From Publishers Weekly
In Boyle's fourth collection of short stories, he depicts a variety of individuals in his usual style of satire and humor.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
If he wants to, Boyle can summon the angst for your standard realistic novel. In this collection's title story, for example, he tells of a newly divorced fellow who inadvertently becomes the host of a young Russian woman who is awestruck by the bounty of America; our distinctly unheroic narrator won't marry her and thus forces her into prostitution. Boyle draws from this premise an indictment of capitalism as well as two engaging character studies. His mockery is at the center of things elsewhere, however, in stories that are less psychological studies than satirical conceits, such as "Big Game." Set on a hunting preserve near Bakersfield, it's a send-up of
Green Hills of Africa, complete with Boyle's deadpan gun lore and a decrepit but still deadly charging elephant. "Hopes Rise" features two frazzled, precious, altogether contemporary characters, or caricatures. The story seems to lament the universal death of frogs and impending ecological disaster but, in the end, comments instead on the separation from nature that urban lifestyles entail. Perhaps Boyle's most arch effort is the slight "Filthy with Things," about people so inundated with possessions they much enter a recovery program. Boyle's fabulist tendencies are much restrained here; not every story is remarkable, but at his best he reminds you of Evelyn Waugh. Of interest, too, because of next fall's movie from Boyle's novel,
The Road to Wellville.
John Mort
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