Customer Reviews

Wild Child: and Other Stories

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

When an author decides to write short stories as compared to full length books there are additional pressures that must be faced. How to build interesting characters and plots quickly... and how to build enough emotion in the story "and" the reader to make a certifiable climactic ending possible in a limited amount of pages. T.C. Boyle has succeeded in that quest "almost" all of the time in this collection. His very few misses are still worth reading but you're left at the end of these anomalies with "nowhere to go." (Even though the journey was enjoyable.) The stories range from a twelve-year-old girl having to testify in her Father's trial after a car accident involving drinking... to a story that zig-zags back and forth from California to the frigid Midwest. In California a woman is killing snails in her garden when a large... very real... tiger appears... simultaneously... in the Midwest a lonely midnight shift nurse gets involved with a stranger with a coonskin hat who doesn't like stray cats. Another story takes place in Mexico and centers around a young boy who can feel no pain. A kindly doctor who delivers and treats him first thinks it's parental abuse... but then finds out he has stumbled upon a scientific miracle... which unfortunately leads to a side show carnival like waste of life. There are stories that debate evolution and creation... and others that depict loneliness and abnormal pets. Fleeting fame and the highs and lows of the music industry is diagnosed with a meticulous unblinking character study.

The longest "short" story by far is "WILD CHILD" which is sixty-five pages long and is based on the true facts of "THE WILD BOY OF AVEYRON"... a young child who was abandoned in the wild with his throat slit and became an animal to survive. My favorite of them all was "LA CONCHITA" which culminates in an exhilarating adrenaline rush as a delivery boy/man who is not at all happy with the world... he delivers everything from screenplays to the valuable package he was transporting today: "THIS WAS THE KIND OF THING I HANDLED MAYBE TWO OR THREE TIMES A MONTH AT MOST-AND IT NEVER FAILED TO GIVE ME A THRILL. IN THE TRUNK, ANCHORED FIRMLY BETWEEN TWO BIG BLOCKS OF STYROFOAM, WAS A HUMAN LIVER PACKED IN A BAG OF ICE SLURRY INSIDE A BUD LIGHT FUN-IN-THE-SUN COOLER, AND IF THAT SOUNDS RIDICULOUS, I'M SORRY." This delivery takes place in a driving rain storm which makes his normal bursts of unconscionable speed very dangerous... and then there is a giant mud slide. Bodies are buried alive and traffic is at a standstill. At the hospital that is awaiting his delivery... seconds are ticking off the clock of life for the recipient... and a frantic knock on his mud-locked car by an overwrought unknown woman... changes this heretofore soulless driver... into the epitome of the "human-condition". Your heart will be pounding as your hands can't stop from turning to the next page.

This is a well written collection that many times leaves you alone with your own thoughts as to how the story really ends... because the real culmination could have gone either way. Unfortunately there are one or two stories that just leave you... but you will be glad you invested your time and money in this book.

Although T.C Boyle's novels have really run the gamut of subject matter, the one thing they all have in common is their author's captivating storytelling approach, which merges the conventional with the unexpected in style and substance. Among the strongest of Boyle's works have been those that take an unusual perspective on historical figures --- Frank Lloyd Wright, Harvey Kellogg, Alfred Kinsey, etc. --- using fiction to offer fresh, contemporary insights on real-life characters from the past.

Similarly, the title story of Boyle's newest story collection, WILD CHILD, is probably the strongest of these pieces. It relates the story of the "Wild Boy of Aveyron," the feral child discovered in the French woods and slowly "civilized" over a number of years. I confess that I knew the tale mostly because of a couple of excellent children's book accounts published several years ago. However, Boyle's story of Victor is simultaneously more graphic and more tender as readers are left to reflect on what is gained --- and lost --- through Victor's "taming." Similarly, in "Sin Dolor," a doctor becomes obsessed with a young patient who apparently has no sensitivity to pain --- but becomes horrified when the boy's own father exploits his child's freakishness to turn a buck.

As in his previous collection, TOOTH AND CLAW, WILD CHILD often focuses --- as in the title story --- on the places where the so-called natural world intersects with the human one. In the disturbing "Thirteen Hundred Rats," a grieving man distorts the advice of well-meaning acquaintances who advise him to get a pet. He buys a snake, but finds that he has a more visceral connection to the rats he purchases to feed his python. In "Admiral," a couple who is too rich for their own good clone their beloved deceased Afghan hound and spend all their time trying to ensure that their new dog's life will replicate their old one's exactly --- and the dog-sitter they hire takes their advice to heart. In "Question 62," two sisters on opposite coasts contend with their own questions about the proper place for "wild" animals.

Other stories explore --- often in gut-wrenching terms --- the moral quandaries of contemporary life. In "The Lie," a young father, desperate to avoid work and exhausted by the drudgery of new parenthood, tells his co-workers that the reason he hasn't come into the office recently is that his infant daughter has died. In "Hands On," a woman embarking on her first plastic surgery procedure develops an unhealthy fixation on the man she thinks can "fix" her.

Throughout, Boyle offers readers keen observations and robust storytelling. Frequently, his stories seem infused with the landscapes of California and South America. Just as often, though, they take place in a geographically generic suburban environment that could be anywhere. Contrasting the extreme, often violent realms of the natural world with the sterile, controlling, lifeless human environment results in powerful commentaries and indelible images --- exactly what the short story is best designed for.

--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

All in all, the stories are good reads. For the most part the quality is there, but long stretches look like something a talented college undergrad could write. There's a lack of planning in some stories; they seem to jump along with little underlying structure.

Having said that, I'll still recommend the book because some of the stories are outstanding. It's something like a CD with fourteen tracks (fourteen stories here), and you only really like four of them, but the others are okay.

"Balto" is about lying under oath. In this case it's a twelve-year-old girl who is pressured to lie to help get her father out of trouble. I wondered how the child would handle it right to the end. "Question 62" is about animal rights and wrongs and a tiger that chooses a strange place to nap. "Ash Monday" is a clever tale about revenge and how it comes in many forms.

Easily the best story is "Wild Child." It's about a boy, eight or nine, who is discovered in 1797 France. It seems he had been abandoned several years before and had managed to survive like a wild beast in the forest. He lived on things like frogs, snails, berries, and raw potatoes that he dug out by hand from farmers' fields before he slipped back into the woods. Eventually he ends up in the hands of people who see him as possible evidence in modern man's debate about innate human qualities: in a "state of nature" is man basically good? Are humans born with certain inclinations, or is that "slate" really clean? Incredibly, the story was based on the actual discovery of such a child and the events that ensued.

A new TC Boyle short story book is a literary event and Boyle's latest short story collection is like his other collections - that is, it is nothing short of brilliant. He is the best short story writer alive at the moment and "Wild Child" cements his reputation for crafting well written stories that draw you into the characters' strange worlds and have you wanting more.

The best story here is a short novella called "Wild Child" about a young boy found hiding in the woods in 18th century France, apparently animal-like due to years of living in the wild. He is taken in and, like the real life case of Caspar Hauser, is taken to the city where he is taught and educated. Unlike Hauser though, the wild child is never tamed. Boyle's characterisation of the child is a perfect rendering of what you would imagine to be a feral child, part human, part animal. You feel the frustrated attempts by doctors to make him speak as well as the surroundings of 18th century Paris and Languedoc. If all the other stories in this book were bad (and they're not) the book would be worth reading for this novella alone.

"The Lie" is about a man who, unable to face work, crafts a lie that his baby has died and thus gains a few more days off. However he's unable to backtrack and then his wife finds out...

"La Conchita" is about an organ courier in California who sees a mudslide happen on the motorway and gets caught up in rescuing trapped people from their cars, imaging an alternate life where one woman's husband dies and he takes his place.

"Bulletproof" is about the battle between secular education and religious views with stickers on biology textbooks that read "Darwin's theory of evolution is just a theory" dividing parents and teachers alike. The narrator, a single man, is torn between loyalty to his secular friend and a Christian woman.

"The Unlucky Mother of Aquiles Maldonado" is about a Venezuelan baseball star whose mother is taken hostage.

"Admiral" is about a rich couple who clone their dead dog and try to recreate conditions as they were years ago.

Those are the stories that stood out for me but none were terrible and all drew me into the story despite being only a dozen pages long. The characters and settings are so vivid that you become instantly interested in the stories. It's the mark of a great writer and a master storyteller who can do that so well. I would heartily recommend this book to any fans of fiction or fans of TC Boyle, who is sure to go down in literary history as the American Chekhov. A must read, fantastic book.

The most difficult element of Boyle collections is that they come to an end. A good read, as always.

The stories in WILD CHILD confirmed my suspicion that T.C. Boyle is the most interesting fiction writer working in the U.S. today. I won't say North America, as Canada has Atwood and Munro, but Boyle is clearly in their all-star league. He wasn't always one of my favorites. His earlier stories were too white and male for me. But he steadily widened his point of view and improved his always impressive technical abilities until he was able to produce what I consider one of the finest novels of the past twenty years, DROP CITY. In both DROP CITY and WILD CHILD, Boyle demonstrates the ability to ground stories with the resonance of myth in the fabric of convincing reality. There are other American writers who excel at the creation of myth, notably Toni Morrison, but, lacking the grounding in reality that Boyle provides, her dream worlds fail to move me as there isn't enough at stake. My prejudice in favor of fiction that carries with it the convincing bite of a reality external to human minds and culture narrows down the field of writers whose latest can get me to pull out my credit card for a hardback purchase to a handful: Smiley, Lethem, Franzen, Boyle.

Smiley used to be the writer whose latest work I most looked forward to, and GREENLANDERS remains one of my favorite novels, but though she still writes with great skill and knows how to tell a good story, Smiley lost me when she retreated into the narrow world of the richest one percent, full of thoroughbred horses and architecturally significant houses in the hills. Another one of my prejudices: I can't stand fiction that fawns on the wealthy.

Lethem wrote wonderfully about the underclass in FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE and though his next, CHRONIC CITY, was a fascinating novel about a member of the cultural underclass, it seems that success might soon have the same effect on Lethem that it did on Smiley. So far I've liked Lethem's subjects and prose enough to pardon his flirtation with post-modernism, which I don't like for the same reasons I don't like magic realism or too much mythologizing, but I much prefer Boyle's less affected style, and if Lethem's next is a post-modern novel about New York's cultural elite, he'll drop off my list of must-read writers.

I admire Franzen as much for his courage in writing about the ecological collapse of our planet, a topic that bores and annoys many readers, as I do for his wit, but with FREEDOM Franzen too is exhibiting symptoms of the Smiley syndrome, dulling his satirical edge and increasing his tendency to have everything end up in a warm financially secure place.

You won't find many warm safe fuzzy places in the stories in WILD CHILD. There are bars and restaurants where men, reaching for the pleasures of the moment, slip, fall, and fail. There's a monumental mudslide where one of these failed, always potentially violent men grabs at a shovel and an illusory chance of redemption. There's the house in a middle class suburb where a lonely man falls in love with a rat and ends up dead in a sea of rodents. There's the gated mansion where a black unemployed college girl takes a job dog sitting a quarter million dollar puppy. There's the early 19th century French institution where the wild child of the title is introduced to Enlightenment civilization. There's a trailer park where a woman decides that a feral cat's worth sacrificing for a dubious male lover while across the country her married sister falls in love with an escaped tiger. There's a run-down recording studio in wintery New York where a second-string backup singer finds a moment of heaven. And my favorite, a terrorist camp in the jungles of Venezuela where the middle-aged mother of a Mexican baseball millionaire survives by doing what she always has, which is the daily work of recreating civilization. All of these settings are places for Boyle to explore the conflicts between men and women, rich and poor, man and animal, and to think about the nature of Nature, in stories that are never didactic and always amusing. Financial success hasn't caused Boyle to forget what the world looks like to most of its impoverished inhabitants, and age has only increased his ability to see the world through the eyes of women. In fact it's Boyle's ability to create female characters whose lives aren't subsumed by men that makes him stand out from his talented male (and most of his female) contemporaries.

Boyle can write as beautiful a sentence as any language-obsessed writer, like the one that begins his title story "Wild Child":
"During the first hard rain of autumn, when the leaves lay like currency at the feet of the trees and the branches shone black against a diminished sky, a party of hunters from the village of Lacaune, in the Languedoc region of France, returning cold and damp and without anything tangible to show for their efforts, spotted a human figure in the gloom ahead."
What's great about this sentence, and all of the sentences in this collection, is that they never call so much attention to themselves that they get in the way of the story. Rather they carry you forward into a life you couldn't have imagined on your own while depositing just a trace of extra loveliness on the way, like using the right amount of good scent instead of a whole cheap bottle of flowery verbiage.

In WILD CHILD, Boyle displays all the literary qualities I like: the courage to write about serious social problems; convincing characters of many classes, genders, and nationalities; a sly satirical but not too obvious wit; and smooth beautiful unobtrusive writing. I'm looking forward to many more years of reading his very fine work.

This is a short review to encourage readers who love short stories to be sure to add this one to your collection. Readers of long novels: Here's your chance to expand your horizon. All of the stories held my interest with Wild Child being the longest & best of the lot. This is a great book to keep at the beach house or guest bedroom so visitors who are looking for "a little something" to read on a quiet summer afternoon can pick up & finish in one sitting.

I usually shy away from books read by the author as not too many do justice to their own works. T.C. Boyle is on of the few exceptions. As a reader of audio books I can say that Boyle is up there with Scott Brick & Jim Dale.

Highly recommended! This is an excellent book of very well-written, lovely short stories that cover an wide range of themes and types of people. I have been impressed with each of the stories and have recommended this collection to my friends. Stop complaining about costs for digital format and check out a free copy from your local community library. Sheesh.

I'm amazed that people give the book a rating of 1 star because they felt they were charged too much for the Kindle version!

I got the book from my library and paid nothing. Should I therefore give it a 5 star rating based on price?

I've read two of T.C. Boyle's books of short stories and found both very enjoyable. Not every one of the stories deserve 4 stars, but I feel that several deserve 5 stars. How anybody can rate a book based on it's price is beyond me. Shouldn't we be reviewing the book rather than use our review as a protest against the pricing of ebooks? You people are really doing the author a disservice by complaining in this manner! You can always complain about the price within the review, but to use that as a basis for your review, what are you thinking?

Some of my happiest childhood memories are of the hours spent curled on my grandfather's lap as he told me stories. I later learned he began with nursery rhymes then as I grew moved on to stories of his boyhood and then to reading children's classics to me. Perhaps this is why I'm so partial to audiobooks, the pleasure of relaxing in a favorite chair and being told a story. In the case of WILD CHILD, the enjoyment is fourteen fold - yes, fourteen stories in the ninth collection by the eminent T.C. Boyle.

The powerful titular story is by far the longest, actually a novella, and based on history - in 1797 a feral child, Victor of Aveyron, was found somewhere in France's wilderness, and given over to the care of a Parisian doctor who strove to teach the boy the ways of civilization. Unsurprisingly it was a struggle; the heart of the tale lies in Victor's observations.

"Sin Dolor," features a Mexican boy who evidently doesn't feel physical pain. He' quite capable of burning himself with no ill effects or happily playing with deadly insects. It doesn't take his father long to realize that he can make money by taking the boy throughout the country in what we once called freak shows. The boy was compelled endure pain for ticket buying audiences. He exhibits "feats of senseless torture" and experiences an agony that is not physical.

Boyle treats us to varying situations and characters - a father who lies about his baby in order to get out of work, an escaped tiger, a town embroiled in a Creationism controversy, an alcoholic's treatment of his daughter.

All of these stories are vintage Boyle causing us to consider, to ponder our own actions and reactions. Doubling the pleasure for this listener was hearing Boyle reading his own works, bringing to each the nuances and emphases probably known only to the author himself.

Enjoy!

- Gail Cooke