Why to read T. C. Boyle

It's always a pleasure to read a T. Coraghessan Boyle story in The New Yorker - he's been a very prolific writer for many years, his novels have taken on a wide range of themes and settings, but I think his stories are his most distinctive contribution - perhaps because there is less variety and he therefore makes a more identifiable signature. Most of his stories, it seems to me, are about a particular kind of person, a guy usually, and cronies - generally late 20s or so, intelligent and educated but not focused or driven, in tenuous relationships, pursuing good times as they see them - a lot of casual drinking and drugs sometimes, generally western, and therefore with a lot of uprootedness and often with much car travel. The narrative voice is always sharp and funny, very attuned to the latest hip and slacker language - maybe some of which Boyle actually invents. In other words, these characters seem like Boyle might have been himself at a much earlier stage or more likely are very much like some of his students. He is a believer in a well-crafted plot, too, often a rarity among contemporary writers - he's less self-consciously artful than many, which may account for his odd status - extremely successful commercially, but never quite on the map of the top literary stars. He dares to entertain. Current New Yorker story, The Night of the Satellite, is prototypical in regard to narrator, characters, setting (it's in the Midwest somewhere, but the characters are West Coast emigrants), tone, voice - but it is less plot-driven than most Boyle stories and therefore slightly less successful I think. Story involves a couple, part-time profs/grad students, as B. deftly notes they get As and Bs in the courses they're taking and give As and Bs to their students - perfectly capturing the indifference of their milieu. Two main incidents mark this story: the couple intervenes in a dispute among a couple whom they don't know, and a piece of a satellite falling to earth brushes against the shoulder of the narrator. Boy lets that stand as some kind of image or symbol - make of it what you will. He sets up the couple-dispute very mysteriously, but there's no great payoff - in fact, much of the action occurs out of the view of the narrator - we never learn exactly what his girlfriend said to her counterpart. The open structure of the story, a tradition going back to Joyce and much used and abused by many writers since, isn't Boyle's greatest strength - but this story still falls very much within his world and is worth reading as a sketch of two characters on the outer banks or a waning relationship.