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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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Tooth and
Claw by T. C. Boyle |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Fortnight Place a copy of T.C. Boyle’s new short story
collection, Tooth and
Claw, by your bedside and enjoy two full weeks of reading pleasure from
the fourteen stories it contains. One word of caution: keep a pencil and
paper or a dictionary close by, because every other story or so, there’s
likely to be a word you’ll have to look up, thanks to Boyle’s precision in
finding just the right word, whether it’s familiar or not. The stories are
creative, finely written, and packed with interesting characters. Given the
range of settings Boyle commands, these fourteen stories also provide readers
with an array of places and eras that increase reader’s pleasure. Here’s an
excerpt, from the beginning of the
chapter titled, “Swept Away,” pp. 20-24: People
can talk, they can gossip and cavil and run down this one or the other, and
certainly we have our faults, our black funks and suicides and crofters’
wives running off with the first man who’ll have them and a winter’s night
that stretches on through the days and weeks like a foretaste of the grave,
but in the end the only real story here is the wind. The puff and blow of it.
The ceaselessness. The squelched keening of air in movement, running with its
currents like a new sea clamped atop the old, winnowing, harrowing, pinching
everything down to nothing. It rakes the islands day and night, without
respect to season, though if you polled the denizens of Yell, Funzie and Papa Stour, to a
man, woman, lamb and pony they would account winter the worst for the bite of
it and the sheer frenzy of its coming. One January within living memory the
wind blew at gale force for twenty-nine days without remit, and on New Year’s
Eve back in ‘92 the gusts were estimated at 201 mph at the Muckle Flugga lighthouse here
on the northernmost tip of the Isle of Unst. But
that was only an estimate: the weather service’s wind gauge was torn from its
moorings and launched into eternity that day, along with a host of other
things, stony and animate alike. Junie Ooley should have known
better. She was an American woman—the
American ornithological woman is the way people around town came to refer
to her, or sometimes just the bird
woman—and she hadn’t just barely alighted from the ferry when she was
blindsided by Robbie Baikie’s old one-eyed torn,
which had been trying to inveigle itself across the roof tiles of the kirk after an imaginary pigeon. Or perhaps the pigeon
wasn’t imaginary, but by the time the cat blinked his eyes whatever he had
seen was gone with the wind. At any rate, Junie Ooley, who was at this juncture a stranger to us all,
came banking up the high street in a store-bought tartan skirt and a pair of
black tights climbing her queenly legs, a rucksack flailing at the small of
her back and both hands clamped firmly to her knit hat, and she never saw the
cat coming, for all her visual acuity and the fine-ground photographic lenses
she trucked with her everywhere. The cat—his name was Tiger and he must have
carried a good ten or twelve pounds of pigeon-fed flesh on his bones—caught a
gust and flew off the kirk tiles like a
heat-seeking missile locked in on Junie Ooley’s hunched and flapping form. The
impact was dramatic, as you would have had reason to testify had you been
meditating over a pint of bitter at the rattling window of Magnuson’s Pub
that day, and the bird woman, before she’d had a chance even to discover the
whereabouts of her lodgings or offer up a “good day” or “how do you do?” to
a single soul, was laid out flat on the flagstones, her lips quivering
unconsciously over the lyrics to a tune by the Artist Formerly Known as
Prince. At least that was what Robbie claimed afterward, and he’s always been
dead keen on the Artist, ever since he came by the CD of Purple Rain in the used-disc bin of a record shop in There
she was, flung down on the stones like a wilted flower amidst the crumpled
stalks of her limbs, the rucksack stuffed full of spare black tights and her
bird-watching paraphernalia, her kit and dental floss and all the rest, and
Tiger just pulling himself up into a ball to blink his eyes and lick at his
spanned paws in a distracted way, when Duncan Stout, ninety-two years on this
planet and in possession of the first Morris automobile ever manufactured,
came down the Street in that very vehicle at twice his normal speed of five
and a half miles per hour, and if he discerned Junie
Ooley lying there it was anybody’s guess. Robbie Baikie flailed his arms to head off People
were shouting from the open door of the pub. Magnus Magnuson himself was in
the street now, windmilling his arms and flinging
out his feet in alarm, the bar rag still clutched in one hand like a flag of
surrender. The car came on. Robbie stood there. Hopeless was the way it
looked. But then we hadn’t taken the wind into account, and how could any of
us have forgotten its caprices, even for a minute? At that crucial instant, a
gust came up the canyon of the high street and bowled Robbie Baikie over atop the bird woman even as it lifted the
front end of The
wind skreeled off down the street, carrying bits of
paper, cans, bottles, old bones and rags and other refuse along with it. The
bird woman’s eyes blinked open. Robbie Baikie, all
fifteen stone of him, lay pressed atop her in a defensive posture,
anticipating the impact of the car, and he hadn’t even thought to prop
himself on his elbows to take some of the crush off her. Junie
Ooley smelled the beer on him and the dulcet smoke
of his pipe tobacco and the sweetness of the peat fire at Magnuson’s and
maybe even something of the sheep he kept, and she couldn’t begin to imagine
who this man was or what he was doing on top of her in the middle of the
public street. “Get off me,” she said in a voice so flat and calm Robbie
wasn’t sure he’d heard it at all, and because she was an American woman and
didn’t commonly make use of the term “clod,” she added, “you big doof.” Robbie
was shy with women—we all were, except for the women themselves, and they
were shy with the men, at least for the first five years after the
wedding—and he was still fumbling with the notion of what had happened to him
and to her and to Duncan Stout’s automobile and couldn’t have said one word
even if he’d wanted to. “Get
off,” she repeated, and she’d begun to add physical emphasis to the
imperative, writhing beneath him and bracing her upturned palms against the
great unmoving slabs of his shoulders. Robbie
went to one knee, then pushed himself up even as the
bird woman rolled out from under him. In the next moment she was on her feet,
angrily shifting the straps of her rucksack where they bit into the flesh,
cursing him softly but emphatically and with a kind of fluid improvisatory
genius that made his face light up in wonder. Twenty paces away, In
they came, and the wind with them, packets of crisps and beer coasters
sailing across the polished surface of the bar, and all of us instinctively
grabbing for our hats. Robbie’s head was bowed and his hair blown straight up
off his crown as if it had been done up in a perm by some mad cosmetologist,
and Junie Ooley heaving
and thrashing against him till he released her to spin away from him and down
the length of the bar. No one could see how pretty she was at first, her face
all deformed with surprise and rage and the petulant crease stamped between
her eyes. She didn’t even so much as look in our direction, but just threw
herself back at Robbie and gave him a shove as if they were children at war
on the playground. “What
the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, her voice piping high with
her agitation. And then, glancing round at the rest of us: “Did you see what
this big idiot did to me out
there?” No
one said a word. The smoke of the peat fire hung round us like a thin
curtain. Tim Maconochie’s Airedale lifted his head
from the floor and laid it back down again. The
bird woman clenched her teeth, set her shoulders. “Well, isn’t anybody going
to do anything?” Magnus
was the one to break the silence. He’d slipped back in behind the bar,
unmindful of the chaff and bits of this and that that the wind had deposited
in his hair. “The man saved your life, that’s about all.” Robbie
ducked his head out of modesty. His ears went crimson. “Saved—?”
A species of comprehension settled into her eyes. “I was ... something hit me, something the wind blew… Tim
Maconochie, though he wasn’t any less tightfisted
than the rest of us, cleared his throat and offered to buy the girl a drop of
whisky to clear her head, and her face opened up then like the sun coming
through the clouds so that we all had a good look at the beauty of her, and
it was a beauty that made us glad to be alive in that moment to witness it.
Whiskies went round. A blast of wind rattled the panes till we thought they
would burst. Someone led This is one of
several bar settings in the stories of Tooth and
Claw, and each one seems better than the one before. I think Boyle is one
of our finest writers, both of stories and novels. In many ways, his skills
become clearest when he constrains himself to the short story. Steve Hopkins,
January 25, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the February 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Tooth
and Claw.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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