His characters are soigne derelicts, underground depressives Boyle has a wonderful eye - and ear - for its social ironies and its rarefied incongruities. It is a subculture that has always lent itself well to a kind of native anthropological comedy, and Mr. ![]() Mobile demi-monde inhabited by gracelessly aging flower-children who have grown more aimless, strapped for money and dependent on drugs. Boyle's chosen milieu is that seedy, downwardly If the larger patterns of this picaresque parable are situated within the perennial geography of American mythology and folklore, its particulars are rooted - or mired - in a very contemporary soil. ![]() Boyle - the author of one well-received novel and a collection of short stories - may be less than sure-footed as a novelist, but he is a humorist of the first water. And by God I was rich.'').Ä«etween these two bits of quintessential Americana, the satirical, distinctly antipastoral and often quite hilarious action of ''Budding Prospects'' unfolds. I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. ![]() (''Plough deep, while Sluggards sleep and you shall have Corn to sell and to keep''), and the bragadoccio refrain of rugged adventurism from ''Death of a Salesman'' (''Why, boys, when The allegorical terrain of the comic novel '' Budding Prospects'' is ironically bracketed by its two epigraphs: a homely Benjamin Franklin adage advocating the virtues of planning, rationality and thrift May 19, 1984, Saturday, Late City Final Edition The New York Times: Book Review Search Article
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