Word: boyds
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Doyle Alexander (17-5) gave up four runs on four hits, including Mike Easler's two-run homer in the second inning. Alexander struck out seven and walked one. Boston starter Dennis Boyd (12-11) took the loss...
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 Côte 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 cafés or easy women who turn out to be hard...
...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...
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...
...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...