THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 3, 1994 TAG: 9406300549
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines
WITHOUT A HERO AND OTHER STORIES
T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE
Viking. 238 pp. $21.95.
THE SHORT STORIES of T. Coraghessan Boyle are like little psychological volcanoes from the crust of contemporary society. It is fascinating to watch them erupt; and occasionally they leave victims. Most of the victims, though, are worthy of being buried in ash and lava: the greedy, the vain, the hopelessly self-possessed.
Boyle, whose notable 1993 novel, The Road to Wellville, is being made into a motion picture, has provided 15 varying set pieces of 20th century angst. His characters play them out in a rich mist of dark humor, crippling ambivalence, delicious comeuppance and occasional triumph.
The opening story, ``Big Game,'' finds a Southern California real estate man, too time-starved for a true African safari, en route with his young trophy wife to a ranch where birds and beasts of the Serengeti Plain are available to his rifle barrel - all for a price. Driven by two or three of the seven deadly sins, he pushes for one trophy too many.
You can see his fate coming. But like an old Rod Serling plot, the fun is in its delivery.
The title piece, ``Without a Hero,'' is a bittersweet affair between an American man and a hustling young Russian emigre - ``twenty-eight, blond, with a figure right out of the Bolshoi and a face that could kill.''
His Irina has a jungle-fighter's instinct for survival and a gluttony for all things material: ``There was no shame in wanting things, and Irina wanted plenty.'' Her Casey is enthralled, but has the guarded psyche of the too-recently divorced. She coaxes from him all but the one thing she needs most, the one thing he cannot give: himself, unconditionally.
Boyle's talent for applying an oily black layer of humor to American culture of the '90s shows up well in three stories with eco/animal-horror backdrops. In ``Carnal Knowledge,'' a man's brief infatuation with a woman converts him into an animal-rights guerrilla who ``awakens'' after a disastrous midnight assault on a turkey farm.
``Top of the Food Chain'' is the deadpan testimony of a foreign service bureaucrat who tries to explain to a Senate committee the daisy chain of disasters that begins with a simple mosquito-eradication plan in Borneo. Every swarm of pests is replaced by a bigger and nastier swarm of pests. Every countermeasure is as naive as it is absurd.
``Hopes Rise'' has a young couple setting out to document an activist's alarm that all frogs and toads are disappearing from the earth. When they stumble upon a pond full of toads in riotous springtime celebration, a loamy expression of their own joy ensues.
Boyle's characters are normal people to whom fate has taken a screwdriver and given just a quarter-turn in the direction of lunacy. Few escape unscathed. A few others find the turn was just what they needed. MEMO: Dave Addis is a staff writer. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design and illustration by BASCOVE
by CNB