SOURCE: "Stories In Which the Unusual Is the Usual," in The New York Times, May 2, 1989, p. C18.

In the following review of If the River Was Whiskey, Kakutani contends that Boyle, now depicting yuppies rather than hippies, has here used his "disparate talents" to produce "showy, but shallow effects."

The America of T. Coraghessan Boyle is a wild and crazy place, where anything can happen. In his most recent novel (World's End), a garrulous epic that chronicled the fortunes of several generations of a single family, "the barbaric new world" of America spawned ghosts and demons, not to mention every imaginable variety of human eccentricity and prejudice. His collections of short stories (Greasy Lake and Other Stories, Descent of Man) have also tended to pivot around the strange and the surreal: neighboring survivalists, holed up in the wilderness to await the apocalypse, come to blows; a group of...