It can be said of T.C. Boyle that no one who writes as much writes nearly as well, and that would include such celebrated authors as Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth and the late John Updike. Boyle has written novels based on the lives of Kinsey, Frank Lloyd Wright and John Harvey Kellogg, as well as novels of social importance, such as “The Tortilla Curtain” and “Riven Rock.” Thus, one of the pleasures of following this writer’s career is that we never know where it will take us. Boyle is both a wonderful stylist and an acute observer of contemporary mores, a kind of 21st century Trollope with an antic muse. Having said that, Boyle’s fiction doesn’t really lend itself to paraphrase. His gorgeous, layered prose, doubling and tripling back on itself within a paragraph, would require some kind of literary GPS yet to be invented to chart a path through it, but fortunately that’s not necessary. All readers have to do is find a purchase and hold on for the ride. In “Wild Child and Other Stories,” his 21st book, Boyle brings together a dizzying variety of stories having to do with fires, mudslides, anarchic school boards and the strange story of a feral boy found wandering in the French countryside in the 18th century to form a brilliant mosaic in which each tile has its own place.

While it’s not easy to keep all these elements in harmony, in the best of his stories Boyle manages to balance brilliantly the prosaic and exotic. In “The Lie,” for example, he tells the story of Jim, bored with his dead-end job and lifeless marriage, who is perplexed by the way life has turned out for him. jcpenney lisette sheer curtains“I used to be in a band. baroque grommet top 84 inch curtain panel pairI had a college degree. curtains schoolboy q ruthlessI was no drudge,” he thinks, and yet his life has devolved into drudgery, bickering with his wife, minding their baby, going back and forth to work. He yearns for a way out. “There was nothing heroic in what I did next, dealing with the baby and my own car and the stalled nose-to-tail traffic that made the three miles to the babysitter seem like a trek across the wastelands of the earth — it was just life, that was all.”

Just life, but as it turns out, overwhelming enough to make the character tell a monstrous lie that in the end yields him permanent release from life as he’s known it. Since Boyle lives in California, it makes sense that traffic plays a large part in his fiction, along with the natural disasters that plague that state. Such things might be of only passing interest to most of us, but for Gordon, the main character in “La Conchita,” traffic and a mudslide threaten both his livelihood and a woman’s life. Gordon makes deliveries, but his cargo is a bit unusual — human organs to be taken within a short time to operating rooms where desperate people are waiting. “I don’t know if the average person really has much of an idea of what a mudslide involves,” Boyle writes. “I certainly didn’t — not before I started driving for a living, anyway. You’d see footage on the six o’clock news, telephone poles down, trees knocked askew, a car or two flattened and a garage staved in but it didn’t seem like much.

It wasn’t hot lava, wasn’t an earthquake or one of the firestorms that burned through this subdivision or that and incinerated a couple hundred homes every fall. Maybe it was the fault of the term itself — mudslide. It sounded innocuous, almost cozy, as if it might be one of the new attractions at Magic Mountain, or vaguely sexy, like the mud-wrestling that was all the rage when I was in high school.” But if most of Boyle’s stories are at the least unusual and often filled with tension, he’s occasionally sweet, if not sentimental. In “Three Quarters of the Way to Hell,” for example, he tells the story of Johnny Bandon, a down-and-out singer with a drug problem, and Darlene, a woebegone chanteuse, who get together to cut an unlikely Christmas CD in a Manhattan recording studio. Though it seems unlikely that Johnny is going to be able to stay straight long enough to finish the gig, Darlene is surprised by what actually develops. “Something happened as soon as Johnny opened his mouth, and it had happened to her before, happened plenty, but it was the last thing she’d expected from a session like this . . .

She couldn’t help herself. She took Johnny’s lead and she flew, and so what if it was corny, so what if the glockenspiel was a cliche out of some fluffy nostalgic place and time nobody could remember and the arrangement was pure chintz? She flew and so did he.” Which is a pretty good description of the prose of T.C. Boyle. When it works, it flies — and even when it doesn’t work, it’s still better than almost anything else. Although the title story didn’t work completely for me as fiction, there’s more than enough here to make this one of the outstanding collections we’ll see this year. David Milofsky is a Denver novelist and professor of English at Colorado State University. You can reach him at david.milofsky@colostate.edu. by T.C. Boyle, $25.95Phil Brownlee is a composer, sound artist, and sound engineer, based in Wellington, New Zealand. As a composer of concert music, his work is published under the name Philip Brownlee. As well as composing concert music, he is also interested in working with recorded sound, improvised performance, and collaborative approaches to sound-making.

See the Biography page for more information. This Friday, 22 April, at 7pm NZST, Radio New Zealand Concert will broadcast the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra’s Kaleidoscope Colours concert from June last year. This includes the premiere of Ko te tātai whetū, the piece for taonga pūoro and orchestra composed in collaboration with Ariana Tikao. The complete concert also includes music by Peter Sculthorpe, Lissa Meridan, and Béla Bartók. Thanks to Darryl Stack, David Houston, and Andrew Collins for the beautiful recording. I don’t think this is the first broadcast, but this time I’ve spotted it before it happens. A video of the premiere of Ko te tātai whetū is now online: Performed by Ariana Tikao, with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ben Northey. Recorded at the Airforce Museum, Wigram, Christchurch, on 13 June 2015. Audio recorded by Radio New Zealand Concert, filmed and edited by Chris Watson for the Resound Project for SOUNZ.

My heartfelt thanks to everyone involved in the project, and especially to Ariana for the rich collaborative relationship. I wonder what else we might make together. I’ve been collaborating with Ariana Tikao on a concerto for taonga pūoro and orchestra. The piece was commissioned by the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, and we’re very grateful for their support and commitment to the project. We’ve also been working with Dr Richard Nunns, and it’s been wonderful to work with Richard again. Ko te tātai whetū will have its premiere on Saturday 13 June, at the Air Force Museum of NZ, in Wigram. Details of the concert are here. It’s that time of year again. Ben Hoadley is presenting a concert of woodwind music by New Zealand composers at St Andrews on the Terrace in Wellington. Rowena Simpson and Kamala Bain will be performing Night Countdown, and the programme also includes pieces by Douglas Lilburn, Helen Fisher, Robbie Ellis, James Gardner, and Ross Harris.

Wednesday 13 May, 12:15 pm St Andrews on the Terrace, Wellington There’s also a concert in Auckland on Friday 15 May, with a different programme. My friends Rowena Simpson (soprano) and Kamala Bain (recorders) are giving two concerts in Wellington next week. The programme is titled Travelling Spirits, and features old and new music for voice and recorder. The new music includes pieces by Nicola LeFanu, John Rodgers, Karel van Steenhoven, Lyell Cresswell, Dorothy Ker, Helen Fisher, as well as the première of my new piece, Night Countdown, commissioned by Rowena and Kamala. Wednesday 29 October, 12.15-1.00pm at St Marks Church, 58 Woburn Rd, Lower Hutt Sunday 2 November, 2.00-3.00pm at Futuna Chapel, Friend St, Karori, Wellington There’s a review of the New Zealand Music for Woodwind concert on the Middle C site, written by Frances Robinson. It seems she enjoyed Stolen Time: The piece unfolded as a delicate counterpoint between the two solo voices, opening with a spare unison melody that evoked, for me, images of Fiordland bush in the dead of night.

There we can indeed steal time from our over-busy urban lives, and listen to the enquiring bird calls that cut into the matchless silence of the rainforest.  The recorder floated on top with light, trilling, fluid lines, over intermittent calls from a Kiwi exploring a few notes outside its normal range, and the occasional honk of a bittern. All closed into the night time silence with another spare, fading unison line…… I was left hoping that we will hear more of Philip Brownlee’s wind writing in future. I’m intrigued by the way she’s formed an interpretation that relates the sounds of the music to something from her own experience. From the composer’s point of view, I’d call that a success, at least for this particular listener. Ben Hoadley’s annual New Zealand Music for Woodwind concert is coming up on 14 May. This year it features music by Kenneth Young, Gillian Whitehead, Natalie Hunt, and the première of my new piece, Stolen Time, for recorder and dulcian, written for Ben and Kamala Bain.

The concert’s part of the St Andrew’s on the Terrace Lunchtime Concert Series: Wednesday 14 May, 12:15 pm, St Andrews on the Terrace, Wellington. This coming weekend, Auckland ensemble 175 East will be performing Tendril and Nebula, at Q Theatre in Auckland. Music by Dorothy Ker and James Saunders is also on the programme.Sunday 8 December, 8pm, 305 Queen Street, Auckland. Tendril and Nebula was commissioned by 175 East in 1999 (my first professional commission!), and I’m very much looking forward to revisiting it with them. On the Middle C website, Peter Mechen has published a review of Stroma’s Mirror of Time 2 concert, which included my new piece, Canzona per sonare: Degraded Echoes. …the opening tones “summoned” as it seemed from faraway places, a sombre medieval sound made of long-held lines from strings and recorder, the lines and harmonies vying with the actual timbres, giving we listeners the opportunity to think spatially, or else indulge our preoccupations.