Grin Reaping

Grin Reaping catalogues the foibles of the fictional Boyle family. In a series of fourteeninterconnected short stories and musings, Rudy Boyle, a Northern Ontario college Englishteacher stuck both in middle age and in the middle of his five siblings, transforms the strangenessof his everyday life into exaggerated home-movie prose. From the significance of tuna fish andBotox, the threat of coyotes and aliens, to the big-ticket items of mortality, gender, climate-change, and Armageddon, Rudy tackles a range of topics with a wry, self-deprecating wit. As hevariously shares such snippets, he exaggerates small and mundane situations into comiccelebrations of the life of the mind, never letting the truth get in the way of a great story. Hisreminiscences deal not only with the absurdities of human nature, but also encompass the grief oflosing family. Rudy is bedeviled by neurosis, and cowed before the insignificant things in hisworld. He talks largely about small matters and trivially about great affairs. It is the nature of hisdilemma and the dilemma of his nature.