, he survives the ordeal, making a warming shelter out of boxes strewn around the warehouse, showing the same sort of ingenuity that kept his grandfather alive in Little America, his base camp in Antarctica. Ironically, of course, his "Little America" is a diminished version of his grandfather's, and he lives in a diminished nation where men are able to perform only dwarfish feats.

People who look for heroes in this bleak world are doomed to disillusionment, Boyle says again in "Beat," a touching story of a young man much like Boyle himself, who looks for Beat writers Jack Kerouac , Neal Cassady , Allen Ginsberg , and William S. Burroughs --and ends up at the house Kerouac shares with his mother, where he meets them all. Chased out by Kerouac's mother, the young man returns to his own mother, chastened and faced with the reality of a bourgeois life without even the illusion of a hero.

The last two stories in Without a Hero and Other Stories combine wit and brilliantly deft wordplay in a haunting call to recognize the diminished glory of American civilization. "The Fog Man" starts out as the narrator's nostalgic memory of youth in a small town in Upstate New York. The fog man of the title is the driver of the truck that goes through the streets near dark during the summer releasing a spray that, according the boy 's parents, is meant to kill mosquitoes. The neighborhood children delight in riding through the clouds of insecticide on their bicycles. At the same time, an atomic-power plant opens near the little town. The boy 's best friend, Casper, a brilliant but disturbed child, begins taunting the only minority student in the school, a Japanese-African-American girl. Although the narrator at first feels no enmity toward the girl and even accepts her invitation to a junior-high school dance, he finally turns against her after becoming the object of other children's abuse. Adults join in taunting the girl and her family, and finally Casper and the narrator pelt the girl's house with eggs, driving her and her family from the neighborhood. In a subplot the boy describes his grandfather's drinking and his violent attack on his wife. At the end of the story, the following summer, the fog man returns wearing a mask, suggesting a new awareness of the toxic effects of the spray; yet, the narrator once again rides his bicycle through it. This fog and the atomic-power plant are visible representations of the toxic hatred that afflicts the community and has been transmitted to the young narrator and his schoolmates. As Boyle told Tad Friend, "The most valuable thing about the whole human experience is innocence, and you get disabused of it in childhood."

"Sitting on Top of the World" is a suspense story with a twist. Lainie, a fire watcher, is alone on a tower in the Sierras when a suspicious visitor arrives at her perch. Feeling threatened by the man, who has been there before, she nonetheless does not seem to care if he rapes or murders her. She feels lonely and unloved. She and her husband have separated, and their son seems to favor his father. The interloper is strange but friendly, and he confesses his deep attraction to her in their brief communications. At the end of the story she puts away the knife she keeps for protection and waits for him in her bed. The reader is left wondering if he is her "hero" or a criminal.

There are no true heroes in Boyle's short fiction. The reader may ask as well if there are any real, memorable characters in his stories or if the cynicism of his stories has obliterated the humanity of the characters.

T. C. Boyle Stories (1998) brings together the contents of Boyle's first four collections with seven stories previously unpublished in book form. Four of these stories were written in the 1970s and offer little that is thematically or stylistically new. In "I Dated Jane Austen," written in 1977 and first published in a 1980 issue of Georgia Review, Boyle enters the story as the narrator and protagonist, Mr. Boyle, who takes the nineteenth-century novelist and her sister to a steamy Italian movie and a disco. Jane seems less interested in Mr. Boyle than in Henry Crawford, one of the characters in her novel Mansfield Park (1814).

"Mexico," written in 1997, is different in style and tone from any of Boyle's earlier short stories. In his review of T. C. Boyle Stories for The New York Times Book Review (8 November 1998), Jim Shepard commented that the recent stories in the book "suggest an increasing willingness to stay committed to the human beings under examination." He added that "Mexico," for example, seems to show Boyle as more humane and compassionate, and less contemptuous, than in his earlier stories. The main character of "Mexico," Lester, seems to be another of Boyle's losers, and the premise of his winning the trip to Mexico by buying a five-dollar chance to benefit a Battered Women's Shelter seems a typically cynical Boyle plot device. Yet, the tone is softer, the mood more like that of Malcolm Lowry 's Under the Volcano (1947), a novel he mentions in the first paragraph. The third-person narration is limited to Lester's consciousness as his weaknesses and naive choices doom him to humiliation. Gina, the beautiful woman he meets in Mexico, is sympathetic to Lester in the end, but she is not willing to sacrifice anything to be with him.

Boyle's career is probably at its halfway mark, and using any American standard of assessment, it has been successful. Yet, Boyle wants more, and the reader senses this desire in the intensity and fervor of his short stories.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)

Hennessy, Denis. "T(homas) Coraghessan Boyle." American Short-Story Writers Since World War II: Second Series, edited by Patrick Meanor and Gwen Crane, Gale, 2000. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 218. Literature Resource Center, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1200009026/LitRC?u=cclc_merced&sid=LitRC&xid=c388a3b3.