T.C. Boyle’s whimsical tendencies grow darker
A sense of urgency courses through the crusading author’s latest imaginative collection
In the preface to his second volume of collected stories published in 2013, T.C. Boyle, perhaps America’s finest satirist, said that, to him, “a story is an exercise of the imagination.”
Over the past three-plus decades, Boyle has exercised his imagination through 16 novels and 11 collections. His twelfth, The Relive Box, heralds a darkening of his whimsical tendencies.
It would seem that Boyle, long a crusader for simple ecological and humanitarian common sense — see the novels The Tortilla Curtain, A Friend of the Earth and When the Killing’s Done, or classic stories like “Sin Dolor,” “Rara Avis” and “The Extinction Tales” — recognizes that the time for subtlety is behind us.
There is a sense of urgency to the 12 stories that make up The Relive Box. And along with the hallmark Boyleian wit, there is the undercurrent of a gathering menace.
In the title story, Wes, a single father to a disaffected teenaged daughter, is addicted to the aptly named relive box, a piece of virtual reality technology that allows a person to revisit moments from their past, but not as “an actor in the scene, only an observer.”
For Wes, it’s the occasions of regret he returns to as he desperately searches for “what passes for God in my life, the mystery beyond words, beyond lasers and silicon chips.”
“Are We Not Men,” delivers a scathing indictment of current trends in DNAdesign technologies such as CRISPR while at the same offering a quietly devastating meditation on marriage and fidelity. “Surtsey” and “You Don’t Miss Your Water (’Til the Well Runs Dry)” chronicle the havoc wrought by climate change: Alaskan islands deluged, and Southern California gripped by drought.
Then there is the caustic and all-tooreal Devon, narrator of “Warrior Jesus.” Angry, misogynistic and casually racist, Devon is Boyle’s embodiment of Donald Trump’s America.
While there are misfires — namely, “The Designee,” an overly long tale of a senior bilked in a fraud scheme, and “She’s the Bomb” in which a university dropout texts bomb threats to her graduation ceremony — on the whole, The Relive Boxis a worthy addition to an already impressive oeuvre. Stephen Finucan is a novelist and short story writer. He lives in Toronto.