Wild Child

I'm a long time admirer of the short stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle (not so much of his novels). They frequently pop up in periodicals I read, such as The New Yorker and Playboy, and have a mordant sense of humor I respond to. His stories are all what I would consider "high concept," in that they are heavily plotted and center around a vividly expressed idea. His latest collection, Wild Child, contains some of that, but many of these works are more ambitious than his usual "ripped from the headlines" looks at the follies of mankind.

As the title might suggest, many of the stories concern the battle between man and nature, with nature always winning. "La Conchita" concerns a man trying to deliver a liver for transplant to a waiting operating room but it is waylaid by a mudslide. "Question 62" is a lovely story paralleling the experiences of two sisters--one who looks up from her gardening to see an escaped tiger, while the other falls into a relationship with a man trying to pass a law allowing the killing of feral cats.

In a similar vein is "Anacapa," about a fishing expedition in the Channel Islands, and "Sin Dolor," about a Mexican boy who cannot feel pain, and ends up exploited by his father. "Ash Monday" concerns the fears of wildfires in California exurbia, and "Thirteen Hundred Rats" is about a man who gets a pet snake, but when it comes time to feed it, ends up with an unnatural empathy for the rat purchased as food.

Off the beaten path for Boyle are "Three Quarters of the Way to Hell," which details the recording of a Christmas novelty song in New York in the 1950s, alternating between a washed-up Italian crooner and a bruised female singer. The title story is a novella about the Wild Child of Aveyron, the subject of Truffaut's film L'Enfant Sauvage, about a feral boy found in the French woods in Napoleonic France and the attempts to civilize him.

My favorite stories are more typical of Boyle. "The Unfortunate Mother of Aquiles Maldonado" is one of those ripped from the headlines stories, clearly inspired by the events involving baseball pitcher Uegeth Urbina, whose mother was kidnapped in Venezuela. "Bulletproof" centers around the debate over the teaching of evolution in schools, and the brilliant "The Lie" is something of a horror story about a man who wants to get out of work so badly that he tells one whopping lie after another. Of course he will be found out, but as we await the inevitable we are sucked into this man's despair, spiraling down the drain with him.