Customer Reviews

After the Plague: Stories

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

There is little doubt TC Boyle is among the finest American short story writers out there today. While Boyle has authored many notable and successful novels, his wonderfully unique and sardonic views of humanity seem to stay better afloat in the shorter form. As with his mammoth short story collection "TC Boyle Stories," these works are not for the conservative reader. In reading this latest collection, one needs no further evidence that Boyle is always thinking "outside the box." He gives readers a thrilling reading experience -- a true rarity in fiction these days!

From a boyfriend's sadistically botched attempt to help out his girlfriend in a triathlon competition to a pair of senior citizens meeting a pitch-black humorous end in their backyard -- it is unlikely you have ever read anything like this before. Having attended a Boyle reading/book signing for this work in October 2001, the author admitted that works like "Friendly Skies" (about passenger "air rage") and the title story (a look at two surly survivors after Ebola wipes out much of the world as we know it) take on an unintentionally eerie spin in a post-September 11th world.

For fans of the author, there is probably little need for any type of recommendation, but for the uninitiated "After The Plague and Other Stories" is certainly a worthwhile and entertaining introduction into the wild, and sometimes warped, world of TC Boyle.

T.C. Boyle's, "After The Plague", is a collection of 16 stories that range from clever observations that most of us don't see, to views on current events, and finally a few stories bordering on surreal.

Some of the stories have plot lines that are not necessarily unique, however he has the ability to turn them around, to find a new angle, and establish a fresh perspective. Several are also much more haunting than they would have been a few months ago. "Friendly Skies", almost predicted the actions of a passenger on the news recently, and even though a scenario that is played out in, "After The Plague", is not at the forefront of people's minds, it certainly holds your attention in a manner it may not have a short time ago. Other stories like, "Termination Dust", bear no relation to what the title suggests. In this case the story takes place in Alaska, and is certainly a bit quirky, but the title represents something truly harmless. There is another tale, which is entitled in a manner that exactly fits the story it introduces. It deals with a controversy that has divided millions, it is blunt and powerful, however I defer mentioning the title here.

One of the most entertaining stories is, "Black And White". A tale has never had a more accurate title. This view in to the world of two sisters displays eccentric and outrageous human behavior, and is arguably the most unique of the 16 stories. Read quickly it creates one tone, read with deliberation, the message is as opposite as the colors in the title.

This is the first work I have read by this author, it will certainly not be the last. His stories may not appeal to all readers, but his flair with a pen, and documenting his view of life will be appreciated.

I have always been a big Boyle fan, and most of these stories have already appeared in the New Yorker, but I have to say: in my opinion this is his best collection. The stories are shocking, contemporary, playful, funny and tragic -- typical Boyle at his finest. From the weirdness of 'The Black and White Sisters,' a twisted and sexy story about eccentric twins who will only surround themselves, in food, clothes, and company, with the colors black & white, which is surreal and funny and sad and has metaphorical echoes of old TV and grim newspapers, to 'She Wasn't Soft,' or 'Termination Dust,' both of which are creepy, heartbreaking suspense stories which focus as grim character pieces, Boyle had me hooked from page one. If you like unforgettable characters, strong plot and contemporary issues, this is a must read. Plus it's funny. Five Stars! Bravo!

I know many lovers of fiction who won't touch short stories. Their complaint usually is that the stories go nowhere and are little more than vignettes or character studies. To them I cannot recommend this volume enough. Mr. Boyle tells stories that grab you from the first sentence-- "They wore each other like a pair of socks"-- and do not let you go until the roller coaster ride is finished, some 20 pages or so later.

The author has collected here 16 stories, most of which have been published previously in EQUIRE, GQ, GRANTA, THE NEW YORKER and PLAYBOY as well as collections of best short stories including The O. Henry Awards, an honor that is certainly apropos since this author is every bit as good at surprise endings as Mr. O. Henry, himself. ("She Wasn't Soft" and "After the Plague" are just two excellent examples.) Many of these stories are about men and women acting badly-- very badly. A young man throws his girl friend's unwanted newborn child into a dumpster, a young drug addict working at his physician brother's abortion clinic goes ballistic and starts shooting protestors, one of a handful of survivors of a global plague in a fit of jealously vandalizes another survivor's home. But Mr. Boyle also writes about the way some people react with gutsy courage to violence. An airline passsenger saves herself as well as everyone else on a plane by attacking an out-of-control fellow passenger who is trying to open the rear exit door of the plane by attacking him with the steel fork given with the awful flight food; and an elderly widow takes on a robber with a can of Mace, for example.

Mr. Boyle has an endless reservoir of creativity. Who else writes stories about a tour of women from Los Angeles going to Alaska to meet eligible men? ("There were a hundred and seven of them, of all ages, shapes and sizes, from twenty-five- and thirty-year-olds in dresses that looked like they were made of Saran Wrap to a couple of big-beamed older types in pantsuits who could have been somebody's mother--and I mean somebody grown, with a goatee beard and a job at McDonald's. . .") Or two wealthy single sisters, one who wears only black, the other only white, who live in a black and white house and hire only black or white workers, wearing only black and white clothes-- no brown-skinned people, that is, Mexicans need apply? Or a house full of young pretty women in an upscale neighborhood where voyeurs can go online and watch their goings-on twenty-four hours a day? Or an elderly couple where the husband suffers a stroke and his wife falls and breaks her hip as she searches for him?

Although not for the fainthearted, these Molotov cocktails are as good a collection of stories as you will find.

Taken as a whole, the sixteen stories in After the Plague go about their virulent work in two ways. First, there's the devastating attack on the body: Boyle's willingness to plunge deep into society's ever-festering issues, from abortion to violent crime. Next, there's the skewering assault on the brain: the author's sustained tour-de-force of technique, making each of his troubled protagonists seem more vivid than our own best friend, or worst enemy. The combination makes for informed storytelling that borders on extended prose-poetry. And it kills utterly.

For "literary fiction" lovers looking for some strong poison, there's much to recommend by way of content in After the Plague. From an airplane carrying one passenger on the brink of "air rage" to the home of a bartender logged on to pornography, Boyle renders each of his contemporary settings with digital-sharp resolution - right down to the salty peanuts and explicit banner advertising. In these and other stories concerned with recent headlines, stories like "Killing Babies" and "The Love of My Life", Boyle always exposes the conflicted man or woman behind the sensationalistic misdeed. ("Another unwanted child in an overpopulated world?" muses one teenager in the latter story. "They should have given him a medal." You'll have to read it to discover what heroic act makes Jeremy so deserving.) Boyle often takes the tabloid as his starting point, only to create mature art that's the antithesis of schlock.

But it's Boyle's craftsmanship, and specifically, his mastery of the close third person voice, that make After the Plague likely to outlive much of today's fiction. Consider this opening passage from "She Wasn't Soft", an account of one tri-athlete attempting to leap the hurdles of her competitors, her own body, and her indifferent, pot-smoking boyfriend.

"She wasn't tender, she wasn't soft, she wasn't sweetly yielding or coquettish, and she was nobody's little woman and never would be. That had been her mother's role, and look at the sad sack of neuroses and alcoholic dysfunction she'd become."

Note the "She", and not "I". But even as we meet Paula Turk through the perspective of a semi-detached narrator, we feel like we're getting a first-hand introduction. It's exhilarating to see a writer of so much political intelligence, so much stylistic exuberance, allow his less wise and less articulate characters "possess" him so fully on the page. Paula may not have the consummate vocabulary of Boyle. She probably doesn't possess the same gift for metaphor, or aptitude for prose rhythm. It's unlikely she'd describe herself this way. Only her author can do that, and while we're aware of Boyle's presence in every sly, subordinate clause, we're also intimately connected to the desperate ambition that is Paula Turk. Despite all his eloquence, Boyle is rarely swayed to speak *for* his characters. Rather, they almost always speak *through* him.

Not every story is told from this perspective, and not all take the seedier segments of the 11 o'clock news as their departure point. Two are fanciful stories of love, one in its nascent stage ("The Underground Gardens") and the other in its final one ("My Widow"). Some stories are told in a convincing and poignant first person, like "Achates MacNeil," which relates a college student's bitter reunion with his famous, novelist father. All of the stories in After the Plague, however, blend riveting style with thoughtful substance. The two strains, acting together, are lethal. Like victims of an epidemic, readers may feel infected with something strange and powerful here: something cathartic and possibly deadly. With After the Plague, at least it feels good.

This is my first work of fiction by T.C. Boyle, but I am afraid that it may not inspire me to consider a second anytime soon. Boyle's conceits are clever, undeniably clever. He writes adroitly, and some of these stories (notably "She Wasn't Soft," "Killing Babies," and "Achates McNeil," all of which come early in this collection) end with twists so wrenching and provocative that they stick with you like literary classics. On the other hand, many of the other stories (including "Mexico," "Rust," "Peep Hall," "Going Down," "Friendly Skies," "The Underground Gardens," and the title story "After the Plague") read like graduate school creative writing class exercises -- of a high order, I grant you, but mechanical, fill-up-the-page, play-out-the-concept exercises nonetheless. Another way of putting it is that too many of Boyle's stories lack the high seriousness that some critics associate with art.

Part of the problem is Boyle's choice of protagonists. Most of his central characters are inept losers attempting to connect with persons for whom they are obviously ill-adapted. It takes a lot of skill, breadth, and humor for an author to keep up his reader's interest in alcoholics, hermits, obsessives, bookworms, senescents, beach bums, and unaculturated immigrants oblivious to the world around them. Sometimes Boyle succeeds. Often he does not.

In the stories here Boyle writes infrequently as a realist. Can you suspend your disbelief long enough to accept that the population of the earth has been reduced by 99.999% in two or three days and that a new Adam may just meet a new Eve from Hell? That an Alaskan barkeep would confuse an easy seduction with rape? That a 21-year-old pseudo-coed in stiletto heels would fall for another bartender in his forties who sends her drinks and dessert on the house? That a young mother would not only abandon her newborn baby but turn inexorably on the young father who unwillingly assists her? I am not a fan of naturalism, ironic science fiction, and gothic realism, and these are not situations that engaged me. Maybe you will enjoy them more.

TC Boyle knows how to get inside his characters, and he does it quickly so that you feel involved with each story from the outset. His stories in this collection are at times dark and macabre, other times moving, but almost always deeply human and richly satisfying in their telling. He has the ability to turn sympathetic characters into sinister ones within the turn of a page - Killing Babies is one such example, with a seemingly normal pair of college kids committing the unthinkable.

I liken TC Boyle's style to that of early Ian McEwan, with a California twist. We get the seamy side of human behaviour, while never departing from the characters' central humanity. Desperate human beings find each other, others find a loneliness at their core that they hadn't given voice to, still others give in to their dark voices.

These are not necessarily cautionary tales. I don't believe Boyle has any such agenda, and I am thankful for that. What he simply does is explore the human psyche and the oddities of human behaviour. For that reason, this is definitely a worthwhile collection of stories.

Boyle is an even better writer of short stories than of novels. There is no "time delay" as you struggle to get used to a new protagonist and a new world; like Updike his sentences draw you right in and you're hooked.

But Boyle doesn't, like some contemporaries, write a "slice of life" that's all language and no story! His stories have plot and often twists, including a likeable narrator who morphs into a killer before out eyes, a pair of teenage lovers who kill their baby, and the title story, set in a California following a devastating plague. But the point is always the insight Boyle demonstrates through his vivid, compassionate writing.

Some of the stories are macabre and wickedly funny (Black and White Sisters, about a pair of eccentric women who have turned their whole world the color of old movies and spare no lengths to complete it; The Death of Cool about an aging tv producer), others are more poignant (Killing Babies, set in an abortion lab, Captured by the Indians, about a young grad student-wife struggling to come to terms with her husband and her future)-- all are inspiring.

Boyle's writing somehow makes the idea of writing accessible. Like Fred Astaire, he makes it look easy. He makes you want to sit down at the keyboard! So it's a must not only for readers but for all writers, too.

I really, really like T. Coraghessan Boyle's novels, so it follows that I should like his short stories, right? Well, no, as it turns out. The traits I like in his novels, including realistic irony, artful ambiguity, psychological depth, and narrative wholeness, are absent in this strange, confused mishmash. The stories read like novel ideas that Boyle lacked ambition to finish writing out to book length.

If you've read at least one or two Boyle novels, you'll recognize the pattern with which each story starts. Some individual thinks he (it's usually "he") controls his universe and moves with impunity. Then something happens that upsets that illusion of control. So far, so good. Sadly, that's as far as most of these stories get. Boyle gets a good head of steam, I get hooked on the premise, and then I guess he gets tired.

"Peep Hall" has a plain-spoken bartender fall for a pretty customer who, he later learns, makes her living on a porn-cam website. But just as they embrace their mutual attraction, screech, the story stops. I want to see this play out, and I think the characters do too, since one asks "What do we do now?" But Boyle either doesn't share that curiosity, or doesn't know where to go, because that's where he cuts them off.

Similarly, the title story posits a world devastated by a mutant ebola strain, the survivors hooking up and breaking up in a mock-erotic waltz of the damned. But again, Boyle doesn't have the courage to carry it beyond merely setting up an intriguing premise. Indeed, I can't quite tell if his tone is merely understated, or if he's read too little science fiction to have enough courage to complete this story.

This collection isn't without redeeming qualities. A few stories, like "Termination Dust," meet Boyle's high standards. This story, about an Alaska backwoodsman who romanticizes himself so thoroughly that he doesn't see other people's real emotions anymore, is both complete and sophisticated as printed. But unfortunately, it's so good that it only points out how disappointing the other stories are.

This collection points up a serious problem with publishing today. A novelist like Boyle gets his short stories printed in glossy magazines because his name moves copy, and editors overlook the fact that the stories kind of suck. Short stories are not novels that are short; the form has its own unique demands, which Boyle thoroughly ignores. And writers wonder why nobody reads short stories anymore.

To begin with, I usually don't read short stories - with exception of some classic (London and O'Henry almost sum it up). This collection reminded me of the best stories by O'Henry, mainly because the endings are surprising at the same extent.
The collection is a little bit dark, so not everybody will like it, but the stories are witty, have interesting twists and real-life (even though not always likeable) characters.
5 stars - this is a really good book, and I will recommend it to all my friends.