Without a Hero: And Other Stories ANNOTATION
In his fourth collection of short stories, Boyle, showing fierce, comic wit and uncanny accuracy, zooms in on an astonishingly wide range of Americans, from the college football player who knows only defeat to the couple in search of the last toads on Earth to a real estate tycoon who takes his family on safari--in Bakerfield, California.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
A critic recently said of T. Coraghessan Boyle, "More happens in one of Boyle's stories than in most post-Victorian novels." This is precisely the case in Without a Hero, fifteen stunning stories that each, in its own way, displays a virtuosity and versatility rare in literary America. In this, his fourth story collection, Boyle takes chance after chance, even to the point of reexamining the ethos of Ernest Hemingway, one of the masters of the form. In "Big Game," the wild animal safari takes place not in Africa but on a pay-per-shoot ranch in Southern California and includes an elephant hunt and its vivid consequences. There are echoes here of Hemingway's classic "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and Green Hills of Africa, but Boyle's hunting story is drawn for the age of ecology rather than an age without limits. Throughout, Boyle displays an astonishing range as he zooms in on such American specimens as the college football player who knows only defeat; the entrepreneur who creates a center for acquisitive disorders; the couple in search of the last toads on earth; and the boy caught between the ingenuousness of childhood and the cynicism of adulthood in "The Fog Man." In some of these stories, Boyle makes you laugh out loud; in others you come closer to understanding the human condition because of the way he cuts to the secret places in his people's hearts. Here is the author of the highly praised 1993 novel, The Road to Wellville, entering a richer and deeper phase in his writing life, his stories bursting with what the Los Angeles Times has called his "ferocious, delicious imagination, often darkly satirical and always infatuated with language."
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Most effective of the 16 technically ingenious and rudely funny, satirical stories in Boyle's fourth collection are the sketches of disaffected individuals who take refuge in hermetic surroundings, self-help programs, political causes and conspicuous consumption to hold at bay the banal world of convention and compromise. In ``Big Game,'' Bernard Puff, impressario of Puff's African Game Ranch in Bakersfield, Calif., peddles a simulacrum of the African bush. His carefully nurtured fantasy world is punctured by the arrival of a cynical young real estate mogul who detects ``every crack in the plaster,'' and whose rapacious hunting leads to a grisly twist of fate when the animals revolt on the veldt. In ``Filthy with Things,'' a pathological couple whose home is sinking under the weight of their ``collectibles'' enlists the services of an evangelical professional organizer who banishes them to a ``nonacquisitive environment'' while she takes inventory of their astounding clutter (``three hundred and nine bookends, forty-seven rocking chairs and over two thousand plates, cups and saucers''). Other poignant tales tell of an ephemeral romance between a Russian and an American, the introduction of anti-drug rhetoric in a suburban grade school and the experience of growing up in postwar suburbia, a world Boyle regards with anxiety, nostalgia and a properly grim sense of humor. (May)
Library Journal
In the title story of Boyle's fourth collection of short fiction, a Southern California swinger hopes to impress a beautiful Russian immigrant with a taste of the good life, only to find himself outclassed by her mastery of consumer culture. In ``Filthy with Things,'' a yuppie couple is forced to seek professional help for an ``aggregation disorder'' that has turned their suburban home into a warehouse of antiques and collectibles. The narrator of ``Beat,'' another wonderful tale, recalls drinking Mogen David wine and listening to Bing Crosby records with Kerouac and Memere one Christmas in the 1950s. Boyle's unique brand of satire avoids the moral indignation that often characterizes the genre. Here, humans are the hapless dupes of their own possessions. An upcoming film version of Boyle's novel The Road to Wellville ( LJ 3/15/93) should create a demand for this writer's work. Recommended for most fiction collections.-- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
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