“Wild Child”

The mind of T.C. Boyle seems to be chock-full of stories that do not discriminate against time, location, or even sense. Some of his ideas come alive on paper in “Wild Child: and Other Stories,” a dizzying array of 14 short stories. The title story is a fictionalized version of the tale of Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron in France. Victor’s stepmother slit his throat and left him for dead in the woods, but he survives, feral and living with animals. Boyle’s other stories run the gamut from a woman finding a stray tiger in her backyard to a father begging for few days off work by telling his boss that his baby has died. The Los Angeles Times comments: “Potent, indelible glimpses of California — loaded to the gills with dark humor, natural disasters and brushes with Botox — abound throughout ‘Wild Child’ … [while] other California apocalypses are quieter, emotional affairs that build up and up, only to send the fault lines in relationships buckling wide open.” T.C. Boyle is a “wild child” in his own right, as his writing shows; his stories veer off in different directions, bounding giddily along from one topic to the next.