Wild Child: and Other Stories

Описание

A superb new collection from "a writer who can take you anywhere" (The New York Times) In the title story of this rich new collection, T.C. Boyle has created so vivid and original a retelling of the story of Victor, the feral boy who was captured running naked through the forests of Napoleonic France, that it becomes not just new but definitive: yes, this is how it must have been. The tale is by turns magical and moving, a powerful investigation of what it means to be human. There is perhaps no one better than T.C. Boyle at engaging, shocking, and ultimately gratifying his readers while at the same time testing his characters' emotional and physical endurance. The fourteen stories gathered here display both Boyle's astonishing range and his imaginative muscle. Nature is the dominant player in many of these stories, whether in the form of the catastrophic mudslide that allows a cynic to reclaim his own humanity ("La Conchita") or the wind-driven fires that howl through a high California canyon ("Ash Monday"). Other tales range from the drama of a man who spins Homeric lies in order to stop going to work, to that of a young woman who must babysit for a $250,000 cloned Afghan and the sad comedy of a child born to Mexican street vendors who is unable to feel pain. Brilliant, incisive, and always entertaining, Boyle's short stories showcase the mischievous humor and socially conscious sensibility that have made him one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.

The Barnes & Noble Review

We meet quite a few drinkers in T.C. Boyle's new story collection Wild Child.  One bar, for example, at 8am shelters " . . . congenital losers and pinch-faced retirees hunched over a double vodka as if it was going to give them back the key to their personalities . . . ."  In another dive, "All you see, really, beyond the shifting colors of the TV, is the soft backlit glow of the bottles on display behind the bar dissolving into a hundred soothing glints of gold and copper."    In yet another, "The door swung in on a denseness of purpose, eight or nine losers lined up on their barstools, the smell of cut lime and the sunshine of the run, a straight shot of Lysol from the toilet in back."  Elsewhere, a knowing twelve year-old observes her father "sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, sipping something out of a mug, not coffee, definitely not coffee."

In the best of these fourteen stories, Boyle captures individuals as they straddle the gap between despair and escape:  the drunken, philandering father in "Balto;" the trapped new father in "The Lie;" the unhinged widower in "Thirteen Hundred Rats;" the woman enthralled by her plastic surgeon in "Hands On;" the woman who spends her days dog-sitting a cloned puppy in "Admiral."  Comedy, often dazzlingly satirical, relieves the despair (few writers can make us both smile and squirm as Boyle does) while complacency is mercilessly skewered.   Whether the setting is affluent California, outlaw Venezuela or 19th-century France, each drama here is beautifully distilled to reveal the emotional truth at its core.

"In the title story of this new collection, T.C. Boyle has created so vivid and original a retelling of the story of Victor, the feral boy who was captured running naked through the forests of Napoleonic France, that it becomes not just new but definitive: yes, this is how it must have been. The tale is by turns magical and moving, a powerful investigation of what it means to be human." Nature is the dominant player in many of these stories, whether in the form of the catastrophic mudslide that allows a cynic to reclaim his own humanity ("La Conchita") or the wind-driven fires that howl through a high California canyon ("Ash Monday"). Other tales range from the drama of a man who spins Homeric lies in order to stop going to work, to that of a young woman who must babysit for a $250,000 cloned Afghan and the sad comedy of a child born to Mexican street vendors who is unable to feel pain.

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