After The Plague: And Other Stories (2002) - Plot & Excerpts
This past Saturday night I was reading “My Widow”, a story in TC Boyle’s After the Plague, just before bed. My wife was reading across the room and two of my three sons were asleep in the next room (the oldest was blowing shit up on the beach with one of his friends). Wind blew in through the skylights and I considered turning on the air conditioner. Earlier Ross and I sat in the dark living room watching the Brewers game and drinking Red Stripes. I had to ask myself, “why am I reading one of the most relentlessly depressing collections of stories I have ever experienced?” Here’s my answer, along with the full-disclosure explanation of why I decided to skip the last two stories in the collection.First off, Boyle can flat-out write. He’s particularly strong in following the shifting internal dialogues of left of center losers and the reactive, unsettled people who are only a step or two away from or past screwing up their lives. Whether it’s a bachelor “saving” a potential girlfriend from a cad (“Terminator Dust”), a directionless boyfriend’s impulsive sabotage of a triathelete girlfriend (“She Wasn’t Soft”), or a young couple panicking around a pregnancy in the worst way possible (“The Love of My Life”), Boyle documents the scenarios in which characters make dead wrong decisions from which they think they can escape but most certainly cannot. These stories will stick with me and Boyle’s descriptions of academia and beach denizens (both appear in multiple stories) were particularly strong. But, you know, these stories seem small, claustrophobic, and perhaps that was Boyle’s intent, but the airless room quality of the work (and I suppose many tragedies seem airless and claustrophobic to those involved) story after story after story had me ready to throw the book through the window. Now…that’s a powerful book, right? How many books do you want to throw out the window? Maybe Boyle took the “fuck it, I’m going to twist the knife deeper and deeper because that’s the truth.” And maybe he’s right sometimes. But I’ve lived enough of that not to want to spend a week reading about shitty lives while I sit on the side of little league baseball games or on the front porch well after dusk. And I’ve also lived through enough of my own depression and bad decisions to say that, for me, that even the worst days include weird moments when, for example, I’ve said, “this tea is pretty good” or “I like the wind today.” So maybe the unrelenting horror of some of these stories is the easy way out in the same way that books with a “mary sunshine farting rainbows” (thanks, Buns!) approach seem like the easy way out. Or maybe Boyle didn’t break the dark stream in the same way you never see action heroes eating dinner or going to the bathroom in the movies. I don’t know.Listen. These are good stories. Like I said, maybe this wasn’t the time for me to read After the Plague. Make up your own mind, of course. I’m going to go read something else, though, maybe a little more complex, a little deeper, a little more multi-faceted now. Anyone want a Red Stripe? The Brewers’ game is on. We can talk about Joy Division records and Bergman films and Dostoevsky later, heck, even between innings, if you’d like. But I want a little of both, at least tonight, at least on warm summer evenings when the wind blows cool and the kids are asleep.
I'm a big TCBoyle fan, I recommend him to people and really hope they will try him out. Both Drop City and The Tortilla Curtain are books that stay with you over time, and even though I know so little about the US, I feel as though I have been told a certain truth, about a time and an attitude, by both novels. There are moments in all these stories of that fierce and funny lucidity, a crisp summing up of sometimes apocalyptic moments, that should make the book un outdo enable. But weirdly, something else happens. You start second guessing what's coming, anticipating the punch you are being lined up for and you start to duck. Another review here says that the reader is put in the same viewpoint over and over, and I think that might be right, I think you are better armed for the next story, and even start to skip the detail as you look for the blow. I think that's a shame, his writing, which someone else says here, can be rhapsodic, is fantastic at drawing you in, it shouldn't be that something as silly as the persistent overuse of the same narrative trick pushes you back out. Sadly, it does.
What do You think about After The Plague: And Other Stories (2002)?
individually these short stories are good; collectively they are a slog. story after story of sad sacks who tended to be hard drinking middle aged men living in a world where women were ok at best, dogs are usually arthritic and babies or pregnancies are a mistake and/or killed. this last theme was disturbing to me since i counted four out of the first ten stories involved a dead child, working at an abortion clinic, killing two babies and regretting two pregnancies. i liked about half of the bo
—moneypenny
Mostly grim stories. That's really the only way I can describe it. If they weren't written so well (most of them- anyway) I wouldn't have bothered. Realities a big enough drag these days- I don't need fiction to reiterate it for me. I suppose you'd call some of these a gritty look at modern day issues. I don't know- they were just a bummer for the most part. Pretty good writing and story telling though. Well- truth be told- the writing got on my nerves at times. He gets a little flowery in his descriptions. I don't have any good examples to put here- so my saying that is going to mean very little if or when I ever read this again. Suffice it to say- he's a good writer- but this collection left me feeling kind of empty. There were a few phrases or descriptions I connect with thought. I didn't bother to note any of these places though.
—Kendall
Dies ist eine weitere Sammlung von Kurzgeschichten von dem bekannten amerikanischen Autor T.C. Boyle. Ich habe es gelesen, weil ich eine dieser Geschichten für einen Literatur-Kurs an der Uni analysiere. In den meisten dieser Short Stories dreht es sich um geschiedene Alkoholiker, oft Männer aber auch Frauen. Loser auf jeden Fall. Und entweder passiert ein Einbruch oder ein Mord. Oder beides. Auch die Themen ungewollte Schwangerschaft, überbevölkerte Welt und Abtreibung werden in mehreren dieser Geschichten angesprochen.Manchmal kann man sich das Ende der Geschichte schon denken, weil es oft immer tragisch endet. Oder zumindest in Trostlosigkeit. Im Grunde genommen ist erst in der allerletzten Geschichte "Nach der Pest" eine Art Happy-End zu erkennen. Diese Geschichte war übrigens auch titelbestimmend für die Originalausgabe "After the Plague", und vielleicht wollte uns Boyle mit diesem Buch vor Augen führen, wie nahe am Abgrund diese unsere Welt sich bereits befindet, dass es aber irgendwo noch ein bißchen Hoffnung gibt.
—Karschtl
