Beastly Affairs

By Pico Iyer

ON THE YANKEE STATION by William Boyd

Morrow; 217 pages; $12.95

William Boyd's leading men tend to be ham-fisted brutes in a state of eternal frustration. Their weighty (245 Ibs.) prototype is Morgan Leafy, the splenetic diplomat at the center of Boyd's first novel, A Good Man in Africa. That account of coming of age in western Africa, published in the U.S. two years ago when Boyd was 30, certified him as a connoisseur of twits and cads. It also showcased Boyd's gift for spinning out old-fashioned tales that bounce along as smartly as a scriptwriter on holiday. Now, in his first collection of stories, the young author has edged a little closer to the genre of savage British satire written by such masters as Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis.

Throughout On the Yankee Station, Boyd's aspiring lechers either vent or invent grievances all the way from California to France and from Africa to Viet Nam. Yet however exotic the horizon, the foreground is always grungy. The sea along the Cote d'Azur is "filled with weed and feces from an untreated sewage outlet"; Cameroon is "a stinking, sweaty country," of insects and imbroglios; California beaches are littered with derelicts and bums; and just about everywhere, there are washed-out blonds in greasy cafes or easy women who turn out to be hard.

Humanity itself is here an endangered species. One story introduces a cheap carnival girl whose "act" requires her to spend all day being licked by a bat; another implicitly compares the hero's lickerish mother to a pleasure-loving lizard; a third likens the members of a platoon to an anteater, a peafowl, a civet cat and other zoo dwellers. To make so beastly a world bearable, an author should ensure that disgust is in his characters' minds and not in his own. At this Boyd does not invariably succeed. In the title story, for example, a G.I. in Saigon undresses a shy local whore only to find that her back has been grotesquely scarred by napalm; in another, a sexual innocent is initiated by a beefy drab with blue-veined thighs and blood on her fingers from the abattoir, where she sorts out tubs of "shivering, gelid, brown and purple guts."

Elsewhere, Boyd chooses to speak in the flat tones of people who seem quite foreign to him: the California pieces feel as if they have been patched together from David Hockney prints, late-night movies and a dictionary of American slang. Their sudden, destructive conclusions ultimately seem less forceful than forced.

In his best tales, however, Boyd places a safe comic distance between himself and his protagonists. Two stories involve the return of the indestructible Leafy, still itching, still conniving, still cursing with undiminished gusto. The others feature like-minded louts stranded in such all-male preserves as Army barracks and boarding schools. At the beginning of the finest of them, Hardly Ever, an adolescent notes gloomily that his rugby teammates are "asthmatics, fatsos, spastics every one" and forlornly lusts after the heroine in The Rape of the Lock. By the end, he is chastely wooing a schoolgirl, while maddening his chums with lubricious tales of his "conquest." The pleasure of such stories lies in their refusal of violent climaxes. Exasperations, after all, last far longer than explosions, while survivors tend to be funnier than casualties, and often much sadder.

--By Pico Iyer