Tc Boyle's Tooth and Claw, almost enough to stand up a movie
To squash the prospects of a movie evening and enchain the reader to its pages, a novel must be either a plot-driven page-turner or the dispenser of something absent from film. That something is the human tangle of thoughts, impressions and feelings which no visual medium can ever zoom in on close enough to reveal. TC Boyles new short story collection Tooth and Claw has almost enough of it to keep a movie-goer home on a Friday evening.
At a reading, two weeks ago, the author conveyed that this meticulous attention to character had developed over 26 years and 16 works as his nuts and bolts focus on his writing style ebbed out. I would rather say he had conserved his fresh similes and cast them into psychological portraiture.
Appropriately, most of his stories resemble psychological lab test records. He places a character in an extreme physical situation and notes down his mental reactions.
In The Swift Passage of the Animals, Zach and his girlfriend are trapped in a snowstorm on the road to a romantic hiking week end. Zachs thoughts are sprinkled on all the plots nudges. Before their life-threatening wade through the snow, he registers her conversation on eels : the dynamics of her voice [ ], the soft sexy scratch of it shot from his eardrums right to his crotch. Here Comes meanders through a bums sensual stimulations on the streets of California, from beautiful girls with their hair and everything else bouncing in the shattered light to vodka and hunger: his stomach clenched around a little ball of nothing. A large portion of the stories protagonists are driven by funerals, family and their own lazyness back to drugs.
TC Boyle effortlessly adapts his writing style to each character while preserving its pungency. In Blinded by the Sun, he slips on the Spanish, Catholic background of his pampas ranch owner like a new shirt. In The Doubtfulness of Water, his humorous and appropriate vocabulary renders bearable the constant fuss of a snotty English widow during her horse ride from Boston to New York. She reacts to a scene in a tavern: the woman spoke of her privates as if they were public [ ]and she had to take her book and sit in the courtyard amongst the flies, which were especially thick here, as if theyd gathered for some sort of convention.
The most enjoyable short stories propel the reader in the blur between reality and science fiction. Dogology dispenses a whiff of life as a dog. It breaks into the thoughts of a woman trying to live as a canine. It gallops on all fours, sticks its nose in compost and rolls in tattered clothes, just like her. In The Kind Assassin, a radio host sets out to break the world record of sleepless days and nights. His rest-less impressions envelop the reader like the real-life experience.
This story is one of the most delectable in the collection. It successfully interweaves the sting of suspensewill he make the record?with equally intense description. But the weaving masterpiece that would stop any movie-goer in his tracks is Chicxulub. It chronicles a fathers evening, from stoned foreplay with his wife, through the phone call announcing his daughter is in a hospital and finally to the operation room. Just before the curve of every crucial moment, statistics on the meteor Chicxulub chanting the insignificance of human existence, slice through and torture.
The previous stories add a firm dose of page-turning plot to the wrenching subjectivity. The rest are delicious reads, but TC Boyles writing style and vivid impersonations are not quite enough to stand up film. Maybe in his next work they will be.
At a reading, two weeks ago, the author conveyed that this meticulous attention to character had developed over 26 years and 16 works as his nuts and bolts focus on his writing style ebbed out. I would rather say he had conserved his fresh similes and cast them into psychological portraiture.
Appropriately, most of his stories resemble psychological lab test records. He places a character in an extreme physical situation and notes down his mental reactions.
In The Swift Passage of the Animals, Zach and his girlfriend are trapped in a snowstorm on the road to a romantic hiking week end. Zachs thoughts are sprinkled on all the plots nudges. Before their life-threatening wade through the snow, he registers her conversation on eels : the dynamics of her voice [ ], the soft sexy scratch of it shot from his eardrums right to his crotch. Here Comes meanders through a bums sensual stimulations on the streets of California, from beautiful girls with their hair and everything else bouncing in the shattered light to vodka and hunger: his stomach clenched around a little ball of nothing. A large portion of the stories protagonists are driven by funerals, family and their own lazyness back to drugs.
TC Boyle effortlessly adapts his writing style to each character while preserving its pungency. In Blinded by the Sun, he slips on the Spanish, Catholic background of his pampas ranch owner like a new shirt. In The Doubtfulness of Water, his humorous and appropriate vocabulary renders bearable the constant fuss of a snotty English widow during her horse ride from Boston to New York. She reacts to a scene in a tavern: the woman spoke of her privates as if they were public [ ]and she had to take her book and sit in the courtyard amongst the flies, which were especially thick here, as if theyd gathered for some sort of convention.
The most enjoyable short stories propel the reader in the blur between reality and science fiction. Dogology dispenses a whiff of life as a dog. It breaks into the thoughts of a woman trying to live as a canine. It gallops on all fours, sticks its nose in compost and rolls in tattered clothes, just like her. In The Kind Assassin, a radio host sets out to break the world record of sleepless days and nights. His rest-less impressions envelop the reader like the real-life experience.
This story is one of the most delectable in the collection. It successfully interweaves the sting of suspensewill he make the record?with equally intense description. But the weaving masterpiece that would stop any movie-goer in his tracks is Chicxulub. It chronicles a fathers evening, from stoned foreplay with his wife, through the phone call announcing his daughter is in a hospital and finally to the operation room. Just before the curve of every crucial moment, statistics on the meteor Chicxulub chanting the insignificance of human existence, slice through and torture.
The previous stories add a firm dose of page-turning plot to the wrenching subjectivity. The rest are delicious reads, but TC Boyles writing style and vivid impersonations are not quite enough to stand up film. Maybe in his next work they will be.
