T. Coraghessan Boyle’s Greasy Lake is a short-story whose characters consist of a bunch of nineteen year old greasers who are considered experts in the social qraces once they achieve the following: “quick with a sneer, able to manage a Ford with lousy shocks over a rutted and gutted blacktop road at eighty-five while rolling a join as compact as a Tootsie Roll Pop stick” (Boyle 1). Boyle uses more references and allusions both topical and classical, stream-of-thought consciousness and fragmented reality than most modern writers, and his characters in this story reveal a sort of mindless, violent existence reminiscent of the teens portrayed in Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange. The plot basically revolves around a night of drunken mayhem on greasy lake, including violent beatings, destruction of property, attempted rape and murder. Thrown into the mayhem to create that much more chaos is a mixture of cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and other chemicals. These are real teens with no direction or skills, substance abuse problems and a bad attitude: “We were all dangerous characters then” (Boyle 1). What makes the characters interesting is that they are real because they seem like typical teenagers who want to party and cause trouble but this particular night something something comes over them which leads to murder.
Boyle’s writing is in the vein of magical realism, and this short story is good evidence of that particular style. Helping him in his creation of it is the use of prose that, as one critic comments, “Boyle’s prose has always been a potent mix of rhythmical line, telling metaphor and vigorous, offbeat description” (Cryer, 2). We see this in Greasy Lake over and over as Boyle uses prose in a way to make the reality of the environment of the story more palpable. In one particular snippet or fragment of narration, and Boyle’s prose reads like so
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