Slipping on a Few New Shirts

To squash the prospects of a movie evening and enchain the reader to its pages, a novel must be either a plot-driven page-turner or the dispenser of something absent from film. That something is the human tangle of thoughts, impressions, and feelings which no visual medium can ever zoom in on close enough to reveal. T.C. Boyle's new short story collection, Tooth and Claw, has almost enough of it to keep a moviegoer home on a Friday evening.

At a reading a few weeks ago, the author conveyed that this meticulous attention to character had developed over 26 years and 16 works as his "nuts and bolts" focus on his writing style ebbed out. But really, he has conserved his fresh similes and cast them into psychological portraiture.

Appropriately, most of his stories resemble psychological lab test records.

"Here Comes" meanders through a bum's sensual stimulations on the streets of California, from "beautiful girls with their hair and everything else bouncing in the shattered light" to vodka and hunger: "his stomach clenched around a little ball of nothing." A large portion of the stories' protagonists are driven to drug use by funerals, family, and their own laziness.

Boyle effortlessly adapts his writing style to each character while preserving the pungency of his words. In "Blinded by the Sun," he slips on the Spanish Catholic background of his pampas ranch owner like a new shirt. In "The Doubtfulness of Water," his humorous and appropriate vocabulary renders bearable the constant fuss of a snotty English widow. She is shocked by a coarse waitress's conversation in a tavern in which "the woman spoke of her privates as if they were public ... and [the widow] had to take her book and sit in the courtyard amongst the flies, which were especially thick here, as if they'd gathered for some sort of convention."

The most enjoyable short stories propel the reader in the blur between reality and science fiction. "Dogology" breaks into the thoughts of a woman trying to live as a canine. Like her, the story gallops on all fours, sticks its nose in compost, and rolls in tattered clothes. In "The Kind Assassin," a radio host sets out to break the world record of sleepless days and nights. His restless impressions envelop the reader like the real-life experience. This story is one of the most delectable in the collection.

But the eclectic masterpiece that would stop any moviegoer in his tracks is "Chicxulub." It chronicles a father's evening, from stoned foreplay with his wife, through the phone call announcing his daughter is in the hospital, and finally to the operation room. Just before the resolution of every crucial moment, statistics on the meteor Chicxulub, which would have dwarfed human existence, slice through and incise a tortuous pause.

The previous stories add a strong dose of page-turning plot to the wrenching subjectivity of "Chicxulub." The rest are delicious reads, but Boyle's writing style and vivid impersonations are not quite enough to stand up to film. Maybe in his next work, they will be.