Fiction: As well as the 10 novels he has published, TC Boyle has also been productive on the shorter fiction front. Tooth and Claw is his seventh book of stories.
The 14 tales in the collection range in time from the early 18th century to the present and in geography from the Scottish highlands to 21st-century America.
Given the spread of period and place, it's almost inevitable that some pieces won't work as well as others. But the line that runs thematically through this book, that frontier between the wild and the ostensibly tame, between the acceptable and the questionable, between organised society and the wilderness, is a thread strong enough to hold the collection and the reader together.
At his best, as in the stories When I Woke Up This Morning Everything I Had Was Gone, Dogology, Chicxulub, All the Wrecks I've Crawled Out Of and Up Against the Wall, Boyle is sharp, incisive, master of his characters and their voices and, often, potently moving.
It's impossible to read When I Woke Up This Morning Everything I Had Was Gone, the opening story in this collection, without being moved and the closing sentence of that story is one of the most redemptive and unexpected I've ever had the good fortune to find. Chicxulub, a story in which the love-making of a middle-aged couple is disturbed by a phone call telling them that their young daughter has been involved in a serious road accident, is chilling. In the instant of the call all fantasy, excitement, possibility and romance are washed out of the picture and we're left with two frightened people staggering into whatever clothes they can find, rushing to the hospital, facing a nightmare that ends with Boyle's beautiful but still painful resolution.
Boyle constantly produces nuggets of keen observation. In Dogology there's a line where a woman sees "the million silver bits of the rain boring into the ground". Or in Chicxulub there's the credible but terrifying moment where the father of the road accident victim is confronted by a nurse in the emergency unit:
For one resounding moment that thumps in my ear and thumps again, I can't remember my daughter's name - I can picture her leaning into the mound of textbooks spread out on the dining room table, the glow of the overhead light making a nimbus of her hair as she glances up at me with a glum look and a half rueful smile, as if to say, It's all in a day's work for a teenager, Dad, and you're lucky you're not in high school any more, but her name is gone.
"Maddy," my wife says. "Madeleine Biehn."
One or two stories didn't work for me, the points seemed laboured, but even in these Boyle remains master of atmosphere, possibility and landscape. Whether it's "the solemn drapery of the forest" or that deeper, more difficult landscape of the mind where "the emotional wrecks are the worst. You can't see the scars, but they're there, and they're a long time in healing".
Again, when it comes to mood, Boyle moves from the wonderful farce of gated America in Jubilation to the terrible but beautiful sadness of Up Against the Wall with style but, much more importantly, with the grace of a craftsman.
John MacKenna is a novelist, short-story writer and playwright. His book, Things You Should Know, will be published by New Island this autumn. He is currently working on a new collection of short stories and a play
Tooth and ClawBy TC Boyle Bloomsbury, 284pp. £10.99