What sets T. Coraghessan Boyle apart from his contemporaries in the art of crafting short fiction? Aside from the fact that he soon enough discovered the value shortening his identity to T.C. Boyle because nobody else on earth knows how to spell Coraghessan from memory? That sounds like an easy joke, but the truth is that there is a distinct and purposeful line connecting the writer’s name to his work. Not to injure any party, but “Coraghessan” is an absurd name for a writer to use in conjunction with only an initial in place of a first name. Think about it: if Boyle chose to go with the impossibly difficult middle name, then how much more difficult must his first name be? And here is where the connection is found. The author was born Thomas John Boyle. He actually chose to alter his very simple middle name for the one so hard to spell himself when he was seventeen.
This is the work of either an eccentric genius or an absurd lunatic. Or, in the case of Boyle, a mixture of both. His writing is eccentric, but not in terms of literary style. And his stories are absurd, but not in the sense of being absolutely unlikely. What really sets Boyle apart from his contemporaries is that one can pick up his enormous volume of collecting stories—clocking in at almost 700 pages—and pick any ten or twenty at random and find very little to indicate they were written by the same author. He is certainly not a regional author whose stories are all generally set in the same locale. He is most assuredly not a writer connected to a specific genre. One can—and many have—take a stab at connecting the stories thematically, but to do so effectively requires focusing on a just a handful of his most well-known tales. Even the narrative style defies linkage; one minute you’re reading a typically confessional first-person narrative like “Greasy Lake” and the next you are knee-deep in the studied experimentalism of “The Hit Man.”
The truth of the matter is that reading the voluminous body of work in the field of short stories published by Boyle is somewhat akin to watching a hyperactive kid who forget to take his medicine. He can seem all over the place with no real sense of focus in terms of the larger picture frequently associated with famous short stories writers. Pick up a collection by Eudora Welty and you know what you’re going to get. The same holds true for such celebrated practitioners of the art as William Faulkner or Stephen King or Edgar Allan Poe. But with Boyle, you might get the echoes of “The Masque o the Red Death” “Bloodfall” or the Stephen King-meets-Kafka horror nightmare of “The Big Garage” or even a showdown with short-story master Gogol in his “sequel” to one of the masterpieces of the genre, “The Overcoat II.”
In the end, lugging around that heavy copy of the comprehensive collection of Boyle’s short stories is perhaps best compared to the advice handed down to Forrest Gump by his mother. Boyle’s fiction is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.
