Response to T.C. Boyle's "The Love of My Life"

"...clouds the color of iron filings, the lake hammered to iron too, and the storm that crashed through the trees beat at their tent with a thousand angry fists."  What an awesome line!  When I read this, I had a vivd image in my head of what the clouds would have looked like.  Cool.

For the beginning of this story to be successful, Boyle had to use something unconventional to pull the story up from something cliche.  It could have gone downhill so fast because teenage love is just sappy and shallow and we've heard that all before.  I think his language, his diction is the aspect that saves this story from being that.  So many times he uses descriptions that I have not heard, many of them gruesome too--"He never gave a thought to what lay discarded in the Dumpster out back, itself wrapped in plastic, so much meat, so much cold meat."  But this diction was so relevant to the character of Jeremy.  He can't say that he threw away his own baby; it had to be lifeless and non-human for him to be able to justify his actions.  But what an awful justification.

From the beginning of the short story I was not expecting the ending in any way.  I did not know that this had been a news story, so if I had I may have clued in sooner.  But the events leading up to her pregnancy weren't my favorite.  He did, however, include a deeper conflict when they were camping and China told Jeremy "I will never be like those breeders that bring their puffed-up squalling little red-faced babies to class."  Then I figured she would probably get pregnant.  But the pregnancy that did happen was far out of what I would have believed would happen.  And that made the couple's relationship from the beginning much more significant.

I just can't say enough about Boyle's imagery.  I scanned through the story after I read it just to read my favorite lines again.