[In the excerpt below, Bull comments on Boyle's The Collected Stories, nothing the opposition between body and reason and the prominence of such motifs as water and alcohol.]

If Haile Selassie, whom some remember as a bit of a biker from his days of exile in the West of England, had been stretched to 6′3″ and given a part in Easy Rider, he would have looked rather like Tom Coraghessan Boyle as he appears on the front of the Collected Stories—an improbable confection of soulful eyes, hollow cheeks, frizzy facial hair and black leather. But although the impression that Boyle is a low-life lion of the interstates is strenuously maintained by his publishers—who report that he was a child of the Sixties, 'a maniacal crazy-driver' who ate anything he could lay his hands on, bought heroin for £5 a bag and listened to music with Linda Lovelace—his writing suggests an altogether less exotic and more wholesome milieu. Boyle studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches at the University of Southern California, and his fiction often relies on the kind of farmboy irony that may come naturally to Ross Perot, but which appears to have been institutionalised in some American creative writing programmes. In such stories, the setting is the affluent suburbs: the Mercedes is in the garage, the National Geographic is on the table, and the jokes are about newfangled technologies that don't work or have unexpected consequences—security alarms, genetic engineering, research on primate intelligence. The implication is always that back on the farm, no one would have been fooled in the first place….

[If] government causes political problems, psychiatrists madness, and doctors illness, how do the people live? How is it possible to survive in a society where being part of the solution automatically makes you part of the problem?

One answer to this question is given in a story called 'Modern Love'. Having eaten a … meal of 'cold cream-of-tofu-carrot soup and little lentil-paste sandwiches for an appetiser and a garlic soufflé with biologically controlled vegetables for an entrée', two lovers watch The Boy in the Bubble, a film about the germ-free adolescence of a child without an immune system, and then put on full-body condoms for sex. But their promising, if intactile, relationship ends when, for wholly trivial reasons, the man fails an exhaustive medical examination taken at the insistence of the hypochondriacal woman…. [It] is the doctor who invents the diseases that keep the sexes apart; the suggestion is that anyone who conforms to the divisive morality of public health will eventually find themselves sealed into a private bubble and deprived of the reassuring intimacy of human contact.

The contrast between the isolated world of modernity and the tactile 'way of the centuries' is, in part, the usual comic juxtaposition of the body against reason, common sense against professional expertise, the familiar past against the uncertain present. But in Boyle's writing, these dichotomies are given an almost obscurantist degree of polarisation, with the result that the proffered alternative to the isolation created by dysfunctional expert systems is not rational communication, but primitive communion. As the abstract of his PhD (a collection of short stories, not, as the publishers claim, a study of Victorian literature) puts it: there is an 'opposition between the primitive (irrational) and the civilised (rational) poles of man's nature', and in 'a universe in which certainty is both essential and impossible, superstition is no less viable than rationality.'

This is a philosophy with a long history. In the 20th century it might almost be called the unofficial social theory of the novel. But Boyle's version is particularly unsatisfactory because he gives little evidence of being able to imagine what the superstitious intimacy of human relationships might actually be like. He appears to have no feeling for the primitive values he espouses. On the contrary, the characters he realises most successfully are self-absorbed egomaniacs….

When Boyle's characters do manage to connect, interaction is usually lubricated by water or alcohol. In 'Greasy Lake', one of his best stories, three teenagers have to drive to the shores of the lake in order to find the drunken excitement for which they have been searching unsuccessfully all evening…. This parallel between water and alcohol (and the dangers inherent in both) is made explicit in 'If the River Was Whiskey', the story of a family splitting up as the result of the man's alcoholism. Father and son talk only when sharing a beer or fishing on the lake, but when the father dreams of being separated from his son, he sees him drowning.

There are many such drownings in Boyle's fiction;… his lakes are littered with floating corpses, in case we forget that water and alcohol can dissolve individuality as well as lubricate sociability. The starkest of these stories is 'Drowning', in which a girl sunbathing at the edge of the water is repeatedly raped while, five hundred yards along the beach, the one person who might have saved her swims out to sea and drowns unobserved. It is a chilling but unsatisfactory tale, and it raises the question of whether the author could have written a convincing story in which the victim and her potential saviour were not just well-greased monads moving in synchronisation, but individuals able to intervene in one another's lives. No doctor sealed the bathers into separate bubbles, but Boyle gives them no more chance of meeting than the lovers in 'Modern Love'.