From Publishers Weekly
If Boyle's progress as a novelist has been uneven his more recent narratives have not managed to achieve the acclaim of 1990's East Is East his talent for crafting amusing and startling short stories has never been in doubt. This compilation (his fifth, not counting a collected volume) culls pieces published in the New Yorker, GQ and other outlets and showcases the signature elements of his fiction: darkly comic scenarios (a surly airline passenger goes berserk and a downtrodden elementary school teacher saves the day), pitiful and realistic characters (an Internet porn addict) and mundane but serious subjects (love, overpopulation, abortion). While there's not much new ground broken here, Boyle more than makes up for the relative lack of innovation by delivering his trademark dazzler endings. In "She Wasn't Soft," a triathlete's idiot boyfriend tries to atone for his wretched behavior by drugging her rival in a race, with potentially disastrous results. And in the title story, an apocalypse leaves only a handful of people on Earth; after a disastrous experience with another survivor, the narrator learns that, even in the worst of situations, love can prevail. Boyle has matured since 1995's Without a Hero: here he relies more on language than farce or shock value, describing the relationship between two lovers who "wore each other like a pair of socks," or, conversely, a college boy who enters a girl's room and feels "like some weird growth sprung up on the unsuspecting flank of her personal space." Boyle's imagination and zeal for storytelling are in top form here, making this collection a smash. Author tour.
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*Starred Review* Boyle is not only a master literary craftsman but also profoundly attuned to the here and now, writing with sharp wit, supple imagination, and acute emotional sensitivity about the peculiarities of our densely populated, technology addled, and precarious world. His eight novels, including
A Friend of the Earth (2000), constitute a smart, provocative, and rollicking body of outward-looking work that is more than matched by the power of his superb short stories. Five previous collections were gathered together in the knockout volume,
T. C. Boyle Stories (1998), and now a new assemblage arrives that is even more remarkable than its predecessors. Here Boyle burrows deeply into the psyches of disparate characters in crisis, balancing his gift for vigorous description with insights into seemingly inexplicable behavior, moments when a person crashes through the guardrail of reason. In "She Wasn't Soft," the surfer-bum boyfriend of a fanatic amateur athlete, stoked by suppressed resentment, does exactly the wrong thing, as does the young, fresh-out-of-rehab protagonist in "Killing Babies," a steadily escalating, many-faceted story featuring a rabid mob of anti-abortion protesters. A connoisseur of the absurd and the macabre, Boyle is intrigued with new forms of mania. "Friendly Skies" is a creepy rendering of air rage. "Peep Hall" is a sweet brave-new-world love story about an admirer of a young woman who lives in a house rigged with cameras to provide cyber-voyeurs with 24-hour Internet access. Observant, empathic, and fresh, Boyle's stories affirm literature's vital and abiding role in our culture as the lights flicker on and off and dot-coms fizzle and die.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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