February 21, 2010
Wild Child by TC Boyle/Apparition & Late Fictions by Thomas Lynch
The Sunday Times review by Stephen Amidon

True to its title, TC Boyle’s ninth collection of short stories takes us for a walk on the wild side — of suburban California. Although most of these wickedly inventive tales are set in quiet communities, they are so densely populated with savage creatures that they might as well be set in some unmapped wilderness. In Question 62, a woman tending her garden is confronted by an escaped tiger who proves far less bestial than some of her neighbours; another story features a woebegone rat who is barbecued by a juvenile delinquent.

The truly feral beasts in Boyle’s world, though, are the humans, straining against the tenuous bonds of civilisation. A depressed film editor tells a minor fib only to watch his deception spiral out of control until it threatens to demolish his life. A woman in search of some Botox develops a fixation on her surgeon, leading to a humiliating examination-room confrontation. A harried delivery man, after being caught in a mud slide, must choose between rushing his cargo of a human liver to an operating theatre or saving a trapped family.

The collection’s wildest inhabitants, however, are its children. In the superb Balto, a 12-year-old shocks everyone with her reaction after being asked to lie in court for her rich, alcoholic father. Sin Dolor, a stunning example of narrative compression, recounts the story of a boy who is born without the capacity to feel pain. In Bulletproof, a 14-year-old decides to damn the consequences when she declares her love for Jesus at a school board meeting.

The book’s only misfire is its title story, which retells the well-known tale of the 18th-century French “savage” boy who briefly became a celebrity. Written in a sombre tone at odds with the blackly satirical style of the other 12 stories, it serves only to underscore how compelling Boyle can be when he lets the beast out.

In Matinée de Septembre, one of the five stories that comprise Thomas Lynch’s collection, a professor tells her students that “sex and death…are the only subjects worth writing about”. If this is true, then Lynch is halfway there. There might not be much sex here, but there is plenty of death. Bloodsport features an embalmer who grieves for a murder victim as he prepares her body; the hero of another story is a coffin salesman mourning his wife. The professor inhabits a tale that turns out to be a reworking of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, in which she becomes besotted by a young Jamaican maid at a resort hotel. Apparition features the ghost of a dead marriage as a minister comes to terms with his ex-wife’s betrayal.

Lynch’s stories can crackle with grace and wit. The minister, who has written a bestseller in praise of divorce called Good Riddance, notes with surprise that “the older he got the more and younger women there were to look at”. The embalmer despairs at the “small-calibre outrage” of a young woman’s murder by a bullying husband. And Catch and Release ends with an image that is certain to snap the reader’s chin up in admiration.

Unlike Boyle, however, Lynch pulls too many punches for the collection to sustain its promise. The book’s varying tone proves unsettling. This is particularly true of Matinée de Septembre, where his effort to follow Mann’s daunting blueprint twists his prose into configurations that sound as if they’ve been poorly translated from the German: “In what remained of her two weeks at the Grand, Aisling’s infatuation with the Jamaican girl only grew more fervid and consuming.” It is the sort of mannered writing that makes you wish for a little more of that small-calibre outrage.