Nature Laughs Last in T.C. Boyle’s “Wild Child”

By Jenny Shank, 1-18-10

Wild Child: And Other Stories
by T.C. Boyle
304 pages, $25.95

Many of the characters in Wild Child, T.C. Boyle’s new collection of short stories, try to maintain an air of refinement: they have a taste for good food and wine, they cultivate precise gardens, they wear expensive clothes, and they seek enlightenment.  But usually these characters’ baser instincts win out, or nature interrupts their careful plans and ruins their leather jackets with mudslides, torrential downpours, or forest fires.  Most of the tales end up illustrating one of Boyle’s recurrent themes: that people are animals, first and foremost.  As clear as Boyle’s themes can be, he’s no moralist, and the stories in this volume are as entertaining and transporting as Boyle’s fiction has always been.

Boyle’s gift for plunging the reader into diverse consciousnesses produces a wide array of believable characters, from a proper Japanese couple who disapprove of their white teenage neighbor’s pyromaniac grilling technique in “Ash Monday,” to the nurturing mother of a Latin American major league pitching sensation in “The Unlucky Mother of Aquiles Maldonado,” to a young, college-educated black woman hired as a dog nanny by a rich couple in “Admiral,” to Victor, the famous feral boy discovered in France around 1800, whose history Boyle recreates in the riveting title novella.

Besides skillfully conveying the private thoughts of his characters’ minds and evoking their worlds through vivid sensory detail, Boyle also excels at structuring his tales for maximum dramatic impact.  This is especially true in the suspenseful “La Conchita,” in which a man who delivers organs to hospitals becomes snared in an epic Southern California traffic jam when he’s trying to deliver a human liver before its transplant viability expires. 

The cause of the jam is a mudslide that’s hit the little town of La Conchita.  Traffic on the highway stops completely at the site of the mudslide.  While the narrator is waiting for the jam to clear, a desperate woman leads him up the muddy hill to help dig her child and husband out of their buried home.  The narrator is blasé about the particulars of his delivery job, which involves saving lives, though he is a few steps removed from the actual saving.  But when he is dragged against his will into assisting with a hands-on recovery effort in the mudslide, it sparks something in him, and he evolves from being a reluctant savior into looking to achieve the rush of helping others again:

“And though I was wet through and shivering and my car was stuck and my shoes ruined and my hands so blistered I couldn’t make a fist with either one, I started back up the hill—and not, as you might think, to watch the lucky man emerge from the hole in the ground or to take a bow or anything like that, but just to see if anybody else needed digging out.”

“La Conchita” is a fiction rooted in fact: mudslides hit the California community of that name in 1995 and 2005, burying houses and killing ten people in the second incident.  Several of the stories in Wild Child are based on news events, but all have a particular T.C. Boyle twist that present the situation from an angle that those who casually read of these events in the newspaper might not have considered.  In 2005, Snuppy, an Afghan hound, became the first successfully cloned dog, copied from a three-year-old dog by scientists at Seoul National University.  Cloning dogs remains an enormously expensive procedure, a fact that must have sparked Boyle’s take on this in “Admiral.”

In “Admiral,” the Strikers, a wealthy couple of middle-aged lawyers hire Nisha to look after their Afghan hound puppy for the exorbitant fee of $25 an hour, plus benefits.  When she was in high school, Nisha dog-sat the Strikers prior dog, Admiral.  Now Nisha has graduated from college and is back in her hometown after being laid off from work.  Nisha hasn’t been keeping up with the news, but the Strikers inform her that Admiral was killed by a car and they paid $250,000 to have him cloned into Admiral II.  The Strikers want Nisha to play with the second dog the same way she did the first, in the hopes of producing an animal with identical behavior.  “It’s nurture that counts,” Mr. Striker explains.  “You’ve got to reproduce the animal’s experiences, as nearly as possible.” Of course, Boyle doesn’t lay out all this information upfront, he teases it out with obvious delight, and complications arise.

Boyle’s range is impressive in the fourteen stories in this collection, which vary in setting (though several explore humanity’s complicated relationship with nature in contemporary California), time period, and length.  “Three Quarters of the Way to Hell” is a fun little ditty about a Christmas music recording session during the Sinatra era, and it’s followed immediately by “Wild Child,” a 60-page story that recreates the life of Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, with great sensitivity and insight.  Wild Child is a diverting collection for anyone seeking a vacation from his or her own skin.

T.C. Boyle will visit the Boulder Book Store on Tuesday, February 9 at 7:30 p.m.  Admission is free for those who purchase either Wild Child or The Woman, or tickets are available for $5.