Word: boyds
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...YANKEE STATION by William Boyd...
...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...
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...
Second, the Sox have a long history of rushing players through their farm system. Boston has one of the best farm systems around, but player after player from Rogilio Moret, to Gary Hancock, to Oil Can Boyd this year, was pushed too fast and suffered for it. Now, no player will tell the team he needs another year in the minors, but Lee drives home the point that the team's desire to win at the moment hurt it in the long...