There is a preponderance of losers in this new collection of stories. I’m not talking about people temporarily down on their luck or suffering from everyday reversals of fortune. I’m talking about people determined to take a bad situation and make it worse, mostly through alcohol but sometimes with drugs or just through a kind of pessimism that makes the idea of trying harder at life seem like the worst kind of foolishness imaginable.
Of course, since the stories in question are by T.C. Boyle in his new collection, “Tooth and Claw and Other Stories,” there is also the kind of imagination that keeps one reading and frequently language that rises higher and stimulates more than almost anyone else can do. Fans of Boyle’s novels will recognize both the kind of off-beat situations and improbable characters that populate such books as “World’s End” and “The Road to Wellville,” and yet as gifted as Boyle is, there’s something disappointing about these fictions, as if they were thrown-off, discarded by the author while he was on his way to something else, perhaps something better.
Several of the stories are what one might call “guy comes in the bar” stories, in which the narrator runs into someone in a bar who then tells him an anecdote, which we discover is the story or perhaps a reflection on the story. “When I Woke Up This Morning Everything I had Was Gone,” is typical in that it follows a serpentine structure, the way a meandering bar anecdote might, and Boyle’s prose will ring true to anyone who’s ever been in such a situation: “So we talked about Jimmy, Jimmy’s tragedy, Jimmy’s refusal to accept facts and the way Jimmy was running hard up against the sharp edges of the world…Then we talked about me, but I didn’t reveal much, and then in it was general subjects…”
Looking too hard for a point here would be an exercise in futility since often enough the narrative itself is the point, the reason for the story, and Boyle seems to have a fascination with this kind of scene. Often, too, the bar stories are very funny or absurd, and the fact that they trail off and then just end without resolution seems not to matter quite so much.
Other stories in “Tooth and Claw” are more fantastic, such as “Dogology,” in which a young woman becomes so obsessed with dogs that she begins to consort with a pack of them, imagining in some way she’s a dog herself, or at least trying to inhabit their world. Boyle writes: “And her nose. She’d made a point of sticking it in anything the dogs did, breathing deep of it, rebooting the olfactory receptors of a brain that had been deadened by perfume and underarm deodorant and all the other stifling odors of civilization. Every smell was a discovery and every dog discovered more of the world in ten minutes running loose than a human being would discover in ten years…”
A little of this goes a long way unless you have an interest in the psychology of paranoid schizophrenics, but the title story in which yet another young man down on his luck meets the girl of his dreams through the agency of a wild jungle cat is more successful.
The cat is a serval, won in a bar bet with a man who has to leave town in a hurry. Taking the cat back to his apartment, the protagonist and a sympathetic barmaid cohabit for a few nights until the woman decides to go back to her boyfriend, leaving the narrator alone with the cat, who is slowly tearing apart his apartment.
In the end, he finds a way to allow the cat to escape, and the identification becomes clear: “Only then did I begin to feel something for the cat, for its bewilderment, its fear and distrust of an alien environment: this was no rocky kopje, this was my bedroom on the second floor of a run-down apartment building in a seaside town…”
At his best, Boyle is able to make persuasive this kind of twinning of the perils of civilization and its eventual tearing apart of everything noble and good to reveal human nature at its most desperate. We see teachers unable to teach because of their own despair at the world and that of their students, marriages that ceased to work years ago if they ever worked at all, and the occasional senseless accident that alters lives for good. Implicit in this is the futility of planning, of ambition, of attempting anything other than blotting the world out in the interests of an uncertain survival. Often enough, however, the stories just seem kind of sordid, a blind reaction against nothing and with nothing in particular in mind.
Given the grimness of most stories in “Tooth and Claw,” only the hardiest of readers will want to go all the way with this collection. But for those who do there are rewards at least in the richness of Boyle’s prose and his occasional, unexpected gallows humor. He has a gift for first lines.
“My childhood wasn’t exactly ideal,” says one narrator in a masterful example of understatement. And another intones, “All I wanted, really, was to attain mythic status.”
Boyle is never less than interesting, and even in minor work, as most of these stories are, his lack of sentimentality and the steadiness of his bleak vision are worth our attention.
David Milofsky is a Denver novelist and professor of English at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.
Tooth and Claw and Other Stories
By T.C. Boyle
Penguin, 304 pages, $25.95
