Without a hero

Fifteen stories make up this collection, the fourth of T. Coraghessan Boyle's to appear in book form. Several of them take on Ernest Hemingway's view of masculinity and risk, and Boyle tests that view against the modern world.

The title story "Big Game" sets its safari not in Africa but on a Southern California ranch where clients pay to shoot animals. The hunt includes an elephant and its aftermath. Its debts to Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and Green Hills of Africa are plain, but Boyle writes for a time when ecology matters more than the old idea of limitless wilderness.

Elsewhere the book covers a wide range of American types: a college football player who has never tasted victory, a businessman who opens a clinic for compulsive buying, a couple searching for the last toads on earth, and a boy torn between childhood innocence and adult cynicism in "The Fog Man." Some pieces are very funny, while others reveal more about human nature through Boyle's sharp look at what people keep hidden.