Without a Hero & Other Stories
"Hopes rise," one of the fifteen stories in T. Coraghessan Boyle's fourth collection is called -- and sometimes they do. Unfortunately the hopes of his characters are usually squashed by vicissitude -- literally squashed in one story, by a rampaging elephant. Most of the protagonists in Without a Hero see their dreams go through the shredder, and not all of them wake up the wiser for it.
Take the undaunted speaker in "Top of the Food Chain," hauled before a Senate committee to testify about the havoc he has caused in Borneo by spraying DDT to kill off the mosquitoes. Which it did. But it also wiped out the wasps that preyed on the caterpillars that lived on the bugs that chewed up the thatched roofs of the huts. The consequent reductio ad absurdum leads to the dropping by parachute of fourteen thousand stray cats, "twirling down out of the sky like great big oversized snowflakes." A lot of the cats get eaten by the people, whose crops have failed. "But we've got a care program going there now, and something hit the rat population -- we still don't know what, a virus we think -- and the geckos, they tell me, are making a comeback. So what I'm saying is, it could be worse, and to every cloud a silver lining. Wouldn't you agree, gentlemen?"
An epigraph from Camus sets the tone of Without a Hero: "All that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration." Boyle writes about lives that are threadbare and bleak. But he does so with such gusto that he can come within a hair's breadth of being too painful to read and still leave the reader wanting more.
And he writes with such crackling wit that "56--0," the most harrowing story in the book, is also the funniest. A college football team looks like ending the season without a single win. For Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot -- "a slow, fat, pasty kid, beleaguered and tormented by his quickfooted classmates, until he found his niche on the football field" -- the final game marks his last chance for glory before he follows his father's footsteps into a life of mediocrity and despair. Fontinot's mother, dying of cancer of the uterus, drags herself from her hospital bed to watch. But despite a superhuman effort he fails, and the story ends with him slumped on the field in a bleak image of defeat, "the steady drift of snow gleaming against the exposed skin of his calves and slowly obliterating the number on the back of his jersey."
Boyle's great talent is to interweave grim fare like this with Twain-like drollery. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete's fellow linemen, on the day after a particularly bloody thrashing, skulk over breakfast in the school cafeteria: "Their heads were like prize pumpkins set on the pedestals of their neckless shoulders, their fingers were the size of an average person's forearm, their jaws were entities unto themselves, and they sprouted casts like weird growths all over their bodies." The coach, Tundra, is a Vietnam veteran who urges the team on with incomprehensible military instructions. When all else fails he rolls up his pants leg and tries to shame them into action with the sight of his prosthesis.
The humour, though, is always black, and pain is never far away. In T. Boyle's world failure comes with the territory and has myriad causes, of which the protagonists are never fully aware. "I wanted reason and meaning to illuminate my life," says the narrator in "The Fog Man." But they don't. A feeling of impotence runs through many of the stories, a sense that people are powerless to escape the humiliation and unhappiness and disappointment that cling about their lives like mist.
"Beat" (which could well be the title of the collection) is a stomach-churning description of the fading of youthful hopes. It is also brilliantly funny. Just before Christmas, 1958, a seventeen-year-old would-be hipster knocks on the door of Jack Kerouac, already well past his glory days and holed up at his mother's house on Long Island. For three days the boy sits at the feet of the Gods: Jack, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg ("that mad calculating bug-eyed big-lipped look of Zen wisdom and frog-like beauty"), and "a skinny, rangy long-nosed Brahmin-looking character with a hundred-mile stare and a dull brown Beat suit that might have come off the back of an insurance salesman from Hartford, Connecticut" who turns out to be Bill.
A good time is had by all, for a while. "I reached for the wine, Jack howled like a dog and even Bill shifted his eyes round his head in a simulacrum of animacy . . . Allen shouted 'Miles Davis!' and the record player came to life, and we were all dancing, even Bill, though he never left his chair." Eventually, though, Jack's mum has had enough and drives them all out into the grimy Long Island night -- but not before the narrator has seen a new and unsuspected look on the face of his hero: "the look of a mama's boy, pouty and spoiled." The next three and a half decades are one long hangover, a sorry procession of mishaps and disillusionment, until "I wonder now if I'm not so much Beat anymore as just plain beat."
Which is how most of the protagonists of these stories end up. Experience bears a heavy price, Boyle says in his uncluttered, needle-sharp prose, and not everybody benefits from it. Those who cling to dreams inevitably suffer, and those who build their lives on illusion -- like Bernard Puff, the proprietor of Puff's African Game Ranch, just outside Bakersfield -- come to a messy end. Just occasionally, things turn out not quite as badly as they might. The narrator of "Hopes Rise," plagued by backache and a vision of environmental collapse, finds salvation in a pondful of mating toads, "beaded and wet with the mucus of life." The hurricane that whips away 73-year-old Willis Blythe's house spares his wife. And the man who stalks the solitary fire watcher in her mountain tower turns out to be not a rapist but a potential lover.
More often than not, though, the sky darkens, bodies seize up, hopes fade. Boyle's way of coping with the catastrophe of life is to laugh at it. Camus would surely approve.