Without a Hero: 9and Other Stories

Most effective of the 16 technically ingenious and rudely funny, satirical stories in Boyle's fourth collection are the sketches of disaffected individuals who take refuge in hermetic surroundings, self-help programs, political causes and conspicuous consumption to hold at bay the banal world of convention and compromise. In ``Big Game,'' Bernard Puff, impressario of Puff's African Game Ranch in Bakersfield, Calif., peddles a simulacrum of the African bush. His carefully nurtured fantasy world is punctured by the arrival of a cynical young real estate mogul who detects ``every crack in the plaster,'' and whose rapacious hunting leads to a grisly twist of fate when the animals revolt on the veldt. In ``Filthy with Things,'' a pathological couple whose home is sinking under the weight of their ``collectibles'' enlists the services of an evangelical professional organizer who banishes them to a ``nonacquisitive environment'' while she takes inventory of their astounding clutter (``three hundred and nine bookends, forty-seven rocking chairs and over two thousand plates, cups and saucers''). Other poignant tales tell of an ephemeral romance between a Russian and an American, the introduction of anti-drug rhetoric in a suburban grade school and the experience of growing up in postwar suburbia, a world Boyle regards with anxiety, nostalgia and a properly grim sense of humor. (May)