In Descent of Man T.C. Boyle Shows Us What We've Ascended To

In T. Coraghessan Boyle's Descent of Man, the dominant theme of modern day folly lurks throughout every story. The collection seems to be asking, we've come all this way for...this? For what?

To fall below the IQ level of precocious apes? To destroy the only home that gives us life? To instill animosity between genders? To collect useless items in our homes, and waste precious money and time to get our hands on goods and artifacts that have nothing to do with enhancing our lives? To be considered champions of consumption, with the greatest champs being cheered on by everyone else? To sink mercilessly into sentimental entertainment again and again?

If all of that seems overwrought and overdone, it never feels preachy. Rather, it's quite the opposite. If you've read enough doom and gloom in the newspapers, and been made to feel like a guilty associate of our postindustrial society's environmental catastrophe, you'll be reinvigorated by Descent of Man's energy.

Boyle's language rises to meet the darkly humorous, satirical premises of his stories. If it didn't, the collection would fall flat in many places, and would risk dropping into the gutter of fiction serving as panic pieces.

Some, such as That Inscrutable Thing, have accused this collection of stories that "read more like writing exercises than stories--experimental pieces of fiction in which the young Boyle is only attempting to explore a particular concept, story idea, or literary form." I think that's fair, and I hadn't thought of it quite that way until I read it. There is a writing exercise feel to Desecent of Man. 

I'm more partial to Max Apple's take. He characterized Boyle's stories as, "A certain restlessness, a temporary energy takes over, a singing in the brain that is too intense to live with for the duration of a novel. That energy roams the lines of the story looking for a way out. James Joyce called that way out an epiphany, but in our time it is more like the quick release of passion than the stately illumination of the intellect."

Maybe the most surreal, yet most serious story in Descent is "Bloodfall". A group of young people who all live in the same house barely notice one evening when the rain they hear on the windowpanes turns out to be bright red.

In that brief silence between songs, I heard it--looked up at the window and saw the first red droplets huddled there, more falling between them. Gesh and Scott and Isabelle were watching TV with the sound off, digging the music, lighting the cigarettes, tapping fingers and feet, laughing. On the low table were cheese, oranges, wine, shiny paperbacks, a hash pipe. Incense smoked from a pendant urn (47).

At least the dogs like it when they're let outside. They lap it up and come back in covered with it. It's blood, and it smells like a butcher's shop outside.

The dread is passed off. Maybe it's a plague. Maybe it's pollution. You know, humans desperate to go back to the pleasant, comforting entertainment of their evenings without having to really give a second thought to the carnage going on outside their homes. Boyle displays that urge, that complacence in us.

Amy howled from the basement. "Hey you guys, guess what? The stuff is ankle-deep down here and it's ruining everything. Our croquet set, our camping equipment, our dollhouse!" The announcement depressed us all, even Gesh. "Let's blow a bowl of hash and forget about it," he suggested. 

"Anyhow," said Walt, "it'll be good for the trees." And he started a bass riff with a deep throbbing note--the hum of it hung in the air even after the lights went out and the rest of his run had attenuated to a thin metallic whisper (52).

As they lose the lights, the electricity, the warmth, the smell of blood is apparent. There's no question of keeping it out.

The reader can imagine the gore being attributed to any number of human atrocities--the blood of

credit: Martin Prechelmacher

those slaughtered in Vietnam, Iraq, and other helpless millions assaulted by the military might of the West. Or the blood of the masses being drained to support a cozy lifestyle for a small section of the planet. Or the lifeblood of the earth, from the chopped trees and slashed mountainsides mined for metals.

One day, it'll seep back to us, fall from the sky, rise up from the ground, and we won't be able to smoke it away, entertain it back into the ground, or sleep through it (which is ultimately what they try to do when the rain does not cease).

Most of the other stories are more playful in tone, even if they have dark underpinnings. One of Boyle's most pleasant techniques is how he bluntly begins, and anchors the story, in absurdity. From "A Women's Restaurant":

It is a women's restaurant. Men are not permitted. Women go there to be in the company of other women, to sit in the tasteful rooms beneath the ancient revolving fans and the cool green of spilling plants, to cross or uncross their legs as they like, to chat, sip liqueurs, eat. At the door, the first time they enter, they are asked to donate twenty-five cents and they are issued a lifetime membership card. Thus the women's restaurant has the legal appearance of a private club, and its proprietors, Grace and Rubie, avoid running afoul of the antidiscrimination laws. A women's restaurant. What goes on there, precisely, no man knows. I am a man. I am burning to find out (83-4).

Boyle sets up each story with care, almost like a circus carefully builds the foundations and tracks for its rides, so that once attached, the participant can be flung along on the wild, colorful ride with confidence that the whole absurd contraption will hang together and not defy its own laws of physics.

There is plenty of mockery in these stories, and the best example is "Heart of a Champion", a story featuring Lassie. A dog more handy than a human, more loyal than any dog on the planet, until she meets a scraggly coyote and lets down her guard over the boy she always protected.

Just as if we're watching a TV show, Boyle uses the omniscient plural to hover over the action, zoom in when necessary, and switch scenes instantly. We cut to Timmy: eyes closed, hair plastered, his left arm looking as though it should be wrapped in butcher's paper. How? we wonder. How will they ever get him out of this? (45). That perspective also gives the author clearance to mock the smoothly audience's reaction and heart levels while in the heat of the drama, as we'll see below.

Little Timmy can't seem to help falling into extremely dangerous situations on a daily basis. One day he falls into a river and is drowning while being swept along by a river rushing toward a gigantic waterfall. Will the dog be able to save him? This is where T.C. Boyle shines by asking us, Do you really enjoy the garbage you people call entertainment? How far can TV take this sentimentality and absurdity and pass it off as heartfelt entertainment?

Then she's in the air, the foaming yellow water. Her paws churning like pistons, whiskers chuffing with the exertion--oh the roar!--and there, she's got him, her sure jaws clamping down on the shirt collar, her eyes fixed on the slip of rock at the falls' edge. Our blood races, organs palpitate. The black brink of the falls, the white paws digging at the rock--and then they're safe. The collie sniffs at Tommy's inert little form, nudges his side until she manages to roll over him. Then clears his tongue and begins mouth-to-mouth (39).

Ultimately, the status of these stories depends on what the reader is searching for. Quirky, darkly humorous, jagged jaunts of the imagination dominate Descent of Man and you won't find even-keeled, slowly unfolding plots. These stories are bursts, like flares, that light up quickly and hit their peak. Not all of the stories succeed, but they are short enough and intriguing enough not to wear out their welcome.

Boyle's first collection is innovative enough to shake the reader or writer out of a rut and goad a frantic cleverness and humor out of a stale or tired mind.

T. Coraghessan Boyle. Descent of Man. Penguin. 1987. 219 pages.