#632 Swept Away- T.C. Boyle

#632 Swept Away- T.C. Boyle

If you don’t hold onto it, opportunities can blow away in the wind, literally. A young, beautiful American woman is visiting the Isle of Unst, the northernmost point of Scotland’s Shetland chain. She is a photographer, and adventurer and on her first day in town, while lugging all her equipment and bags to the Inn, she is bowled over by a flying cat. The wind in Unst is unbelievably strong and lifting up animals and tossing them towards unsuspecting visitors isn’t out of character for this part of the world.

While dazed on the ground, her life is saved from an oncoming car by a local sheep herder, Robbie. They fall in love and have an affair that is talked about for years to come. But she is a traveling spirit and Robbie belongs to the Isle. Before he knows it, his one great love is swept away for good.

Rating: 8-8-8-7 Total= 31

#604 Rust- T.C. Boyle

#604 Rust- T.C. Boyle

Walt and Eunice are old and living out their retired lives in their old house. They had a dog, but at this moment Walt didn’t know where it had gone to.

“He didn’t know where the dog was, though he knew where his first bourbon and water of the day was—right there on the TV tray in front of him—and it was 11:00 a.m. and plenty late enough for it.”

He went outside to the yard—a place he hadn’t been in years—to find the dog. He falls, and is unable to move. He calls out for his wife, but there is no answer. His hearing isn’t all that good and she’s been drinking as well. She’s probably just sitting in front of the TV.

“…where time was meaningless, a series of half-hour slices carved out of the program guide, day melding into night, breakfast into dinner, the bright electrons dancing eternally across the screen.”

By nighttime, she finally goes looking for him, and by the time, she sees him, she has already tripped over his fallen body and she joins him on the grass—her hip now broken. Depending on how you look at this story, it’s either very funny, or extremely depressing. Old age like this is not exactly something to look forward to.

Notable Passage: “You measure your life in dogs, if you’re lucky you’ll get five or six of them.”

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total= 28

#226 Thawing Out- T.C. Boyle

#226 Thawing Out- T.C. Boyle

Marty is 24 and in the beginnings of a serious relationship with Naina. As it gets more serious, he gets more cold on the subject. He takes a solo vacation that turns out to be a five month long weekend, losing his job, and his girlfriend in the process. Afraid of adulthood and a long term commitment, Marty struggles with adulthood.

The setting and theme is cold water. Naina’s family is Ukrainian and they have an affinity for cold water. Their Polar Bear Club takes a ceremonial frigid dip into the Hudson each winter solstice to reaffirm their lives and virility. Marty needs to take the plunge to rid himself of his selfish adolescent ways.

The plunge has to be voluntary. The accidental fall into freezing water he took in Canada was due to miscommunication, and thus ended in disaster. The real plunge must be embraced, and done on faith; that one will be as warm as bath water.

Rating: 8-8-8-7 Total= 31

#212 King Bee-T.C. Boyle

#212 King Bee-T.C. Boyle

Wow, what a nightmare! A couple has trouble conceiving a child. They look to adopt but do not want to wait the many years it would take to adopt a new-born of their choosing. They get duped into adopting a 9 year-old boy named Anthony. He appears at first to be the Norman Rockwell archetype of the American male child, but things turn quickly.

“The smile was a regular feature of those first few months—He stopped smiling when the trial period was over, as if he’d suddenly lost control of his facial muscles. It was uncanny. Almost to the day the adoption became formal—the day that he was theirs and they were his—Anthony’s smile vanished.”

His calm demeanor turns to erratic behavior, foul language and an obsession with bees. He likes bees because they have no mercy, “You fit in or you die.” Nothing seems to rid him of his psychotic behavior and he goes in and out of institutions and youth prisons until he becomes an adult, scarier and even more bee-like.

There are obvious literary links here, from the Kafka-esque alienation insect references, or a twilight zone story arc. Personally, I see a lot of Stephen King in this story, which is something I wouldn’t have expected from Boyle. This is a fun outlier so far in this collection.

Rating: 7-8-8-7 Total= 30

#198 The Little Chill- T.C. Boyle

#198 The Little Chill- T.C. Boyle

7 forty year-olds, friends from elementary school meet up for a birthday gathering. Hal, Rob, Irene, Jill, Harvey, Tootle and Pesky haven’t seen each other in six years and a lot of water has flown under the bridge. Each character is given a fun, noir-esque description like this one:

"Jill had a certain fragile beauty about her. She’d gone into a Carmelite nunnery after the obloquy of high school and the unrequited love she bore for Harvey, who at the time was hot for Tootle. She lived up the sreet from Rob and Irene, in her late mother’s house and she’d given up the nun’s life twelve years earlier to have carnal relations with a Safeway butcher named Eugene, who left her with a blind spot in one eye, a permanent limp, and triplets."

I guess we’re supposed to identify with having outgrown our high school clique but understand that we will always be attached to them at the same time. That we will always measure ourselves through their eyes and will always seek their approval. However, this rings somewhat false here. They all hate each other, bitterly and without a tinge of respect or nostalgic fondness. I have a hard time believing that these 7 people wanted to get together with each other…dancing or not.

Note: seeing TC Boyle speak this past year he said that the usual reaction to a short story collection is that people will hate half of them and love half of them, just nobody agrees on which half is which. Pretty funny, and probably accurate.

Rating: 7-7-5-4 Total= 23

#184 The Hat- T.C. Boyle

#184 The Hat- T.C. Boyle

Like within a family, personalities are magnified in small communities. You can’t hide, and everyone becomes something of a caricature or a stereotype. This tiny deep mountain community in the Sierras has 27 year-round residents. Jill and Michael are two. Of the 25 others, only 3 were woman, 2 of those were married and old, and the other a drunken walleyed man-hating poetess. So you can imagine, during the long winter months, things could get a bit ornery.

“I’d read somewhere that nine out of ten adults in Alaska had a drinking problem. I could believe it. Snow, ice, sleet, wind, the dark night of the soul: what else were you supposed to do?”

And drink they did, all day and night. Visitors and seasonal residents made things interesting, and so do bears that stalk the food stores of the only bar in town.

Notable Passage: “Her tone was so soft, so contrite, so sweet and friendly and conciliatory, that I could actually feel the great big heavy plates of the world shifting back into alignment beneath my feet.”

Rating: 8-7-8-7 Total= 30

#170- The Human Fly- T.C. Boyle

#170- The Human Fly- T.C. Boyle

With a name like the Human Fly, you’d expect Metamorphosis, and then when you get a Kafka quote at the head of the story, its from The Hunger Artist. Then you start reading it and it’s about a circus performer pushing the boundaries of his daring and you think about First Sorrow and the trapeze artist that wants to stay on his trapeze a all times. Cleary this is literary tribute to Franz Kafka.

This homage comes in the form of an inside look at the world of a low-level entertainment agent. At this moment, he had three clients: “A nasally infected twelve year-old with pushy parents…a comic with a harelip that did only harelip jokes; and a soft rock band called Mu, who believed they were reincarnated court musicians from the lost continent of Atlantis.”

That was until a man dressed in a red cape with a swim cap walked into his small back office. The man was Zoltan Mindszenty aka. La Mosca Humana, the Human Fly. He wanted to be famous. He had already gotten press for his public climbing stunts in Mexico, but wanted exposure here. He began by hanging himself 21 stories above the street in a sack.

“As it turned out he, stayed there, aloft for two weeks. And for some reason—because he was intractable, absurd, mad beyond hope or redemption—the press couldn’t get enough of it.”

Sounds like a familiar mix of modern reality TV and David Blaine. He survived the stunt, and a few more before taking one step too far. But he did become famous. Boyle, like many writers seem to have a love/hate thing for entertainment agencies. They can be

“…a mercenary, a huckster who’d watch a man die for ten percent of the action.”

While they always disdain the agency or the business, the agent themselves seem to be written with a more gentler pen, be it respect, empathy or just pity, who knows?

Rating: 8-7-8-7 Total= 30