Without a Hero

By T. Coraghessan Boyle and Werner Richter

Book Overview

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK - From the award-winning author of The Tortilla Curtain comes fifteen "gloriously comic . . . stories that] are more than funny, better than wicked" (The Philadelphia Inquirer).

"Fifteen sterling tales marked . . . by a keen sense of the absurd and a . . . compassionate awareness of human frailty."--The Washington Post

The stunning stories in Without a Hero each, in their own way, display a virtuosity and versatility rare in literary America. T.C. Boyle takes chance after chance, even to the point of reexamining the ethos of Ernest Hemingway. In "Big Game," the wild animal safari takes place not in Africa but on a pay-per-shoot ranch in Southern California and includes an elephant hunt and its vivid consequences.

Boyle displays an astonishing range as he zooms in on such American specimens as the college football player who knows only defeat; the entrepreneur who creates a center for acquisitive disorders; the couple in search of the last toads on earth; and the boy caught between the ingenuousness of childhood and the cynicism of adulthood in "The Fog Man."

In some of these stories, Boyle makes you laugh out loud; in others, you come closer to understanding the human condition because of the way he cuts to the secret places in his peoples' hearts.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140178392
• ISBN13: 9780140178395
• Release Date: May 1995
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 7.8"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

HE'S A WHIZ WITH A NARRATIVE !

In this, his ninth book and fourth collection of stories, T. Coraghessan Boyle is as satiric, offbeat, and laconic as ever. A whiz with a narrative, his stories are so well honed that there does not seem to be an extraneous syllable. True to form, the author tackles improbable subjects and fleshes them out with bigger than life characters in unlikely situations. A bored adman is spending his 30th birthday on a windy beach with only "a comforting apocalyptic tract about the demise of the planet" for company. There he meets Alena Jorgensen, a beautiful animal rights activist. He falls in love with her and placates her by eating unappetizing breakfasts, "...brewer's yeast and what appeared to be some sort of bark marinated in yogurt." He even joins in a Beverly Hills anti-fur march, challenging "A wizened silvery old woman who might have been an aging star or a star's mother," and is flattened by the woman's kickboxing chauffeur. One would be hard pressed to select a favorite among the 16 sketches included in this collection. "Filthy With Things" is a mirror held to the face of greed, as a couple whose home is bulging with their possessions seeks the help of professional organizers to ease them into a "nonacquisative environment." In "Big Game," Bernard Puff operates a big game preserve located just outside of Bakersfield, California. There, for a price, guests can shoot anything. Puff affects a phony British accent, and drinks quinine water although nary a malarial mosquito has been spotted. "Without A Hero" speaks with an unconventional voice but, oh, how refreshing to hear it. - Gail Cooke

Filthy With Fun

WITHOUT A HERO is a terrific collection of short stories by a highly inventive author. I recently enjoyed his novel INNER CIRCLE, and previously had noticed his imaginative, satirical stories in the pages of The New Yorker. Quite simply, T.C. Boyle is fun to read. Short stories showcase Boyle's creativity and wit. Here we enjoy tales about over-monied California real estate moguls trophy hunting outside Bakersfield ("Big Game"); the astonomer and his collectibles-crazy wife who undergo reprogramming at the hands of a professional clutter organizer ("Filthy With Things"); the remarried, aged husband doting on his ridiculously demanding wife and his unpredictable reaction to her well-being in a hurricane ("Act of God"); the mud-splattered and half-crippled, never-say-die right guard for the Caledonia College football team ("56-0"); the beatnik who has hitchhiked across the US for a night of carousing with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs ("Beat"); and the young Irish-American boy sucking in both the carcinogenic fumes of bug-spray and prejudice ("The Fog Man"). The thriller of the bunch is the closer. In "Sitting on Top of the World" sexy ranger Elaine guards the forest from fire, splendidly isolated for days in the mountaintop station, enjoying her solitude. Until a stranger comes knocking....

Irony, Black Humor, and Satire pervade

I must confess that I feel guilty even writing a reveiw, let along giving 5 stars, for a book that I haven't read all of. I was only assigned six of the short stories in the book for my Satire class...and though I suppose I could have read more, I did not. However, that does not change the fact that the 6 stories I read were all brilliant in their own right.BIG GAME- Trying to import African into Southern California, Bernard Puff learns too late the danger of trying to import one reality into another.TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN- DDT leads to devastation of Borneo...but wickedly funny and ironic, "Every cloud has a silver lining"56-0- Ray Aurther Larry-Pete Fontinot tries one last time to taste glory in football. Far far far from Rudy.FILTHY WITH THINGS- Materialism has a hold on Julian...but the remedy may prove worse than the disease. Twilight Zone-esque, and I mean that as the highest of compliments.BEAT- Buzz's hero and the Beat culture are not as glamourous as they seemTHE FOGMAN- Rasicm at its most heartbreaking...and the moral: nothing changes.Even if all the other stories in this book are completely horrid and abominations to the English language, you should still pick up a copy of T. Coraghesson (what a helluva name) Boyle's book even if only to read these stories.

Bright spots galore in this story collection

If I were the author of The Road To Wellville, I don't think I'd print that on my books. I think I'd just coast on having a wonderful name like "Coraghessan" to throw around. In any case, 56-0 was sort of heartbreaking, and Top of the Food Chain barreled down a road I'd always wondered about, and Big Game I really liked, for being about Hemingway a little, and Filthy With Things scared the living daylights out of me, reminding me more than a little of the Stephen King story Quitters, Inc.