Friday's Forgotten Book: Budding Prospects

T. Coraghessan Boyle is probably my favorite living short story writer. The archetypal Boyle narrator/protagonist –- a too-intellectual sad sack, half-clinging to hippie ideals he no longer believes in or lives by, easily led around by the pecker, battered by whatever societal or natural disaster catches the author’s fancy this time -– is a surprisingly hardy fellow, a regular Buster Keaton figure. You welcome him turning up in story after story, surviving all sorts of out-there scenarios.

In the novels, though, that same character can come to seem like a bit of a straw man.

Not so in Budding Prospects, his second novel.

Lighter than anything else I’ve read by him, this is a pretty straightforward comic novel -- a marriage of the traditions of the “fuck-up” novel and the heist novel -- about a simple plan to grow and sell some marijuana in northern California.

The novel begins:

I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town. About the only thing I didn't give up on was the summer camp.

Let me tell you about it.

If you need more convincing, and you’ve never read T.C. Boyle before, check out one of those story collections first.