T.C. Boyle’s “After the Plague”

The infectious energy of the prose makes up for sometimes static plots. There’s lots of looking back.

There’s a lot of nihilism. The treatment of the characters borders on the patronizing.

There’s some nice experimental stories – “The Black and White Sisters”, for example, which has a good, far-fetched premise – the sisters exclusively wearing either black or white, who hire a guy to asphaltize their garden, then kidnap him for use as a sex slave.

But cumulatively taken the stories become depressing. The Love of My Life is a horrible story about an adolescent love that’s betrayed after a ghastly accident. Boyle’s characters are deeply unsympathetic psychopaths for the most part and once you get into the routine of anticipating the “unpleasant twist” it all does become rather a downer. This is a liability of the short story form when writers resort to a recognizable formula, something Boyle does a few times too often in this collection.

The title story is one of few where the hero isn’t psychotic. Within its context (most of the world’s population wiped out by agonizing plague), the story offers the closest Boyle gets to a happy ending…

The story where I really started to chafe against Boyle’s overkill was “Killing Babies” where the anti-hero a drug-addict starting anew in an abortion clinic loses it, pulls his pistol and starts plugging away at the protesting pro-lifers.

This killer gets given this pay-off: “It was easy. It was nothing. Just like killing babies.”

And my reaction was – “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?” – the story and its pay-off were a little too pat in their metaphorical posturing.

My overall feeling was disappointment that Boyle doesn’t use his obvious skill to better effect.

I’ll definitely read more Boyle but if his other work suffers from the same lazy urges he’ll never be one of my favorite writers.

Freddie Omm