Tc Boyle's Greasy Lake

T.C. Boyle’s Greasy Lake T.C. Boyle’s Greasy Lake is a short fiction that focuses on three young men in the 1960s. A time when the narrator says, it was good to be bad, when young people cultivated decadence like a taste. The three young privileged men take a night out on the town at Greasy Lake, when they can drink, smoke, listen to music, and howl at the moon. This story can be seen as a representation of Boyle’s teenage years as he refers to himself as a sort of pampered punk. As described in the beginning, the three are young privileged individuals, just out of school for the summer, cruising around their town in the narrator’s family station wagon. All three are nineteen years old and the narrator considers them ‘bad characters.’ According to Michael Walker’s on Boyle’s ‘Greasy Lake’ and the Moral Failure of Postmodernism, “the narrator of this story is not only as old as Boyle himself, but has much the same background. Boyle, born in 1948, would have been 19 in 1967,...” so the events that the narrator goes through while may not exactly be an …show more content…
A coming-of-age story, "Greasy Lake" depicts the evening of three suburban teenage boys in search of an outlet for their energy and frustrated passions. Their wanderings take them to Greasy Lake, where they encounter more and darker adventure than they anticipated, including a ravaged car, battered faces, and a dead biker. A would-be bad boy at the beginning of the story, the narrator is distinctly different at the end; when a girl offers a good time of sex and drugs, saying, "Hey, you want to party, you want to do some of these with me and Sarah?" the chastened narrator is unable even to speak. Generally acclaimed for its wide range of narrative techniques and voices, this second story collection also received praise as serious social commentary in a comic