February 11th, 2019 - Asleep at the Wheel

Dear TNY,

I know I’m supposed to remain impartial to the author, but when I see TC Boyle’s name below one of your newly published stories I wince; and I winced for “Asleep at the Wheel”. 

Now, that’s not to say that I hated the story.  I have a history with Boyle.  He’s one of the most prolific short story writers in the last half century.  One cannot help but have read some of his work.  I have, in fact, read the thick book with three subjects (Love, and two others; I have now forgotten and no longer own the book).  And what I learned from that book applies to this or any other Boyle story.  It’s that most of his stories are the same.  He will sine wave through voices, but the pattern of his stories is pretty much the same.  He’s very, very good at that pattern.  But that’s just it; it’s a pattern.  Once you know how it’s going to go, it’s hard to be surprised.  And since his craft is mediocre at best (word choice, fresh language, etc) the stories are something I finish, but do not register as great.

I’m gonna take a hot second here to recognize that I have had similar issues with other authors after reading their collections.  Most notably is Papa H.  I have read the entirety of his short stories.  And by the end, I was exhausted.  I didn’t want to read anything by him again.  But time passed and I was able to recognize that the writing (although tired at the time I read the collection) was still good after taking a break.  The same goes for Flannery O’Connor.  Are there Boyle stories I have read more than once?  I think so?  Maybe the one where the narrator says that someone dies in this story (at the very start).  I thought that story was clever.  But not great.

Okay, all of this is to say that I’m biased.  Now, I’m going to try to be unbiased.  I can’t understand why the kid playing chicken was in the story.  Cindy never concluded on that story arc, which is bullshit for this reader because there is no payoff.  They, mom/son, are only loosely tied together in this narrative anyway, so short of just watching a bunch of drunk kids steal cars and then die as they flew off a cliff (assuming that), that sub-arc didn’t do shit for the main arc other than elongate pauses in it.  Why not cut it and use the space to beef up the feels in the Cindy’s arc?

Also, Cindy and Carly as names?  Names of people that interact with each other?  That’s just fucking lazy.  40% of the letters match.  More importantly, the ones that match are the first and last.  There are many studies that show that humans rarely need to read the interior letters in a word to ascertain it’s meaning.  But now I’m in the predicament of getting lost between a car computer and the main character because the editor/author couldn’t be troubled to sort out something as easy as name choice.

The technology is a gimmick.  That’s how it feels to me, anyway.  Again, biased.  I read a story by Boyle from an anthology maybe a year or so ago.  About CRISPR.  It felt the same as this.  He takes a gimmick and then build a story around it that somehow exposes the human condition. Or tries to. But doesn’t.  Now, is that possible?  Fuck yes, Moby Dick.  “The Things They Carried” and Ender’s Game and Lord of the Flies.  But the human condition needs to surpass the gimmick.  To outshine it.  It doesn’t happen in this piece.  Or even close to it.

So, I didn’t hate this story.  I just found it bland as fuck.  And incomplete.  But I did finish it, so that is good, I guess.

See you next week,

Nick