TC Boyle’s fiction is satiric, surreal, comic, and dark. His first book, Descent of Man, published in 1979, is an eclectic collection of short stories that incorporate elements of popular culture, anthropology, and psychology. Several stories in this collection start as parodies of pop culture narrative tropes borrowed from Hollywood. “The Champ,” for example, borrows its plot from a common Hollywood trope: the prizefighter story. In it, an aging champion is struggling to hang on to his title while facing an up and coming challenger. Instead of boxing, however, the sport is competitive eating. Boyle successfully mimics the style of these stories in what is both a satire and an homage. The Champ himself is identified as “Angelo D.” an obvious reference to Angelo Dundee, Muhammed Ali’s longtime trainer. In the story, Angelo D’s trainer is a gruff crusty taskmaster with a heart of gold that every prizefighter must have. While the premise is absurd, the story lives in a reality that has been created by Hollywood with which the reader is entirely familiar (Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight, Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky). The story begins the way most of these stories begin:
Angelo D. was training hard. This challenger, Kid Gullet, would be no pushover. In fact, the Kid hit him right where he lived: he was worried. He’d been champ for thirty-seven years and all that time his records had stood up like Mount Rushmore—and now this Kid was eating him up.
We immediately know what kind of story this is and what to expect, but in the very next paragraph the absurd element makes its first appearance:
“But Angelo, you ain’t done already?” His trainer, Spider Decoud, was all over him. “That’s what—a piddling hundred and some odd flapjacks and seven quarts of milk.”
“He’s on to me, Spider. He found out about the ulcer and now he’s going to hit me with enchiladas and shrimp in cocktail sauce.”
When a story contains absurd or supernatural elements, the key to maintaining the reader’s suspension of disbelief is to make sure all the other elements of the story appear normal and react to the absurdities in expected ways. In Boyle’s case, the realistic elements are based on the reader’s experience with popular culture’s artificial constructions rather than any kind of objective reality. Like the classic aging boxer, contending with his battered body—his aging heart or his semi-detached retinas—Angelo worries about a vulnerability that naturally fits this constructed reality.
In “The Big Garage,” Boyle’s inherits his absurdist reality from more literary sources, primarily Franz Kafka. In this nightmare story, Boyle takes a common, everyday experience—an automobile breakdown—and exaggerates it to show how modern life can become impersonal, bureaucratic, frustrating, and degrading. A motorist, indifferently only identified as “B” is stuck on the highway, somewhere in the middle of nowhere with his broken down Audi. A tow truck appears and takes him and his car to a Big Garage. It’s late, so B must wait until morning for a mechanic to look at his car. Interestingly, Boyle portrays this Big Garage and the activities as if it were a large bureaucratic hospital where the cars are the patients, and their owners are their relatives, endlessly waiting for word about their loved ones:
B. continues to rock on his feet. He clears his throat. Finally he ambles across the room and stops in front of her chair. “Ah…”
She looks up. “Yes? Can I help you?”
“You were going to call Diagnosis about my car?”
“Oh,” grimacing. “No need to bother. Why at this hour they’re long closed up.You’ll have to wait until morning.”
“But a minute ago—”
“No, no sense at all. The Head Diagnostician leaves at five, and here it’s nearly ten. And his staff gets off at five-thirty. The best we could hope for is a shop steward—and what would he know? Ha. If I rang up now I’d be lucky to get hold of a janitor.
B. is forced to go through a bureaucratic maze, filling out endless forms in order to get his car services. When he can’t take anymore and confronts a team of German mechanics, they throw him down a chute to a car wash, where he is washed and waxed. Finally, he is forced to buy another car from the Big Car Lot across the street.
In Green Hill, a plane crashes in the jungle and plunges the survivors into a Lord of the Flies inspired competition. The narrator, one of the participants, is cynical, self-centered, and contemptuous of the others and describes them in contemptuous ways:
There are no flames. There is blood. Thick clots of blood, puddles, ponds, lakes. We count heads. Eight of us still have them: myself, the professor, the pilot (his arm already bound up in a sparkling white sling), the mime, Tanqueray with a twist (nothing worse than a gin drinker), the cat breeder, and Andrea, the stewardess. The cats, to a None, have survived. They crouch in their cages, coated with wet kitty litter like tempura shrimp. The rugby players, all twelve of them (dark-faced, scowling sorts), are dead. Perhaps just as well.
This is a cast worthy of a 1970’s disaster moving. The dead rugby players are a reference to the true story of the 1972 plane crash and the Andes where an Uruguayan rugby team resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. On a lighter note, the Professor is a reference to a castaway in a popular but silly 1960’s sitcom. The pilot is the classic square-jawed hero of this genre, taking charge, and giving cliched speeches in what is a completely hopeless situation:
Suddenly the pilot is on his feet. “Now listen, everybody,” he booms. “I’m going to lay it on the line. No mincing words, no pussyfooting. We’re in a jam. No food, no water, no medical supplies. I’m not saying we’re not lucky to be alive and I’m not saying that me and the prof here ain’t going to try our damnedest to get this crate in the air again. . . but I’m saying we’re in a jam. If we stick together, if we fight this thing—if we work like a team—we’ll make it.”
I watch him: the curls at his temple, sharp nose, white teeth, the set of his jaw (prognathic). I realize that we have a leader. I further realize that I detest him. I doubt that we will make it.
The narrative is structured like diary entries with sections labeled Night, Morning, Afternoon, Evening,etc. The narrator’s tone is cynical throughout. His actions reveal him to less than heroic and admirable. He hordes food, he makes passes at Andrea, the stewardess, whose clothes, like a movie heroine, strategically disintegrate over time, revealing more and more skin.
The location of this plane crash is not specified. They appear to be in a rainforest, somewhere in the in the Pacific rim (their radio briefly picks up a broadcast from Tokyo before it fails).
Ultimately, the narrator is the only survivor to make it out of the jungle. In the final paragraph, as he finally reaches civilization, he thinks about how famous and rich he is going to be when he writes his book about this experience, which he will call Green Hill, giving this story a recursive structure. Artifice creates its own reality.
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