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“Fifteen sterling tales marked . . . by a keen sense of the absurd and a . . . compassionate awareness of human frailty.”—The Washington Post
The stunning stories in Without a Hero each, in their own way, display a virtuosity and versatility rare in literary America. T.C. Boyle takes chance after chance, even to the point of reexamining the ethos of Ernest Hemingway. In “Big Game,” the wild animal safari takes place not in Africa but on a pay-per-shoot ranch in Southern California and includes an elephant hunt and its vivid consequences.
Boyle displays an astonishing range as he zooms in on such American specimens as the college football player who knows only defeat; the entrepreneur who creates a center for acquisitive disorders; the couple in search of the last toads on earth; and the boy caught between the ingenuousness of childhood and the cynicism of adulthood in “The Fog Man.”
In some of these stories, Boyle makes you laugh out loud; in others, you come closer to understanding the human condition because of the way he cuts to the secret places in his peoples’ hearts.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
May 1, 1995 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781101651575
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781101651575
- File size: 493 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from May 2, 1994
Most effective of the 16 technically ingenious and rudely funny, satirical stories in Boyle's fourth collection are the sketches of disaffected individuals who take refuge in hermetic surroundings, self-help programs, political causes and conspicuous consumption to hold at bay the banal world of convention and compromise. In ``Big Game,'' Bernard Puff, impressario of Puff's African Game Ranch in Bakersfield, Calif., peddles a simulacrum of the African bush. His carefully nurtured fantasy world is punctured by the arrival of a cynical young real estate mogul who detects ``every crack in the plaster,'' and whose rapacious hunting leads to a grisly twist of fate when the animals revolt on the veldt. In ``Filthy with Things,'' a pathological couple whose home is sinking under the weight of their ``collectibles'' enlists the services of an evangelical professional organizer who banishes them to a ``nonacquisitive environment'' while she takes inventory of their astounding clutter (``three hundred and nine bookends, forty-seven rocking chairs and over two thousand plates, cups and saucers''). Other poignant tales tell of an ephemeral romance between a Russian and an American, the introduction of anti-drug rhetoric in a suburban grade school and the experience of growing up in postwar suburbia, a world Boyle regards with anxiety, nostalgia and a properly grim sense of humor. -
May 1, 1995
In Boyle's fourth collection of short stories, he depicts a variety of individuals in his usual style of satire and humor.
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