Word games

Tooth and Claw
By T. Coraghessan Boyle
Viking, 284 pp., $25.95

There has never been any doubt that T. C. Boyle can write. The question that has dogged his remarkable oeuvre is whether he can resist overwriting. ''Tooth and Claw," his seventh story collection, provides a familiar answer: not really.

That said, Boyle is rarely a boring writer.

''She let her mind go numb with the night and the sweet released odors of the leaves they crushed underfoot," he writes in the ''The Doubtfulness of Water," which recounts a dowager's arduous journey from Boston to New York in 1702. A bit farther on, he adds, ''The leaves were in color, the dragonflies glazed and hovering over the shadows in the road ahead, and in the clearings goldenrod nodding bright on a thousand stalks." Such passages are so lyrical and evocative that we happily lose ourselves in the spell of the story and forgive its rather shapeless course.

''Dogology" is another irresistible romp. The story features a female PhD candidate who slowly (and quite convincingly) gives up her human life to run with the local canine pack. ''She'd made a point of sticking [her nose] in anything the dogs did, breathing deep of it, rebooting the olfactory receptors of a brain that had been deadened by perfume and underarm deodorant and all the other stifling odors of civilization."

The story deftly plumbs the inextricable conflict between man's rational capacities and his animalistic urges, a theme Boyle has been examining, in one way or another, since his debut collection, 1979's ''Descent of Man."

''Swept Away" tells the story of Robbie Baikie, a shy Prince fan from the blustery British isle of Unst who falls hard for a visiting ornithologist. ''There was something inhuman in a passion so intense as that -- it was a rabbity love, a tup's love, and it was bound to come crashing down to earth, just as the Artist lamented so memorably in 'When Doves Cry,' " the narrator tells us.

Boyle is at the top of his game here -- wry, playful, and generous toward his tenderhearted lovers, even as they are torn asunder.

Unfortunately, for all his exotic settings and clever hooks, there is rarely much at stake in his stories. He becomes a writer more enamored of his own prose than his characters, and it shows.

''The Kind Assassin" is narrated by an FM shock jock named Boomer who hopes to break the world record for staying awake. Boomer doesn't talk much like a shock jock, though. He uses words such as ''integument" and ''indite" and ''cannonading" -- T. C. Boyle words. His metaphors are showy and imprecise: ''His voice was like Karo syrup poured through an echo box." ''Tony [slipped] out of the booth like a knife pulled from a corpse."

And there's no drama here. A vague love interest shows up halfway through, but she makes no real impact on Boomer. Nothing does, not even his lack of sleep. His madness is vaguely described and brings us no closer to his heart. The story is a stunt. The same can be said of ''Jubilation" and ''Blinded by the Light," broad satires that manage to take potshots at topics (planned communities and global warming, respectively) that deserve a deeper psychological treatment.

Boyle has long shown a fascination for stories in which addiction and the hubris of youth collide. But none in this latest collection feels urgent in the way his earliest fiction did. It's hard to care much about his feckless protagonists, because Boyle has no sustained compassion for them. The arrangement comes to feel cynical after a time.

''Here Comes" is the most obvious example. It tells the story of a young man, Raymond, on the verge of becoming homeless. But we get no real sense of how Raymond was brought low. Instead, we wallow in his misery, from the moment we encounter him waking on a city sidewalk. ''A woman who must have had three hundred pounds packed like mocha fudge into the sausage skin of her monumental blue-and-white-flecked top and matching toreador pants stepped daintily over the splayed impediment of his legs and shot him a look of disgust."

Mocha fudge? Sausage skin? Toreador pants? Does anyone honestly believe such a woman exists? Or is she simply a way for the author to humiliate his leading man?

Later in the story, Raymond considers seeking the mercy of his ex-girlfriend. ''But Dana's face was like a cleaver, sharp and shining and merciless, and it cleaved and chopped till he had no choice but to get out the door or leave his limbs and digits behind." How one wishes Boyle had ended the sentence with ''cleaver." But he is the sort of author who can never quite restrain his virtuosity, even when it comes to seem more like grandstanding.

The most telling example is ''Chicxulub," the chilling account of two parents who are called to the hospital to identify the body of their daughter. Finally, Boyle has staked himself to a situation with real emotional consequences. The story has moments of crushing beauty. But it also has lines like this: ''My wife nods, the wet ropes of her hair beating at her shoulders like the flails of the penitents."

If the narrator were the sort of guy prone to histrionics, such an image might make sense. But he's not. He's a quiet, suburban dad trying desperately to distance himself from reality. The melodramatic metaphor comes not from him, but from the author.

I say all this as a longtime fan of Boyle's. There is little doubt he is one of the most inventive writers of our age. If only he felt more for his characters, and flogged the language less on their behalf, he might also be one of our finest.

Steve Almond is the author, most recently, of the story collection ''The Evil B. B. Chow and Other Stories." See ''Bookings," below, for information on a local appearance by T. C. Boyle.