Poet Laureate of the South and Far West - T.C. Boyle

T.C. Boyle has become the poet laureate of the Southwest and Far West hard drinking sympathetic but hard luck guys - a rougher version of the kinds of generally childless men who appear in fiction by Carver, Ford, McGuane, but with maybe more of a sense of an abandoned past (East Coast) life. Boyle has an impressive 5-part story, I Walk Between the Raindrops, in the current New Yorker, narrated by a man visiting a totally non-tourist Ariz town (Kingman?) with his wife, visiting her father, a guy living, I think, in a trailer park and whose favorite (only) restaurant is Denny's; the narrator and wife are more urbane that most of the people they meet in this town (as socially marked by drinking preferences, beer and g&T v Zin and Cab. The narrator, in a bar waiting for his wife, is approached by an evidently disturbed woman who won't leave him alone. This strange encounter prompts three memories - each a very short story in its own right, one of a death in a Cal mudslide, another of an unintended insult to a close friend, each a story of unsettled emotions and of hidden danger, and Boyle wraps up by returning to the present and the episode of the strange woman in the bar, who leaves the bar and tries to throw herself on the freight-train tracks. There's no simple or even evident conclusion to this story  - just an exclamation from the narrator something like Jesus save us all! - but Boyle builds a mood of sinister upheaval and effectively delineates the cultural boundaries the separate the two halves of this story and this marriage: Sophisticated life on the Pacific Coast contrasted with desert retirement community and both lives are built on status assumptions (what you're drinking, where you dine, how you speak) and both equally unsettled and vulnerable.