Is TC Boyle calling his teenage protagonist a dog?

My first take on T.C. Boyle's Balto.


You spend an afternoon drinking bottles of wine and cognac with your mistress when you realize you're extraordinarily late to pick up your adolescent and school age daughters from school. Your mistress drives off as soon as the valet brings her sports car around and as you get behind the wheel, you realize the booze has hit you harder than you thought. So, you pick up your teenage daughter and ask her to drive you home.

This is the premise of Boyle's Balto, the fourth story in BASS. I'm thrilled to report that the main characters in this story are under 45 (at least), but the jury's still out on how much I liked this story.

Last week, SynecdoChick mentioned that the characters in this story are white, rich people, and while I wouldn't argue that the father is rich in this story, he's losing everything. He's lost his wife - she's gone off (or back - considering that the girls have French names) to Paris. He's lost his car after letting his daughter behind the wheel. He looks like he's about to lose his job if he keeps taking long,liquid lunches, and he's about to lose his children. Am I right in guessing, Synedoc, that there's a bourgeoise trope of having it all, but losing it slowly?

The story of Balto, the sleigh dog that brings vaccine to Inuit children dying from diptheria, comes into play after the daughter hits another child while driving her drunken father's car. The daughter has to testify before child services and lie
to protect him so he won't lose them. Or more importantly (b/c it's implied that her mother is gone and not coming back), that she doesn't lose her family.

Why am I undecided? Boyle switches back and forth between dual points of view easily. But I feel really strongly about the scenario where the father asks his daughter to help by driving for him because he's too drunk. It strikes me as selfish and reckless. While I have a twinge of sympathy for the father, I feel extraordinarily sadden for the teenage protagonist, who is essentially an orphan or will be by the time her father is through. But then again, I wonder if this is a successful story, then for making me feel this much?

I am still waiting for the edgy, culturally diverse fiction by unestablished and maybe writers who were born after the Johnson administration. Is it that there is so little quality fiction from this age group? Is it that a pack of established writers that defined short fiction for decades is getting older? Or is it that the publications have an older, white baby-boomer audience, ergo they have stories about older, white baby-boomers? I don't know.

If you could say anything to this author about this story, what would it be?

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SynecdoChick’s Review of “Balto” (Best American Short Stories 2007)

“There are two kinds of truths, good truths and hurtful ones” (55). Now that’s a first line …


I found this story compelling from the very beginning. I criticized “Solid Wood”—probably unfairly—because not enough happened. As Fiction Anemic rightly corrected me, the interior action of the characters can be all the action a story needs. Maybe “Solid Wood” seemed to be lacking not so much because nothing happened, but because there seemed to be so little at stake. All the action that mattered happened in the characters’ pasts. “Balto” is compelling because there is a great deal at stake for the characters—their actions will have significant consequences in the present tense.

I also liked the way Boyle structured this story—at first the reader isn’t sure what has happened or what it is that the lawyer is asking Angelle to do. On a first reading, I was propelled to the end just to find out what Boyle meant by that first line and to find out what Angelle would say in the courtroom. In the end, the reader isn’t sure whether Angelle confessed because it was the right thing to do or whether it was simply an act of adolescent rebellion. It reminded me of the ending of John Updike’s “A&P”—you’re not sure about the character's true motivations, but you’re sure the character’s life will never be the same.

Boyle is such a skillful storyteller that it’s easy to overlook any faults in the story. For example, on the first page of the story, Angelle thinks deeply about the metaphor “crow’s feet,” relating the image to Edgar Allen Poe’s famous raven. Is this a likely train of thought for a 13-year-old?

I also wondered how the tale of Balto functioned in the story? Why was it significant enough to be referenced in the title? I know T.C. Boyle has written extensively about Alaska … but how is that story-within-a-story related to the story Boyle is telling here?

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