What are we to make of Mr Boyle?

Back in professional yachting days, my way of keeping in touch with the best writing around was the New Yorker magazine. If you aren’t aware of the magazine, you might well think it odd to look to America, and that country’s regular slaughter of the English tongue, to see new trends in literature. 

However, the magazine had very high writing standards, and commissioned top writers for some really excellent short stories.

I confess that I didn’t invest in a subscription. Well, I seldom knew when I'd be on terra firma and, anyway, because South African libraries did.

Within a few hours of reaching a port in that distant land, usually magnificent Cape Town, I would pass many hours catching up on trends, and on the magazine's gifted contributors.

Short story brilliance

These days, the web version of New Yorker magazine has quite a campaign going in UK to attract customers.

You don’t need to subscribe to get a taste of what the magazine rates as short story brilliance.

 They do keep prompting you for a subscription, I should admit, but you won’t need a degree in computing to avoid it. However, if you have the funds and want to, it certainly seems a good investment. I don’t, thanks to extreme injustice which is why I am obliged to make do with the freebies.

And this weekend it introduced me to a new writer – new to me – who seems to have been around for some time, quite long enough to have had a library of novels and short stories published.

 I got to know T. Coraghessan Boyle’s short story I Walk Between the Raindrops this weekend. Apparently, he was known as the less challenging T C Boyle.

 As I sit here before the pc telling you about it a few hours later, I confess I really don’t know what to make of it.

A strange woman approaches

 The story is told is such a strange way... I mean, we are in the thoughts of the writer as he arrives in a bar, waiting for his wife.

A – well - nutter of a woman approaches him and gets short shrift. He moves to another part of the bar and she follows. Then he complains to management about her.

 This might be the stage when his insensitivity causes the reader to stop reading, perhaps preferring instead to lodge a complaint about his lack of humanity.
Continues on the blogs for my ocean adventure book, Sailing to Purgatory, at SailingToPurgatory.com