WASHINGTON POST 2001

Pox Americana

09/16/2001

AFTER THE PLAGUE *

And Other Stories

By T.C. Boyle

Viking. 303 pp. $25.95

T.C. Boyle was at the University of Iowa in the mid-1970s. In those days giants still roamed the earth, and he studied with the likes of Frederick Exley, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, John Irving and Vance Bourjaily, Boyle's mentor in the Iowa Writers Workshop. By the early 1980s Boyle was already earning awards for his novels and short fiction, a track that he has followed steadily since then, garnering a handful of O. Henry Awards, Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships and the PEN/Faulkner Award, among many others.

Boyle's later novels tend to meander, as in the rather shambolic grotesqueries of The Road to Wellville and Riven Rock, but his short fiction remains among the very best published in the last few decades. T.C. Boyle Stories (1988) collected 68 of these; After the Plague adds 16 more, including two O. Henry Award winners, "The Love of My Life" and "The Underground Gardens." The first of these deals with a pair of teenage lovers, Ivy League-bound, whose lives are derailed by the girl's pregnancy and the couple's subsequent abandonment of their newborn daughter. Readers expecting remorse or tenderness on the part of the guilty parties, however, are unfamiliar with Boyle's trademark sense of irony and detachment: "Even if it was alive, and it was, he knew in his heart that it was . . . it didn't matter, or shouldn't have mattered. . . . When he really thought about it, thought it through on its merits and dissected all his mother's pathetic arguments about where he'd be today if she'd felt as he did when she was pregnant herself, he hardened like a rock, like sand turning to stone under all the pressure the planet can bring to bear. Another unwanted child in an overpopulated world? They should have given him a medal."

Other stories take their cues from yesterday's headlines. The narrator of "Killing Babies" is a former crack addict taken in by his brother, a doctor whose abortion clinic is under siege by chanting protesters. Here the lines blur between moral rightness and delusional self-righteousness, and the tale ends in a scene of nightmarish confrontation right out of The Day of the Locust. "Captured by the Indians" charts a similar decline into violence and despair. A woman avoids telling her oafish partner of her pregnancy, all the while haunted by two disparate, horrific events: an 1862 massacre of women and children by rampaging Sioux and the present-day threat of a serial murderer known as the train killer. The story's final sentence contains more genuine horror and menace than this entire summer's worth of scary movies.

Sometimes, though, Boyle's technical facility subverts the power of his work. "Termination Dust," "She Wasn't Soft," "Mexico" and "Death of the Cool" rely too heavily on similar tone and elements -- alcoholic, feckless guys, grimly determined women, surprise endings that don't quite surprise. The attempt at surreal comedy in "The Black and White Sisters" simply falls flat. More successful are those stories where Boyle extends his range, as in the sweetly resigned tone of "Achates McNeil," whose pseudonymous (and miserable) narrator is the college-age son of an Incredibly Famous Countercultural Writer, a J.D. Salinger/Hunter Thompson/Jack Kerouac/Thomas Pynchon kind of guy who sounds a teensy bit like Boyle himself -- "A skinny man in his late forties with kinky hair and a goatee who dressed like he was twenty-five and had a dead black morbid outlook on life and twisted everything into the kind of joke that made you squirm." (Another nice touch is the name of the narrator's girlfriend, Victoria Roethke.) And the mordant, very funny "Friendly Skies" is an inspiration to frequent fliers everywhere: the account of one woman's very, very bad air day, and a stellar example of how to make Travellers' Rage work for you.

Boyle has acknowledged the influence of absurdist playwrights such as Eugene Ionesco; but at their best his most recent stories bring to mind the surreal juxtapositions of another American writer, the F. Scott Fitzgerald of "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and "The Ice Palace." The lonely protagonist of "Peep Hall" discovers that the ordinary-seeming house where a lovely neighbor lives is, in fact, peephall.com, where cameras are trained round-the-clock on its nubile inhabitants. The tale, evocative of Yasunari Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties, ends on an uncharacteristically wistful note. "Going Down" cuts between a man alone in his house during a snowstorm and scenes from the science fiction novel he reads while waiting for his wife to return from her ill-timed shopping expedition. "The Underground Gardens" follows the tragicomic career of a Sicilian immigrant in California during the early years of the last century; when his 70 acres of hardscrabble turn out to be incapable of sustaining anything green, he starts digging and never stops.

After the Plague's title story is best and most improbable of all: a tale of apocalypse with a happy ending. If (as seems likely) the world is going to hell in a handbasket, it would be a very good idea to pack Boyle's latest book, so you'll have something to read on the way. *

Elizabeth Hand is the author of seven novels, including the forthcoming "Walking in Flames."

Nights in the Tropics

06/10/2001

MY GRANDMOTHER'S EROTIC FOLKTALES

By Robert Antoni

Grove. 201 pp. $24

Imagine listening to a bawdy, laughing Scheherezade whose off-color tales lilt to a calypso beat. That's the voice of Maria Rosa de la Plancha Domingo, narrator of Robert Antoni's My Grandmother's Erotic Folktales, a collection of linked stories as surprising and luminous as a hidden tropical waterfall.

Antoni's two novels, Divina Trace (winner of the Commonwealth Writers prize) and Blessed Is the Fruit, showcased his gift for combining a ripe Caribbean patois with an elegantly stylized island mythos. My Grandmother's Erotic Folktales is a sort of West Indian Nights: tales within tales within tales, told to a grandson by the 97-year-old Maria (known as Skippy or Skip) as she recalls her youth on the bustling island of Corpus Christi during World War II. This is when the American troops appeared, seizing the young widow's cocoa estate and turning it into a naval base: "Let me tell you every whorewoman in Corpus Christi descended straight away on that place . . . because it's true what they say that the Yankees would pay any amount of money because they don't have no sex in America, and that is why the Americans only like to fight wars."

Like Scheherazade, Skip spins her tales to protect the honor of her daughters and young countrywomen: She runs a respectable boarding house, satisfying her Yankee soldiers with cerveza, spicy food and "The Story of General Monagas' Pearlhandled Pistol and the Tiger that Liked to Eat Cheese" and "The Tail of the Boy Who Was Born a Monkey."

Like any heroine worth her salt, Grandmother and her beautiful female charges are beset by unwanted suitors. The framing stories in this collection feature two nefarious con men, the Kentucky Colonel and the King of Chacachacari. Their absurd efforts to bilk the widow of her money include a search for buried treasure and having her invest in Skippy's Pizza Parlor. The Colonel also starts a radio station, announcing he will henceforth be called Wolfman Jack; this last doesn't fool the canny widow, since "everyone with sense knows he won't be appearing on the radio with he big caveman beard for another twenty years!"

seem labored, their mix of Caribbean folklore and American pop culture like one of those fusion recipes that never quite come together in the cookpot. More captivating are Antoni's versions of classic folktales. "The Tale of How Crab-o Lost His Head" is an island version of Rumpelstiltskin, wherein a young orphan girl must guess the real name of the most beautiful woman in the village of Blanchisseuse or else go to bed hungry each night, never tasting the island's wealth -- "a pawpaw, or a ripe mammy-sapote fruit. A hand of sweet-plaintains, or little sicreyea-bananas, or soft silk-figs. A few portugals, dillies, julie-mangoes or eden or doudou. Sugarapples, guavas, caimets, or whatever else was in season. . . ."

Antoni's island dialect begs to be spoken aloud, and one sometimes has the delightful sense of reading a distinctively adult Dr. Seuss -- "nobody had never given her no flowers before, not even the blossoms of a stinking-toe bush." But the narrator's voice can grow wearying; its rich patois and relentlessly earthy humor make one yearn occasionally for the acidic bite of real life or even tragedy. Despite their title, My Grandmother's Erotic Folktales are less silkily erotic than belly-laugh ribald, often scatological, with humor reminiscent of a Farrelly Brothers movie (and not quotable here).

And then the storyteller gives us "The Tale of How Iguana Got Her Wrinkles," a lush, sensual account of forbidden love that truly does achieve the timeless quality of myth and folklore for which Antoni obviously strives. By the end of this book, one can believe in almost anything, including Skippy's instrumental part in the Normandy invasion. Like her Yankee friends, one leaves these tales feeling replete, grateful and slightly dazed by the magic worked by a nonagenarian storyteller who has "remained young and sweet sweet forever!" *

Elizabeth Hand is the author of seven novels, including the forthcoming "Walking in Flames."

Test-Tube Genius

05/27/2001

THE SONG OF THE EARTH

Written and Illustrated by Hugh Nissenson

Algonquin. 244 pp. $24.95

It's not often that one encounters a compulsively readable, brilliantly conceived novel about Big Ideas, so readers take note: Hugh Nissenson's The Song of the Earth is the Real Thing. The biography of a fictional 21st-century artist named John Firth Baker, The Song of the Earth draws on letters, journal entries, original art and interviews, a form popularized almost 20 years ago by George Plimpton and Jean Stein in Edie.

Imaginary biography has been done before, of course -- think of Steven Millhauser's Edwin Mullhouse or, more recently, Brook Hansen and Nick Davis's Boone, which has a template similar to that of The Song of the Earth. And Nissenson's previous novel, The Tree of Life, was the fictional journal of a 19th-century minister; it was nominated for both the PEN/Faulker and National Book awards.

This time Nissenson looks forward, not back. The Song of the Earth is couched as the book that accompanies a retrospective show commemorating the 10th anniversary of the murder of artist John Firth Baker. Born in 2038, Baker is identified as the world's first genetically engineered artist. In fact, he is one of three "arsogenic metamorphs" whose birth mothers engage in a risky (and, in the United States, illegal) experiment, agreeing to be artificially inseminated by Frederick Rust Plowman, an American scientist working in Japan. Plowman has isolated the genes that govern creative tendencies, but his research indicates that DNA isn't enough. He believes that the withholding of maternal affection may also be a crucial ingredient in producing a great artist, composer, writer, musician. Two of the women involved in his undertaking agree to a horrific, if short-term, experiment; one of them is Jeanette Baker, John Firth Baker's lesbian mother, who deliberately stops taking her antidepressant medication for the six months following his birth.

All three nascent artists -- John Baker, a Japanese boy named Yukio Tanaka, and a Russian, Nadia Kammerovska -- are precocious children, growing up in a world ravaged by global warming and the fault lines left by decades of gender- and religious-inspired terrorism. And they are not the only genetically engineered people making their way through this bleak yet exhilarating landscape. Among others, there are Alex Thomas, a young composer, and Ishtar Teratol (her name makes punning use of the Latin teratogen, monster), who has been designed at great expense by the World Humin Chess Grandmaster's Association "with but one aim: to someday regain for the human race the world chess championship, which has been held by IBM's chess maven since 2009." Along with John Baker, these young people endure the hatred and envy of "naturally gifted artists." The depiction of these myriad cults and factions at war with each other -- Gaian, gynarchic, phallocentric -- is hilarious, witty and depressingly believable.

Nissenson dives into deep waters with his novel -- not just into the relationships between Science and Art, maleness and femaleness, but into the often dangerous confluence of creativity, sexual desire, obsession, and religious and political zealotry. When John Firth Baker is a child, his artistic talents are wholeheartedly encouraged by his mother. But John is also gay, and in adolescence he becomes fixated on the leader of a neo-pagan cult, a transgendered Gaian guru named Billy Lee Mookerjee. This obsession leads John to undergo sexual surgery himself and to become a member of the Gaian cult, decisions that estrange him from Jeannette and have a lasting impact upon his art and its cultural legacy.

The Song of the Earth evokes earlier sf novels about the risks of artistic obsession; Thomas M. Disch's haunting On Wings of Song and Samuel R. Delany's classic Dhalgren and Triton come immediately to mind. John Firth Baker himself is reminiscent of the true-life archetypes embodied by people such as Basquiat and Rimbaud, though Nissenson more deliberately invokes Charlotte Salomon, the Holocaust victim who cast her autobiography as art in the groundbreaking multimedia work "Life? or Theater?" Re-creating the flavor of "real" art is itself risky business, and Nissenson's book is weakest when it presents poems and images meant to hold iconic significance for their 21st-century audience.

Still, the ambitions of The Song of the Earth, like those of John Firth Baker, are seemingly endless and ultimately commendable. The brief arc of Baker's life ends violently when he is 19, yet even in this Nissenson pushes the envelope: Baker's work is posthumously appropriated by the Gaian cult the young man eventually abandoned to pursue his art. In life and death, Hugh Nissenson's protagonist leaves burning contrails across his near-future America. This novel seems likely to have a similar impact upon contemporary fiction. *

Elizabeth Hand is working on a novel about artistic obsession, "Walking in Flames."