Product Description

Since his first collection of stories, Descent of Man, appeared in 1979, T.C. Boyle has become an acknowledged master of the form who has transformed the nature of short fiction in our time. Among the fourteen tales in his seventh collection are the comic yet lyrical title story, in which a young man wins a vicious African cat in a bar bet; "Dogology," about a suburban woman losing her identity to a pack of strays; and "The Kind Assassin," which explores the consequences of a radio shock jock’s quest to set a world record for sleeplessness. Muscular, provocative, and blurring the boundaries between humans and nature, the funny and the shocking, Tooth and Claw is Boyle at his best.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #506831 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780143037439
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The threat of imminent demise—whether self-inflicted or from an ungentle Mother Nature—hovers in Boyle's seventh collection (after the novel The Inner Circle). Ravenous alligators make a memorable cameo in "Jubilation," in which a divorced man seeking community and stability moves into a "model" town erected in a Florida theme park (think Disney's Celebration), only to find that benign surfaces conceal dangerous depths. This theme of civilization versus wilderness also underpins the weird and wonderful "Dogology," in which a young woman's frustration with the accoutrements of the human world compels her to run—on all fours—with a pack of neighborhood dogs. "Here Comes"—one of the collection's more realistic pieces—describes the anxious circumstances of a suddenly homeless alcoholic poised to slip through the cracks for good in a Southern California town. Substance abuse figures again in "Up Against the Wall," about a young man seduced by a dissolute new crowd, while his parents' marital discord and the Vietnam War tug at the edges of his drugged-out awareness. The wired rhythm of Boyle's prose and the enormity of his imagination make this collection irresistible; with it he continues to shore up his place as one of the most distinctive, funniest—and finest—writers around. (On sale Sept. 12)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Readers I meet in different parts of the world invariably tell me they love short stories, but publishers don't, because they know most collections of shorts are not money-makers. Certainly there are too many that should never have been published -- flaccid, inept stories peopled with dry-cleaned characters. But T.C. Boyle, a virtuoso craftsman, is one of the reasons readers do love short stories, and Tooth and Claw will give devotees of the form much pleasure and an occasional frisson.

Inside Tooth and Claw are Boyle's trademark taut writing, immediate intimacy, vivid language, and meaty words and phrases including "liver muggies," "foude" and "testudineous." Cherish the writer who stretches your mind a little. These characters speak and tell their stories in the slouchy dialogue we all use, their girlfriends throw them out, they confront one another, break up and throw up, they shriek, their flesh prickles, they slip, sink, fall, they brush lips with death, but somehow most escape the deep kiss.

Among Boyle's gifts are his roaring intelligence and a curiosity that has led him over the years to develop a masterly range of subjects and locales. In these 14 previously published selections, he convincingly carries the reader to Tierra del Fuego beneath the hole in the ozone layer, to the muddy road from Massachusetts to New York in 1702, to the Siberian forest, to India, to the glass booth of a greasy radio station, to the moral masquerade of a model community like Disney's Celebration, to suburban New York, to the windy Isle of Unst in the Shetlands, to dumpsters and isolated cottages.

There are many fools in these stories and many bars, some wretched, some wonderful, such as the bar at Jimmy's Steak House: "Inside, it was like another world, like a history lesson, with jars of pickled eggs and Polish sausage lined up behind the bar, a display of campaign buttons from the forties and fifties -- I Like Ike -- and a fireplace, a real fireplace, split oak sending up fantails of sparks against a background of blackened brick. The air smelled sweet -- it wasn't a confectionary sweetness or the false scent of air freshener either, but the smell of wood and wood smoke, pipe tobacco, booze." Casual conversations over drinks grow like cultures in Petri dishes into bizarre and dangerous relationships.

And there are animals throughout. In "Dogology," a woman scientist begins to live with the neighborhood dogs despite the neighbors' revulsion; Gulpy Gator takes a victim (this reader thought it was the wrong victim) in the man-made Floridian Allagash Lake; a lecture on eels and bears precedes "The Swift Passage of the Animals"; and a vicious serval cat in the title story sexually excites a young woman who, true to form, dumps the narrator.

In "Swept Away," a big lump of a man and an American photographer come together at the edge of the cliffy island of Unst in a strange tangle of love, culture, sex and misunderstanding. It is illustrative of Boyle's ability to build a moving and desperate story in a few pages. The wind surges through the piece, and the descriptions of its wild power lead the reader from amusement and interest to the thrill of authenticity. Boyle balances tragedy and comedy in a small compass with great skill.

"The Doubtfulness of Water" is an unusual story -- if it is a story. A 35-year-old woman in 1702 New England undertakes an autumn journey from Massachusetts to New York to tell another woman something of importance; we are never sure just what. She goes alone, hiring men (most of them rude and uncaring) to escort her. Her commentary is tart and acerbic. She has a terrible fear of water, yet again and again she has to cross streams and rivers on horseback, by rickety bridge or fragile boat. The lodgings are most often frightful, but she perseveres and eventually arrives at her destination. We're relieved when she reaches New York and come to feel we have traversed the rough old New England post road with her.

Every reader will have his or her own favorites, but I also liked "Here Comes," a raunchy and sodden account of a man kicked out of his girlfriend's place and starting to turn into a bum. (Sometimes that is all it takes in Boyle's stories.) I was reminded of Greg Brown's "Just a Bum," which voices a fear that lurks deep inside some men that they might lose everything, all their "stuff," and others will see them standing on the corner "with a nine-day beard and bright red eyes." Something of that fear is caught in this story: that comfort, security, success can flash away in half an hour, never to be regained.

"All the Wrecks I've Crawled Out Of," with its don't-care sex, drugs, booze and Boyle-style muddy lake, also hints at lurking bumhood for the miserable protagonist. And "Jubilation" is alight with burning irony (even a little over the top). Can there really be narrow fools who buy into corny, contrived money-sucking communities like this, clinging to their imagined status-prize Golfpark Drives, wrap-around porches and Casual Contempos?

Yes, there can, and thank heaven T.C. Boyle has his glittering eye on them.

Reviewed by Annie Proulx
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Boyle—beloved author of The Inner Circle and Drop City—is a masterful prose stylist. This volume showcases his skill, hurling such wonderful phrases as "face that was like a dried-up field plowed in both directions" at the reader. But the reviews of this collection were mixed, suggesting that Boyle is a bit too enamored of his own wordsmithing. A few critics claimed that he was so busy making it rococo and perfect that he failed to develop characters that readers care about. Still, the collection is clever, creative, and inventive in the dialectic it poses between nature and civilization and will engage and even delight all but the most finicky readers.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

"Nature, Red In Tooth And Claw"
If my memory serves me right, Tennyson in his long poem "In Memoriam" referred to nature as "red in tooth and claw." T. C. Boyle obviously takes a page from Lord Tennyson in his latest collection of short stories where nature at best is indifferent, at its worst, malevolent. Wind storms are so bad that the weather service's wind gauge was once torn from "its moorings and launched into eternity" ("Swept Away") and a "bird lady" probably was washed out to sea. Two individuals get lost in a blinding snowstorm in the Southern Sierras in "The Swift Passage of the Animals." The characters-- at least some of them-- in "Blinded by the Light" are obsessed with a hole in the ozone layer: "So the sky is falling. Or, to be more precise, the sky is emitting poisonous rays." In "Chicxulub" an asteroid collided with the earth "sixty-five million years ago: "The thing that disturbs me about Chicxulub, [the name of the asteroid or comet] aside from the fact that it erased the dinosaurs and wrought catastrophic and irreversible change, is the deeper impication that we, and all our works and worries and attachments, are so utterly inconsequential." Additionally, in several of these stories the characters must also deal with nature's animals: wind-driven falling cats in "Swept Away," man-eating alligators in "Jubilation," an African wild cat that the narrator wins in a bar bet-- coincidentally in a driving rain-- in the title story. Or what is even worse, at least one character ("Dogology") wants to become a dog.

Thirteen of these fourteen stories will open up your sinuses. The characters, many of whom would be described as losers-- but never dull losers-- step in front of the proverbial train and suffer the consequences-- a sleep-deprived man, a homeless man for the first time, a high school teacher who uses and deals drugs at night. Mr. Boyle is quite amazing at setting the tone for a twenty-page story in one sentence. Check out "Here Comes," for example: "He didn't know how it happened, exactly--lack of foresight on his part, lack of caring, planning, holding something back for a rainy day--but in rapid succession he lost his job, his girlfriend and the roof over his head, waking up on morning to find himself sprawled out on the sidewalk in front of the post office."

My favorite story is "Chicxulub" where parents, whose daughter is not home yet, get a late night telephone call-- every parent's worse nightmare-- that "there has been an accident." In a little over ten pages, Mr. Boyle tells a story so universal, so painful and so well-written that you almost forget you are reading fiction and hope with all your being that that child is safe. But isn't this what fine fiction should do?

"The Doubtfulness of Water: Madam Knight's Journey to New York, 1702"-- a story with a title that long had better have something going for it-- for me it didn't, went right over my head, or around it. I don't have the slightest idea what the writer wanted to say- which alone doesn't make a story bad-- I just found it dull; and there are too many other wonderful, satiric, funny and profound stories by this fine writer that I haven't read yet.

Mr. Boyle has to be one of our best short story writers.

Our Most Talented Short Story Writer?
Is there a more talented short fiction writer in America than T.C. Boyle? Probably not. Many of his considerable gifts and persisting preoccupations are on display in Tooth and Claw, his seventh published collection of stories.

Five of the fourteen stories are set in bars. They feature precariously-balanced young men being swept toward the realization that something has to give or change. Boyle shares this space with Richard Bausch, another fine short story writer. If Bausch's stories have the fiery burn of raw pulque, Boyle's go down like high grade tequila: the kick comes later. Given his storytelling skills, one suspects that Boyle could spin out guy-in-bar tales as effortlessly and endlessly as a spider can drop silk filaments from its abdomen.

His comic gifts are on display in Swept Away, a roistering tale of the affair between a visiting ornithologist and a local farmer on a bleak Scottish isle, and the satirical subset of those gifts is evident in Jubilation, which chronicles the natural disasters that befall a man trying to start a new life in a housing development built by a theme park company. Dogology, about a woman who wants to be one with the animal kingdom, and The Kind Assassin, about a drive-time DJ's attempt to set the record for going without sleep, show Boyle turning intriguing concepts into stories peopled by characters who engage our feelings.

Several of the stories revolve around nature. The Doubtfulness of Water takes us on an adventurous journey from Boston to New York in the year 1702. Tooth and Claw, a combo bar and animal story, gives us a lost young man trying to cope with a feral pet. In Blinded by the Light, a Patagonian rancher is afflicted by the visit of an environmental doomsayer obsessed by the ozone hole over the South Pole. In Boyle's fictional world there are two broad classes: those who know we're headed towards some sort of environmental catastrophe and those who are trying not to think about it.

Two of the stories could be prequels to Drop City, Boyle's novel about young people who head out west in the late sixties to join a hippie commune. All the Wrecks I've Crawled Out Of and Up Against the Wall are both narrated by young guys scrambling for purchase in the adult world. They're looking for answers in the emerging counterculture of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. These two stories deliver the strongest emotional punch in the collection because it feels like there's something more at stake than a verbal frolic. Boyle seems to be trying to nail down an American moment -late sixties/early seventies- in which he's emotionally as well as intellectually invested.

This collection shows yet again that Boyle is a brilliant stylist who moves nimbly over a broad swath of American terrain. If his jazzy riffs haven't yet achieved that higher synthesis, that reordering of our perceptions, which we ask of our greatest fiction writers, it's clear that he has the talent to get there.

dark humour plus deep turmoil
The sheer contrast of these stories made the collection creative and artistic. Most stories entailed animal behaviour vs. reasoning; pain/joy, love/hate, and reality/escapism. I was impressed by the mixture of dark humour, intricate details, and emotional turmoil that lies in these pages: the title fits perfectly, and one cannot help but consider that some of the stories are semi-autobiographical. Ideas for the stories are bizarre, brilliant, refreshing and sometimes finish with unexpected twists of fate. Despite each character's repeated dance with diverse forms of substance abuse, one feels empathy for him as he struggles for his identity even if he's as desperate and pathetic as they get. It was a film-noir of story-telling, and a most enjoyable read.