I don't enjoy short stories nearly as much as I do novels. Usually starting in medias res and ending prematurely (with the conclusion being too ambiguous/open to interpretation to my taste), they don't give me enough time to connect with the characters, get to know the setting, etc. You could also argue that they aren't as well developed and the ideas aren't strong enough to carry a novel, but that would be ignorant and irrelevant, respectively. Long story short, I basically don't like short stories because they aren't long enough. Bigger is better, more is more.

This collection though is pretty much as big as they come: 68 stories in 691 pages, written over the course of more than two and a half decades. In other words, it comprises what I believe is every damn short story penned by T.C. Boyle by the time of its publication (1998). (Turns out I was way off. Something like 40 of his early stories weren't included). The stories are divided into three categories: "Love", "Death" & "And Everything in Between". Another thing I don't like about collected short stories is that they tend to meld into each other when read in succession. E.g. let's say I read 100 pages a day, that's 10 different stories of which at the end of the day I can completely recall maybe the last two. Meanwhile the preceding eight have turned into an amorphous glob of a novella. Maybe this only happens to me. Anyway, I'd encourage shuffle reading since consecutive stories in each section can sometimes be similar to each other. Also, there was no way I would read this thing in one go. Instead I read it between eight other books, said 100 pages at a time. You (or at least I) couldn't easily do that with a novel, which is a positive attribute of the short story, I guess.

If I were forced at gunpoint to say a word or two about the actual contents of the book, I'd say: "Please don't shoot. This is the best book of short stories I have read, though I have not read many. Um. The stories concern regular people in ostensibly mundane situations. Nature in some form often plays a supporting role. Whether funny or sad, they always feel exceptionally real and full of detail. There's surprisingly little filler considering nothing was left out. It came to my attention during my, ahem, extensive research that Mr. Boyle enjoys an almost Hasselhoffian popularity in Germany and that might make me think twice before accusing those Krauts of bad taste again, lederhosen et al. notwithstanding. Now will you stop pointing that thing at me?"

Here is an incredibly unhelpful list of all the stories rated individually:
I 4, II 3½, III 4, IV 4, V 4½, VI 4½, VII 4, VIII 4, IX 4, X 4, XI 4, XII 3½, XIII 3½, XIV 4, XV 4½, XVI 4½, XVII 4, XVIII 4½, XIX 4, XX 4, XXI 4½, XXII 4½, XXIII 4, XXIV 4, XXV 4½, XXVI 4, XXVII 4, XXVIII 4½, XXIX 4, XXX 4½, XXXI 4, XXXII 4, XXXIII 4, XXXIV 4, XXXV 4, XXXVI 4½, XXXVII 4½, XXXVIII 4, XXXIX 4, XL 4, XLI 4, XLII 4, XLIII 4, XLIV 4, XLV 4½, XLVI 4½, XLVII 4½, XLVIII 4½, XLIX 4, L 4½, LI 3½, LII 4½, LIII 4½, LIV 4, LV 4, LVI 4½, LVII 4, LVIII 4, LIX 4, LX 2½, LXI 4, LXII 4½, LXIII 4, LXIV 4½, LXV 4½, LXVI 4, LXVII 4½, LXVIII 4½. ( )

Notes on one story - Greasy Lake

“It's about a mile down on the dark side of route eighty-eight”

Bruce Springsteen’s words are the first we read at the beginning of Greasy Lake, a short story written by T.C. Boyle in 1981.

Greasy Lake provides the destination for Crazy Janey and Wild Billy in song and the destination for Jeff and Digby in story. Both song and story have unnamed narrators who recount a night at Greasy Lake, each with different outcomes.

T.C. Boyle’s story focuses on a small group of friends, college age, seeking experiences on an early June evening to match the image they have built for themselves: “dangerous characters.” Their search is initially unsuccessful (“The first two nights we’d been out till dawn, looking for something we never found.”), but the third night eventually brought exactly what they were looking for – a dangerous situation for dangerous characters.

“Oh, you don't know what they can do to you
Spirits in the night (all night), in the night (all night)
Stand right up now and let it shoot through you” (Bruce Springsteen)

The spirits in the night of Boyle’s story infuse the three friends with a violent response after stumbling into an unexpected confrontation with a couple in a car, a car they thought would contain another friend, Tony, with “some little fox.” The initial violence is recounted with images of Rockettes and Bruce Lee, images that make you smile about a prank gone bad, but suddenly a tire iron swung by the narrator fells the “bad greasy character” who took exception to their prank. Time stops as they assume he is dead, killed instantly by the blow to his head. “The effect was instantaneous, astonishing…He collapsed. Wet his pants. Went loose in his boots.”

They are brought back to the moment by “a raw torn shriek,” a scream from “the fox” as she ran at them in rage. The blood lust of the situation heightens. All three are described as being in the grip of “the purest primal badness” while grabbing her, tearing at her clothes with the intent of raping her. The arrival of another car halts the attack and the friends scatter, the narrator running toward Greasy Lake to make another horrific discovery in this horrible night. While attempting to swim the lake, to escape from whoever arrived at the scene, the narrator stumbles upon a body floating in the lake, later surmised to be the owner of a nearby motorcycle, “a bad older character come to this.”

We later discover that the tire iron did not deliver a fatal blow. We are privy to the description of the distant sounds of the narrator’s car (his mother’s car) being destroyed with that same tire iron: windshield, headlights, taillights, and body. The greasy character and his friends take their leave, having extracted some semblance of revenge for the events of the night.

As dawn approaches, our original group of friends gather around the battered car, still in running condition, but a visual testament to the chaos of the night, a night in which they were caught up in the badness they sought at Greasy Lake.

Just as they are to leave, two drunken and stoned young women arrive in a car, calling out the name of the biker, whose body is floating in the lake, the body discovered by the narrator during his night of terror. The disappearance of Al, their biker friend, lifeless in Greasy Lake, is quickly forgotten. Rather, they see an opportunity; an opportunity to share some “tablets in glassine wrappers,” an opportunity “to party.”

Wild Billy said, "Trust some of this it'll show you where you're at, or at least it'll help you really feel it" (Bruce Springsteen)

Throughout the story, knowing that they had found what they were looking for, the narrator’s only stated epiphany is the realization that the “obscene…soft, wet, moss-grown” object he stumbled upon in the lake was a corpse, the “waterlogged corpse” of the biker. We never witness what insight he may have gained, even in retrospect (since the story is told from his perspective many years later). We are left to wonder if he found anything other than horror that night, anything other than the fear of being caught or the fear of creating a believable story as to what happened to the car. This point is brought home in his response to the young girls who inquire about Al. “Al. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to get out of the car and retch, I wanted to go home to my parents’ house and crawl into bed…’We haven’t seen anybody,’ I said.” He doesn’t immediately face up to the consequences of the night. We hear no regret as he tells the story years later. We don’t know if he really felt it at all.

“So we closed our eyes and said goodbye to gypsy angel row, felt so right” (Bruce Springsteen)

The characters in Bruce’s song felt so right at the end of their night at Greasy Lake. Boyle’s characters are numb, “zombies, like war veterans, like deaf-and-dumb pencil peddlers.” Like one of the girls at the end of the story, we are left in a daze, “standing there…shoulders slumped, hand outstretched” hoping they learned something. I can hope, but I don’t believe they did.

I've only read a few of these stories so far, but what I've read has been excellent. I especially liked "Back in the Eocene." Very droll. ( )

Reprinting Boyle's first four volumes of short stories into one big book (as well as seven additonal stories, two of which had never been printed before), this collection runs the gamut from hilarious to heartbreakingly real. This collection not only proves that T. C. Boyle is a master novelist but a modern master of the short story as well.

My only problem with this book has othing to do with Boyle's abilities or the content of the stories therein. It's a sequencing issue. The book is divided into three sections (titled "Love", "Death", and "Everything Else") and the stories are divided as closely into those categories as they can possibly be. The end result of this maneuver is that sitting down and reading a few stories chronologically can lead one who doesn't know any better to believe that Boyle is a one-trick pony, only writing about a select handful of topics. This is decidely not the case. The book itself would have served to disprove this misnomer better if it had in fact simply reprinted the previous volumes. New readers to Boyle will probably enjoy this collection more if they "pick and choose" stories and read them out of order.

With that said, Boyle is without question one of our greatest contemporary writers and this volume proves it faster than his novels would. ( )

A big fat collection (five books worth?). Most of Boyle's stories are flamboyant and just bent enough to be compelling, some are okay, and some are heartbreakingly true. ( )