Fifty Going Down

“After the plague--it was some sort of Ebola mutation passed from hand to hand and nose to nose like the common cold--life was different. More relaxed and expansive, more natural.” Although he wrote the sentence long before, the optimistic opening of the title story to T.C. Boyle’s disturbing new collection reads as sharp, if different, after Sept.11.

Boyle’s has always been a peculiar voice, particularly in the short-story form, which he has worked like a master trickster, the jester of the butt end of the 20th century. In his early stories, he juggled language with a dada panache, tossing hippies and Mao, Darwin and fugu into the air just for the thrill of watching the nouns and verbs fall into astonishing tales.

But life is different now, and the 21st century Boyle is different too. The jewel-earringed jester, the rock ‘n’ roller who once sang in a coat he borrowed from James Dean, has grown the beard of a Jeremiah. Terrible things happen in these stories. Boyfriends sabotage their lovers, brothers their brothers, fathers their sons.

Witness the plight of the college freshman Achates McNeil, whose famous writer father appears on campus only to embarrass his son in front of the faculty and students: “He said things like ‘I’m glad you’re asking me to speak on the only subject I’m an authority on--me,’ and with every other breath he dropped the names of the big impressive actors who’d starred in the big impressive movie version of his last book.... ‘When we were on location in Barbados, Brad and Geena and I used to go snorkeling practically every afternoon, and then it was conch ceviche and this rum drink they call Mata-Mata, after the turtle, and believe me, kill you it does .... “‘

And it gets worse. We watch with dread as Boyle’s characters follow lost dogs and errant libidos, invite thieves and murderers into their homes, veer off their programmed courses and maneuver their jets to their own destruction. The lemming is not an aberrant character in the world according to Boyle. It is the norm.

Fortunately, all is not gloom and doom. In “Peep Hall,” a closeted nerd discovers the love of his life in the girl next door, who lives in a sorority house whose activities, in all their erotic potential, can be viewed 24 hours a day over the Internet. “My Widow,” in which the narrator looks down from the afterlife as his widow dwindles into a senility of cats and dirty laundry, ends with exquisite sentiment.

“So she sits there by the ashes of the cold fire, listening to the furtive groans and thumps of the old house. The night deepens, the stars draw back, higher and higher, arching into the backbone of the sky. She is waiting for something she can’t name, a beautiful old lady clothed in cats, my widow, just waiting. It is very still.”

Yet for the most part, Boyle’s new stories confront us with hard problems and modern hypocrisies. We see yesterday’s headlines--”Murder of Abortion Doc,” “Teens Smother Newborn”--as the inspirations for these stories. Why the new Boyle, less winking than grimacing? Perhaps the answer is in the title of a Puerto Rican sci-fi novel that one of his middle-aged heroes picks up--”Fifty Going Down.” In the middle of the road of life, perhaps Boyle has decided that the time for jokes is past.

More Elvis Costello than Mick Jagger, more willing to experiment outside of the constraints of the old R & B quintet, Boyle has rocked into an age of receding hairlines and expectations recognizing that it is possible to put away childish things and still be hip. It is not just that Boyle no longer writes about drugs and sex and teenagers who yearn to be ba-a-a-ad. It is that curiosity and passion have drawn him away from the juvenile concerns of, say, a Hamlet and toward the weightier, more complex dilemmas of a graying Claudius.

Of course that means a change of timbre and a change of instrument. Boyle--and we have no finer virtuoso of the American language than Boyle--has made the decision that language should no longer be played like a hip kit of Yamaha drums and Zildjian cymbals but, as he quotes Flaubert, like “a cracked kettle on which we beat our tunes to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”

What a longing, and what an ambition! We flail about as a nation, all of us, with our cracked kettles of military bands and CNN searching for a beat to march to, but isn’t our ambition the same as Boyle’s, the same as Flaubert’s? In an age of war where the foe is indistinct and difficult to identify, Boyle has become both the poet and the prophet of our time. *