Wild Child
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
A feral boy is captured and 'civilised' in the Languedoc region. A young woman is hired to look after a cloned dog that cost its owners $250,000. A widower in a self-satisfied suburb engulfs his loneliness in a sea of rats. A weary city GP is baffled by a Mexican boy, the son of a taco-seller, who can feel no pain. A junior film editor invents the death of his own daughter because he can't face going in to work. A vindictive teenager with a gasoline fixation runs into trouble with his Japanese neighbour. Two washed-up crooners in 1950s New York get creative while recording a schmaltzy Christmas special. In this beguiling new collection of stories, T. C. Boyle, one of the world's greatest storytellers, explores the improbable, the tragic, the allegorical and the altogether ordinary.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The title novella in Boyles's ninth collection is as good as anything the prolific author of The Women has written. Basing his story on the historical Victor of Aveyron, the feral child discovered in the wilds of France in 1797 and slowly brought to heel indoors under the patient but understandably frustrated doctor Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, Boyle interrogates history with an experienced reader's wariness of sentimental revisionism and a great writer's attention to precisely what defines the child's wildness. The 13 other stories are a grab bag of Boyles's signature modes and are, therefore, mixed. There's "Question 62," a by-the-numbers suburban comedy concerning an escaped tiger; "La Concita," a dutiful requiem for baby boomer ordinary guyism; and "Sin Dolor," a bona fide Borgesian legend about a child whose inability to feel pain fails to protect him from more subtle wounds. Stronger material is found in "The Lie," about a man who lies about his newborn baby's death to get out of work, comprising one of the book's few surprises. What's largely missing is experimentation, intimacy and deviation from a catalogue throughout which Boyle has proven himself doggedly reliable; one wonders when this wild child got housebroken.
