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A Death in Kitchawank, and Other Stories
T. C. Boyle is one of the most renowned storytellers of the modern era. This collection of fourteen stories drifts effortlessly between myth and reality, encompassing a panorama of human emotions. In “The Marlbane Manchester Musser Award,” Boyle reveals a writer’s dismay when a simple trip is turned upside down by a stranger. “Los Gigantes” tells the story of a group of giants being used to create a new breed of soldier for the military. In “The Way You Look Tonight” Boyle examines the way our perceptions of our loved ones can change on a dime with just a simple revelation. And in “Sic Transit” he shows how quickly we can become consumed with curiosity.
Boyle travels the world in these and the rest of the stories, from California to Russia, Latin America to upstate New York, but his adept touch at depicting the lives of his characters never wavers.
Boyle travels the world in these and the rest of the stories, from California to Russia, Latin America to upstate New York, but his adept touch at depicting the lives of his characters never wavers.
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First published October 3, 2013
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About the author
T. Coraghessan Boyle
160 books3,033 followersT. Coraghessan Boyle (also known as T.C. Boyle, is a U.S. novelist and short story writer. Since the late 1970s, he has published eighteen novels and twleve collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988 for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is married with three children. Boyle has been a
Professor of English at the University of Southern California since 1978, when he founded the school's undergraduate creative writing program.
He grew up in the small town on the Hudson Valley that he regularly fictionalizes as Peterskill (as in widely anthologized short story Greasy Lake). Boyle changed his middle name when he was 17 and exclusively used Coraghessan for much of his career, but now also goes by T.C. Boyle.
Professor of English at the University of Southern California since 1978, when he founded the school's undergraduate creative writing program.
He grew up in the small town on the Hudson Valley that he regularly fictionalizes as Peterskill (as in widely anthologized short story Greasy Lake). Boyle changed his middle name when he was 17 and exclusively used Coraghessan for much of his career, but now also goes by T.C. Boyle.
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April 23, 2020
Review of A DEATH IN KITCHAWANK 1.7
By T.C. Boyle
Reviewed by James Victor Jordan
Five Stars
This is a review of the audio recording of T.C. Boyle’s story collection, A Death in Kitchawank. The narrator is the author, T.C. Boyle. I award the collection and the narration each a well-deserved five stars.
Had it been separately published in print, A Death in Kitchawank and Other Stories would have been T.C. Boyle’s ninth story collection in print form, excluding the two compendiums of his stories T.C. Boyle Stories I and II and a special collection of previously published stories selected as being suitable for the young-adult market: The Human Fly. Instead A Death in Kitchawank and Other Stories is available as a collection in print only as a bonus collection of fourteen stories in T.C. Boyle Stories II (2013), together with three other previously published T.C. Boyle story collections—After the Plague (2001), Tooth and Claw (2005), and Wild Child (2010).
Each of the stories in the A Death in Kitchawank and Other Stories collection is as good as literary fiction gets. As a collection, it’s a tour de force of short fiction. In this review I support these superlatives in my discussion of three stories in the collection: “In the Zone” first published by The Kenyon Review in 2011, “Slate Mountain” first published by The Kenyon Review in 2013, and “A Death in Kitchawank” first published in The New Yorker in 2010.
Are these the best stories in the collection? They are three stories among the fourteen that I find especially compelling, a fair representation, a flavor if you will, of the collection. Each is thought provoking and palpably poignant.
In this review, the spoiler-alert factor descends with the most said about “In the Zone” in terms of the plot and ending and with just enough said about “A Death in Kitchawank” to support my evaluation of that story and to whet the appetite.
A recurring topic found in T.C. Boyle stories is the toll on the environment by monumental natural and human-caused disasters and the translation of those catastrophes into personal terms: their effects on individuals. E.g. “Chicxulub” published in The New Yorker in 2004 and A Friend of the Earth, Dr. Boyle’s novel published in 2000. At times this theme warns, at times it’s metaphorical, and at times it’s simply a sad recognition of our hapless march to extinction. The first two stories I discuss are emblematic of this theme: the examination of an environmental disaster in “In the Zone” and reflection on a disaster wrought by the environment in personal, i.e. human, terms.
“In the Zone.”
In 2019, the HBO miniseries Chernobyl aired to critical and popular acclaim. I was astounded by its brilliance, its historical and human revelations—the horror of the disaster as well as the not-surprising coverup by the (evil) Soviet Empire. I was not far into viewing the first episode of Chernobyl when I remembered a similar feeling of astonishment, of revelation when I first read “In the Zone.” The nuclear disaster at Chernobyl occurred in 1986. When “In the Zone” was published in 2011, the accident was not widely understood in the west and had long since been breaking news. This story shined a well and long overdue spotlight on that tragedy through the medium of literary fiction.
Topics explored in T.C. Boyle’s fiction are often the subject of subsequent books, stories, or movies, so often in fact that I experience an impression that Dr. Boyle is prescient. For example, the September 2004 publication of his novel, The Inner Circle—historical fiction centered on the life and work of Alfred Kinsey—was followed in November 2004 with the release of the biopic Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson. It is rewarding to read the book and then see the movie, or vice versa. The same can be said of Chernobyl and “In the Zone.” After seeing Chernobyl, I eagerly reread the story. And subsequently it was a treat to hear T.C. Boyle read the story. Each time I read “In the Zone,” and after I listened to it, I had a deeper appreciation of the consequences of the event and of the story as well.
Chernobyl, the miniseries, presents a macro view of what occurred, how it occurred, and the suffering of the workers at the plant, the first responders, and the investigators. But Chernobyl only marginally touches the surface of the experiences of the local villagers displaced by the disaster—the viewer sees the forced evacuation of villagers, the subsequent execution of their pets they were forced to leave behind. But nothing is shown of their lives before, during, or after the forced evacuation.
“In the Zone,” a microcosm of the Chernobyl nuclear conflagration, tells the story three years after the meltdown of a reactor at the Chernobyl facility of two characters who had been villagers. The reader shares the intimate experiences of this couple in a close third-person narration. The reader is told, in fictive form of course, of consequences to the rural villagers displaced from their bucolic environs and moved into cramped ghetto-like dilapidated soviet style apartments in Kiev; from self-sufficiency via hunting and farming to enforced urban poverty, the largess of their government.
Now, scant months after the inaugural broadcast of Chernobyl, we have learned of the August 2019 Russian nuclear missile accident off the Pacific coast of northern Russia. We know that an untold amount of lethal radiation was released into the atmosphere. But we don’t yet know a whole lot more as we’re witnessing a Russian coverup modeled on the 1986-Soviet-Chernobyl coverup. It’s as if the story and the docudrama are saying, “We must never forget.” Unfortunately, it’s another example of T.C. Boyle’s prescience.
“In the Zone” is a “return to The Garden of Eden” story. When it begins, the story is set in Kiev, where three years after the Chernobyl disaster the widow Maryska Shyshylayeva is living “in an inhuman space in a crumbling apartment block for evacuees.” She is 62-years old and has been warned that if she were to return to her village in the uninhabitable zone, the poison in the air and in the ground, in the food and in the water, will cause cancer in her bones, an excruciating death of near unimaginable suffering.
Conditions in Kiev become unendurable for Maryska. When she learns from Leonid Kovolenko, 67, a friend of her departed husband, that in return for a bribe, to be offered by Leonid, a guard will allow her to return to her village, she and Leonid embark upon a return journey, making their way back to the wasteland of her village. Maryska and Leonid find that their respective homes are intact. They set about restoring their properties after three years of abandonment as best they can. They live off canned goods recovered from the abandoned homes, the land, eating rabbits trapped or shot by Leonid, fruit they harvast and eventually crops they cultivate. Animals—roe deer, wolves, moose, boar, squirrels—have returned. Or maybe they never left.
Maryska and Leonid are Adam and Eve until they discover a young couple with two children, a milk cow, and a dog, who have returned to live nearby in the evacuated village. Maryska and Leonid must know that it is likely that any day one or the other or both will fall ill from radiation poisoning. They live happily one day at a time in classic Freudian denial. But the narrator never says this. Instead the reader learns “That first day was the happiest of her life. She felt like a songbird caged all these years and suddenly set free, felt giddy, a girl all over again.” Maryska and Leonid shortly move in together, become lovers, live as husband and wife.
“And then one morning as they were lingering over breakfast . . . a strange terrible mechanical sound erupted out of nowhere and drove down the chatter of the birds and the symphony of the bees.” The sound came from an auto driven by Nikolai, Maryska’s thirty-six-year-old, fat to the point of obesity, chain smoking son, a professor in Moscow, come to rescue her by persuasion or force from the poison zone. “And in all those days, weeks and months of the three years she was entombed in those apartments [in Kiev] he had visited her exactly once.”
“At first, they talked of little things . . .” and then without self-awareness of the irony given his obese smoke-shrouded unhealthy lifestyle, Nikolai “started in on the subject he’d come expressly to address, or not simply to address but to harangue her with: the poison.” But Maryska won’t go and Nikolai is persuaded to accede to her wishes at the end of the barrel of Leonid’s rifle.
Maryska and Leonid have been told of their likely fate: death by radiation poisoning. But the story continues through another round of the seasons, of renewal and hope all a gift, though it will likely be a short-lived one, of their escape from the squalor imposed upon them in Kiev.
Chernobyl unmasks the coverup, telling, in effect, what happened. “In the Zone” reveals something quite different by comparing an impoverished life of squalor and dependency on the state to the freedom of living on one’s own terms, healthy for a time, in a land of beauty where the stuff of subsistence is plentiful. And what does this have to say about what was taken from these villagers? This is a critical issue beyond the scope of Chernobyl.
“Slate Mountain”
“Slate Mountain” is a story about a very different type of loss. As with “In the Zone,” it is as personal as loss can be, the possible loss of a spouse while hiking on potentially perilous mountain trails. It is a story of confronting loss in the face of hope. I use the word “potentially” because in “Slate Mountain” the outcome is unknown despite the narrator’s hope for a happy ending, a hope that must sustain him through a lonely, cold, wet uncertain night.
The story opens on “a Saturday at the end of October, the leaves bronzing on the lower slopes, deer season safely in the can and the mosquitos gone to mosquito hell till spring at least . . .” Seventeen people have signed up for a hike to be led by the narrator, Brice, and his wife Syl. As with Maryska, in the face of warnings about outdoor dangers, Brice takes his chances on an away-from-home excursion, though on first take, comparing the dangers of the aftereffects of a nuclear disaster to a hiking accident appears to be superficial. Yet the commonality is that in each of these stories, the protagonists choose to ignore warnings about environmental dangers. Though the danger of radiation poisoning in Maryska’s case is an eventual certainty, danger of a mishap while hiking the trails on Slate Mountain are statistically remote. Still the chances taken by the protagonists in each story are rational.
“A Death in Kitchawank”
“A Death in Kitchawank” is a very different kind of story, though the writing, as one would expect of a T.C. Boyle story, is gorgeous. “Saturday, just after two,” the story informs at the outset, “the sun a hot compress on her shoulders and scalp, the shrieks and catcalls of the children as they splash in the shallows a kind of symphony of the usual.”
This is a story of danger where danger should not lurk. It is realistic fiction at its finest. Why? Because the writing is so up close—as great first-person narration should be—that if the reader didn’t know it was fiction, she would likely conclude that it was superb memoir.
The Narration
In conclusion, just a brief word about the narration, the performance of the stories by the author. I’ve listened to many T.C. Boyle books read by him and to others read by professional narrators. As good as the professional narrators have been, not one of their recordings compares to the narrations by T.C. Boyle, including his narration of the stories in A Death in Kitchawank. After wondering why, I think I’ve put my finger on the reason. In virtually all if not all T.C. Boyle’s fiction there is irony—think of Maryska’s son urging her to leave her village when during the three years she lived in poverty in Kiev, he visited her just once—and satire, humor which offers hope flickering against the onset of the coming void. No narrator of T.C. Boyle’s fiction conveys these nuances as well as T.C. Boyle does. Without question, listening to this collection of stories performed by T.C. Boyle will be a delight.
By T.C. Boyle
Reviewed by James Victor Jordan
Five Stars
This is a review of the audio recording of T.C. Boyle’s story collection, A Death in Kitchawank. The narrator is the author, T.C. Boyle. I award the collection and the narration each a well-deserved five stars.
Had it been separately published in print, A Death in Kitchawank and Other Stories would have been T.C. Boyle’s ninth story collection in print form, excluding the two compendiums of his stories T.C. Boyle Stories I and II and a special collection of previously published stories selected as being suitable for the young-adult market: The Human Fly. Instead A Death in Kitchawank and Other Stories is available as a collection in print only as a bonus collection of fourteen stories in T.C. Boyle Stories II (2013), together with three other previously published T.C. Boyle story collections—After the Plague (2001), Tooth and Claw (2005), and Wild Child (2010).
Each of the stories in the A Death in Kitchawank and Other Stories collection is as good as literary fiction gets. As a collection, it’s a tour de force of short fiction. In this review I support these superlatives in my discussion of three stories in the collection: “In the Zone” first published by The Kenyon Review in 2011, “Slate Mountain” first published by The Kenyon Review in 2013, and “A Death in Kitchawank” first published in The New Yorker in 2010.
Are these the best stories in the collection? They are three stories among the fourteen that I find especially compelling, a fair representation, a flavor if you will, of the collection. Each is thought provoking and palpably poignant.
In this review, the spoiler-alert factor descends with the most said about “In the Zone” in terms of the plot and ending and with just enough said about “A Death in Kitchawank” to support my evaluation of that story and to whet the appetite.
A recurring topic found in T.C. Boyle stories is the toll on the environment by monumental natural and human-caused disasters and the translation of those catastrophes into personal terms: their effects on individuals. E.g. “Chicxulub” published in The New Yorker in 2004 and A Friend of the Earth, Dr. Boyle’s novel published in 2000. At times this theme warns, at times it’s metaphorical, and at times it’s simply a sad recognition of our hapless march to extinction. The first two stories I discuss are emblematic of this theme: the examination of an environmental disaster in “In the Zone” and reflection on a disaster wrought by the environment in personal, i.e. human, terms.
“In the Zone.”
In 2019, the HBO miniseries Chernobyl aired to critical and popular acclaim. I was astounded by its brilliance, its historical and human revelations—the horror of the disaster as well as the not-surprising coverup by the (evil) Soviet Empire. I was not far into viewing the first episode of Chernobyl when I remembered a similar feeling of astonishment, of revelation when I first read “In the Zone.” The nuclear disaster at Chernobyl occurred in 1986. When “In the Zone” was published in 2011, the accident was not widely understood in the west and had long since been breaking news. This story shined a well and long overdue spotlight on that tragedy through the medium of literary fiction.
Topics explored in T.C. Boyle’s fiction are often the subject of subsequent books, stories, or movies, so often in fact that I experience an impression that Dr. Boyle is prescient. For example, the September 2004 publication of his novel, The Inner Circle—historical fiction centered on the life and work of Alfred Kinsey—was followed in November 2004 with the release of the biopic Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson. It is rewarding to read the book and then see the movie, or vice versa. The same can be said of Chernobyl and “In the Zone.” After seeing Chernobyl, I eagerly reread the story. And subsequently it was a treat to hear T.C. Boyle read the story. Each time I read “In the Zone,” and after I listened to it, I had a deeper appreciation of the consequences of the event and of the story as well.
Chernobyl, the miniseries, presents a macro view of what occurred, how it occurred, and the suffering of the workers at the plant, the first responders, and the investigators. But Chernobyl only marginally touches the surface of the experiences of the local villagers displaced by the disaster—the viewer sees the forced evacuation of villagers, the subsequent execution of their pets they were forced to leave behind. But nothing is shown of their lives before, during, or after the forced evacuation.
“In the Zone,” a microcosm of the Chernobyl nuclear conflagration, tells the story three years after the meltdown of a reactor at the Chernobyl facility of two characters who had been villagers. The reader shares the intimate experiences of this couple in a close third-person narration. The reader is told, in fictive form of course, of consequences to the rural villagers displaced from their bucolic environs and moved into cramped ghetto-like dilapidated soviet style apartments in Kiev; from self-sufficiency via hunting and farming to enforced urban poverty, the largess of their government.
Now, scant months after the inaugural broadcast of Chernobyl, we have learned of the August 2019 Russian nuclear missile accident off the Pacific coast of northern Russia. We know that an untold amount of lethal radiation was released into the atmosphere. But we don’t yet know a whole lot more as we’re witnessing a Russian coverup modeled on the 1986-Soviet-Chernobyl coverup. It’s as if the story and the docudrama are saying, “We must never forget.” Unfortunately, it’s another example of T.C. Boyle’s prescience.
“In the Zone” is a “return to The Garden of Eden” story. When it begins, the story is set in Kiev, where three years after the Chernobyl disaster the widow Maryska Shyshylayeva is living “in an inhuman space in a crumbling apartment block for evacuees.” She is 62-years old and has been warned that if she were to return to her village in the uninhabitable zone, the poison in the air and in the ground, in the food and in the water, will cause cancer in her bones, an excruciating death of near unimaginable suffering.
Conditions in Kiev become unendurable for Maryska. When she learns from Leonid Kovolenko, 67, a friend of her departed husband, that in return for a bribe, to be offered by Leonid, a guard will allow her to return to her village, she and Leonid embark upon a return journey, making their way back to the wasteland of her village. Maryska and Leonid find that their respective homes are intact. They set about restoring their properties after three years of abandonment as best they can. They live off canned goods recovered from the abandoned homes, the land, eating rabbits trapped or shot by Leonid, fruit they harvast and eventually crops they cultivate. Animals—roe deer, wolves, moose, boar, squirrels—have returned. Or maybe they never left.
Maryska and Leonid are Adam and Eve until they discover a young couple with two children, a milk cow, and a dog, who have returned to live nearby in the evacuated village. Maryska and Leonid must know that it is likely that any day one or the other or both will fall ill from radiation poisoning. They live happily one day at a time in classic Freudian denial. But the narrator never says this. Instead the reader learns “That first day was the happiest of her life. She felt like a songbird caged all these years and suddenly set free, felt giddy, a girl all over again.” Maryska and Leonid shortly move in together, become lovers, live as husband and wife.
“And then one morning as they were lingering over breakfast . . . a strange terrible mechanical sound erupted out of nowhere and drove down the chatter of the birds and the symphony of the bees.” The sound came from an auto driven by Nikolai, Maryska’s thirty-six-year-old, fat to the point of obesity, chain smoking son, a professor in Moscow, come to rescue her by persuasion or force from the poison zone. “And in all those days, weeks and months of the three years she was entombed in those apartments [in Kiev] he had visited her exactly once.”
“At first, they talked of little things . . .” and then without self-awareness of the irony given his obese smoke-shrouded unhealthy lifestyle, Nikolai “started in on the subject he’d come expressly to address, or not simply to address but to harangue her with: the poison.” But Maryska won’t go and Nikolai is persuaded to accede to her wishes at the end of the barrel of Leonid’s rifle.
Maryska and Leonid have been told of their likely fate: death by radiation poisoning. But the story continues through another round of the seasons, of renewal and hope all a gift, though it will likely be a short-lived one, of their escape from the squalor imposed upon them in Kiev.
Chernobyl unmasks the coverup, telling, in effect, what happened. “In the Zone” reveals something quite different by comparing an impoverished life of squalor and dependency on the state to the freedom of living on one’s own terms, healthy for a time, in a land of beauty where the stuff of subsistence is plentiful. And what does this have to say about what was taken from these villagers? This is a critical issue beyond the scope of Chernobyl.
“Slate Mountain”
“Slate Mountain” is a story about a very different type of loss. As with “In the Zone,” it is as personal as loss can be, the possible loss of a spouse while hiking on potentially perilous mountain trails. It is a story of confronting loss in the face of hope. I use the word “potentially” because in “Slate Mountain” the outcome is unknown despite the narrator’s hope for a happy ending, a hope that must sustain him through a lonely, cold, wet uncertain night.
The story opens on “a Saturday at the end of October, the leaves bronzing on the lower slopes, deer season safely in the can and the mosquitos gone to mosquito hell till spring at least . . .” Seventeen people have signed up for a hike to be led by the narrator, Brice, and his wife Syl. As with Maryska, in the face of warnings about outdoor dangers, Brice takes his chances on an away-from-home excursion, though on first take, comparing the dangers of the aftereffects of a nuclear disaster to a hiking accident appears to be superficial. Yet the commonality is that in each of these stories, the protagonists choose to ignore warnings about environmental dangers. Though the danger of radiation poisoning in Maryska’s case is an eventual certainty, danger of a mishap while hiking the trails on Slate Mountain are statistically remote. Still the chances taken by the protagonists in each story are rational.
“A Death in Kitchawank”
“A Death in Kitchawank” is a very different kind of story, though the writing, as one would expect of a T.C. Boyle story, is gorgeous. “Saturday, just after two,” the story informs at the outset, “the sun a hot compress on her shoulders and scalp, the shrieks and catcalls of the children as they splash in the shallows a kind of symphony of the usual.”
This is a story of danger where danger should not lurk. It is realistic fiction at its finest. Why? Because the writing is so up close—as great first-person narration should be—that if the reader didn’t know it was fiction, she would likely conclude that it was superb memoir.
The Narration
In conclusion, just a brief word about the narration, the performance of the stories by the author. I’ve listened to many T.C. Boyle books read by him and to others read by professional narrators. As good as the professional narrators have been, not one of their recordings compares to the narrations by T.C. Boyle, including his narration of the stories in A Death in Kitchawank. After wondering why, I think I’ve put my finger on the reason. In virtually all if not all T.C. Boyle’s fiction there is irony—think of Maryska’s son urging her to leave her village when during the three years she lived in poverty in Kiev, he visited her just once—and satire, humor which offers hope flickering against the onset of the coming void. No narrator of T.C. Boyle’s fiction conveys these nuances as well as T.C. Boyle does. Without question, listening to this collection of stories performed by T.C. Boyle will be a delight.
November 25, 2020
Well written collection. Like all of T.C. Boyle, very detailed and engrossing imagery but I have to admit this work didn’t hold my interest. I just didn’t much care about what he was writing. Sorry, but still a fan.
July 6, 2016
Well written & read by the author, the only reason I'm giving it 2 stars. Unfortunately, the stories were pointless, the characters as banal & uninteresting as their situations. Snap shots of every day life & some damn fools or bad luck.
For instance, in one story, a man goes off the deep end searching for spirituality. He pays a lot of money to live in the desert with his new wife in a celibate, silent communion 3 years, 3 months & 3 days, supposedly the same as the dahli lamas do. This is so back to nature that the tiny community has no transportation or communication & is 9 miles away from the nearest town. They don't even have any neighbors nearby. So, the obvious happens I just can't relate. Dumb, nothing noble or spiritual about it. Just dumb.
The other stories, while not quite as stupid & pointless, didn't raise any great points, so I finally bailed halfway through the 4th or 5th.
For instance, in one story, a man goes off the deep end searching for spirituality. He pays a lot of money to live in the desert with his new wife in a celibate, silent communion 3 years, 3 months & 3 days, supposedly the same as the dahli lamas do. This is so back to nature that the tiny community has no transportation or communication & is 9 miles away from the nearest town. They don't even have any neighbors nearby. So, the obvious happens I just can't relate. Dumb, nothing noble or spiritual about it. Just dumb.
The other stories, while not quite as stupid & pointless, didn't raise any great points, so I finally bailed halfway through the 4th or 5th.
August 1, 2015
A great collection from an expert story teller. I listened to this while driving cross-country, and although TC Boyle is an excellent reader with a pleasant voice, I think I might have preferred the book version. The voices of the characters -- as varied as they are in age, gender and personal agenda -- started to blur into one another for me, because they are read in the same intonation.
Then there were things that in the middle of an engaging tale made me feel manipulated by the author or snap completely out of the narrative, such as when in one story a young couple squatting in a summer home past their lease with the electricity and heat cut off receives several phone calls on their land line. ! Just saying. How does someone of Boyle's fame and fortune get away with a blunder like that one?
Then there were things that in the middle of an engaging tale made me feel manipulated by the author or snap completely out of the narrative, such as when in one story a young couple squatting in a summer home past their lease with the electricity and heat cut off receives several phone calls on their land line. ! Just saying. How does someone of Boyle's fame and fortune get away with a blunder like that one?
December 21, 2014
Bret Easton Ellis meets David Sedaris.
May 16, 2021
"Funny" is one word for T. C. Boyle's stories, and there is a vein of humor that runs through them, though it often hangs on men doing awkward or wrong or offensive things, in their futile struggle to get over themselves and connect. When your collection starts off with a man putting on a ski mask and climbing up the backside of the cabin of the woman he has a crush on, it's an announcement that toxic masculinity is on the dissection table.
Though I suppose it takes a more insightful literary reader than I to explore the deeper themes and appreciate the structure of some of these Boyle stories. They do seem like poetic little gems, but I still find many of them unsatisfying. "My Pain is Worse Than Your Pain" is a comic send up of American foibles, I suppose, but on the grounded, unallegorical dimension I read on, it's just a very creepy guy, in a town full of alcoholic escapists. Har-dee-har-har. Conversely, "The Silence" also features an ego-filled man who is literally too involved in overcoming ego to notice the personhood of the woman in his life. But this one is actually funny, except it goes for a sense of tragedy in its ending, when the whole setting, a Buddhist retreat in the dessert, is too gimmicky for that, in my opinion, anyway. Though I do get the sense I'm not seeing all the layers there.
"A Death in Kitchawank" bemuses me, with its lilting, descriptive sentences pasting over big breaks in time sequence. It seems to ask, what if we could watch a watchful mother, Miriam, and all the friends and family in her neighborhood, all changing and narrowing, as she and her husband grow from early middle age to ripe old age. A whole gaggle of daughters and sons lead more fragmentary lives than she was hoping to see in her society. It's a powerful work, sort of, but I had to read it twice, and just wasn't satisfied with its somewhat experimental narration, though I respect the artistic dimension of it. "Burning Bright" was even more experimental, with fragmented subplots connected by a thread of tigers, but similarly without satisfying me. It's like a story by Junot Díaz in which the females inexplicably do not get to slap the males around, and we get some eccentric tigers, instead.
That's a reference to Blake, get it? The overt literariness of Boyle can be a little precious, as at the end of "In the Zone," when the Ukrainian woman reads Chekhov. It's like, hey, look, I'm a Boyle character based on his notes from reading Chekhov, and also something about Chernobyl. Get it? Yes, I get it, but you pulled me out of the drama. Though overall "In the Zone" was the most successful story for me, and not coincidentally, the only when without painfully self-absorbed men dominating the stage.
I feel bad for sounding so crabby just now, but I wanted to write something out of my notes, and I did respect the work that's gone into these. The social realist depiction of American men circa 2010 is a valid concern for art, even if it ain't pretty.
Though I suppose it takes a more insightful literary reader than I to explore the deeper themes and appreciate the structure of some of these Boyle stories. They do seem like poetic little gems, but I still find many of them unsatisfying. "My Pain is Worse Than Your Pain" is a comic send up of American foibles, I suppose, but on the grounded, unallegorical dimension I read on, it's just a very creepy guy, in a town full of alcoholic escapists. Har-dee-har-har. Conversely, "The Silence" also features an ego-filled man who is literally too involved in overcoming ego to notice the personhood of the woman in his life. But this one is actually funny, except it goes for a sense of tragedy in its ending, when the whole setting, a Buddhist retreat in the dessert, is too gimmicky for that, in my opinion, anyway. Though I do get the sense I'm not seeing all the layers there.
"A Death in Kitchawank" bemuses me, with its lilting, descriptive sentences pasting over big breaks in time sequence. It seems to ask, what if we could watch a watchful mother, Miriam, and all the friends and family in her neighborhood, all changing and narrowing, as she and her husband grow from early middle age to ripe old age. A whole gaggle of daughters and sons lead more fragmentary lives than she was hoping to see in her society. It's a powerful work, sort of, but I had to read it twice, and just wasn't satisfied with its somewhat experimental narration, though I respect the artistic dimension of it. "Burning Bright" was even more experimental, with fragmented subplots connected by a thread of tigers, but similarly without satisfying me. It's like a story by Junot Díaz in which the females inexplicably do not get to slap the males around, and we get some eccentric tigers, instead.
That's a reference to Blake, get it? The overt literariness of Boyle can be a little precious, as at the end of "In the Zone," when the Ukrainian woman reads Chekhov. It's like, hey, look, I'm a Boyle character based on his notes from reading Chekhov, and also something about Chernobyl. Get it? Yes, I get it, but you pulled me out of the drama. Though overall "In the Zone" was the most successful story for me, and not coincidentally, the only when without painfully self-absorbed men dominating the stage.
I feel bad for sounding so crabby just now, but I wanted to write something out of my notes, and I did respect the work that's gone into these. The social realist depiction of American men circa 2010 is a valid concern for art, even if it ain't pretty.
May 29, 2017
3.5 stars - Several of the short stories were predictable; something I have not yet found with T.C. Boyle. Even when I read his book, The Women, and knew how the story had to end, the ending still felt unexpected. But the first stories in this novel had obvious endings right from the start and I found it hard to become engaged in them. The last stories in this novel were much better and were unexpected. If the novel had been filled entirely with these stories, this would have been a 4 star review, no question. But because so many of the stories were just good, and mostly because they were well written, I rounded down my rating to a 3. Do not misunderstand me; a story written by T.C. Boyle, predictable or not, is still a very well-written, good, and interesting story and well worth the read. It's just most of these stories were forgettable, which is quite different from nearly everything else of his I have read.
March 21, 2018
As an independent book this book is available only in the audible format apparently. It is also a part of a larger book of TC Boyle stories. This audible book was read by the author something I think is always an interesting experience. I found the stories to be both interesting and entertaining. You are often experiencing the story from inside the head of the main character.
April 4, 2021
Wow! This book is so dark and twisted, but like in the most normal way. I don’t know how to explain it, but it really was a ride. It reminded me a lot of Don Cheever. I thoroughly enjoyed these stories and all the the despicable, sad, lonely people in it!
I also highly recommend listening to the audiobook read by the author. His voice is perfect for the tone and ambiance of these stories!
I also highly recommend listening to the audiobook read by the author. His voice is perfect for the tone and ambiance of these stories!
August 5, 2018
Boyle's short stories are fantastic for illustrating the nuance of contradicting and conflicting belief structures and how they play out in human interactions. The short story format seems particularly suited for skewering dogmatic beliefs.
March 16, 2021
Highlights: "Los Gigantes," "Sic Transit," "What Separates Us from the Animals."
October 7, 2023
Maybe a generous 4 stars. Good stories.
November 24, 2025
I listened to this CD in car. This is a very disturbing--in a very normal everyday way---bunch of short stories I have read in awhile. I have to explore some more of his work.
October 4, 2015
Having just heard 'Chicxulub' read on The New Yorker Fiction Podcast, I knew I wanted to get deeper into Boyle; having heard him read Tobias Wolff's "A Bullet in the Brain", I knew Boyle was an excellent narrator. So, what better first collection than Boyle reading Boyle?
'Liking' the characters in fiction isn't necessary to me, especially in a short; nor is identifying with them. However, with the people I had settled in to visiting with over the next few hours, some relief would have been appreciated. From the many angry malcontents of all ages, to the several angry couples of all ages, I found the Boyle pattern repetitive toward the end: formulaic in the hands of a lesser writer, sure, but still. With snippets of worthy writing popping up so very often, one is compelled to slog on; but it is as if Boyle sets up his characters only to torture them for our amusement, and that wears thin.
'Liking' the characters in fiction isn't necessary to me, especially in a short; nor is identifying with them. However, with the people I had settled in to visiting with over the next few hours, some relief would have been appreciated. From the many angry malcontents of all ages, to the several angry couples of all ages, I found the Boyle pattern repetitive toward the end: formulaic in the hands of a lesser writer, sure, but still. With snippets of worthy writing popping up so very often, one is compelled to slog on; but it is as if Boyle sets up his characters only to torture them for our amusement, and that wears thin.
July 6, 2015
Like many, I've enjoyed TC Boyle's short stories more than his novels. They are crisply rendered with strong authorial voices. He specializes in unreliable narrators, the kind of characters who keep insisting they are normal, even as they describe, in perfectly rational detail, whatever batshit crazy situation they've entangled themselves into.
May 20, 2015
Snap shots of human failures/foibles. Some great and most just good. Stories through the narrow lens by which young men see the world, self-justification and bad decisions and responding to odd chances. Or stories of young (and some not so young) men hacked by their own emotions.
March 20, 2016
There is a story in the middle of this collection about dog fights that is so horrifying, I cringe to think about it. TC Boyle really knows the form of short story and to write such an upsetting story takes a lot of courage. Sure opened my eyes to the cruelty possible among some animal owners.
January 7, 2014
Great little set of stories, somewhat predictable but all written and delivered quite well as usual from one of my favorite seasoned writers.
August 16, 2014
I thought he was a great narrator – a lot of times authors who narrate their own books pretty much suck but I thought he did a great job.
August 3, 2014
Some short stories by Boyle, very engaging
March 23, 2015
Good collection of riveting stories showcasing human emotions and the effects of bad decisions.
April 14, 2015
Have always enjoyed TC Boyle's work. Captures the angst of current middle class life in America very well.
March 21, 2016
Very good writer and varied stories. Read them all except the one with the dog fighting in it.
May 8, 2016
Not as compelling as his novels, but he's such a great writer I still give him 4 stars.
July 13, 2016
I enjoy all his writings. The stories showcase the underside and quirkiness of people
March 2, 2024
3.5 stars rounded up.
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