SOURCE: "Lost in the Funhouse," in The Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 9, No. 6, November-December, 1989, p. 5.

Below, Ulin favorably reviews If the River Was Whiskey.

T. Coraghessan Boyle has never been one to shy away from the challenges of his own imagination. Throughout the course of his career, he has written with astonishing energy and originality about a carnival of characters and situations; his work—and particularly his short work—is based on a willingness to be outrageous, to take risks, to tap into the essential absurdity of the universe and let it run its course. It's no surprise, therefore, that like his previous story collections, If the River Was Whiskey is a literary funhouse, its stories a set of crazy mirrors reflecting the odd mixture of the ridiculous and the sublime that has become Boyle's trademark.

What is surprising, though, is the topicality of this book, its sense of relation...