Satire and Irony
Boyle’s prodigious output of short fiction has touched upon so many subjects across such a broad range storylines that any serious search for prevalent themes inevitably must shift the focus from what happens in his stories to the way he tells it. Boyle’s world view tends toward a satirical and ironic perspective which has the ability infuse the literary techniques conveying an individual story’s theme whether the plot whether delving into the Kafka-esque nightmarish world of “The Big Garage” or the takedown of food critics in “Sorry Fugu.” Through his entire body of work, Boyle works within the realm of irony. In fact, Boyle is one of the dominant literary figures of the Age of Irony.
The Male Gaze
It’s not that women don’t exist in Boyle’s fiction or that they cannot play significant parts. For instance, Jane Good, the scientist studying primates who will throw over her boyfriend for a chimp. Notably, however, it is not Jane who narrates her offbeat love story in “Descent of Man”, but the boyfriend. Boyle’s most famous short story by a wide margin—few indeed are the college graduates of the 21st century who have not been assigned to read it—is “Greasy Lake” and though girls play significant parts, it is all about manhood, the lack thereof and the difficult transition from boyhood. Narrative perspective and the styles in which the stories are told may change dramatically from one story to the next, but it is almost guaranteed that any Boyle short story chosen entirely at random will be one which presents the world through the male gaze. In this instance, the male gaze extends beyond the Mulvey-esque way of defining women to include how the entire world is defined through a masculine perspective.
Animals
Indeed, reams of feminist critiques of Boyle could focus solely on how he seems more capable of seeing the world through the consciousness of beasts than of women. In addition to the chimp story mentioned above, there is its sequel, “The Ape Lady in Retirement” which, despite the title, remains a story about the boyfriend. “Carnal Knowledge” satirizes animal rights activism while “A Bird in the Hand” presents an apocalyptic nightmare of animal rights gone mad. Even Lassie shows up in “Heart of a Champion” though, naturally enough, in an ironically satirical send-up of trope that Timmy always needs saving. The plethora of animals in Boyle’s stories is not a theme in the sense of plot, but rather as a narrative device. The plots vary from one to the next, but persistent throughout is narrative choice to use animals as a means of exploring not their behavior, but how their behavior impacts humans—more specifically, of course, how they impact human males.
