SOURCE: "Corn," in London Review of Books, Vol. 16, No. 1, January 6, 1994, pp. 19-20.

In the excerpt below, Bull comments on Boyle's The Collected Stories, nothing the opposition between body and reason and the prominence of such motifs as water and alcohol.

If Haile Selassie, whom some remember as a bit of a biker from his days of exile in the West of England, had been stretched to 6′3″ and given a part in Easy Rider, he would have looked rather like Tom Coraghessan Boyle as he appears on the front of the Collected Stories—an improbable confection of soulful eyes, hollow cheeks, frizzy facial hair and black leather. But although the impression that Boyle is a low-life lion of the interstates is strenuously maintained by his publishers—who report that he was a child of the Sixties, 'a maniacal crazy-driver' who ate anything he could lay his hands on, bought...