T. C. Boyle
BIO
T. C. Boyle is the author of eleven novels, including World's End (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award), Drop City (a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award), and The Inner Circle. His most recent story collections are Tooth and Claw and The Human Fly and Other Stories.
AUTHOR TALK
February 13, 2009
T.C. Boyle, whose previous novels have centered on historical figures such as John Harvey Kellogg and Alfred C. Kinsey, tackles Frank Lloyd Wright in his latest work of fiction, THE WOMEN. In this interview, Boyle explains what attracted him to these strong personalities and points out the differences between Wright's creative process and his own. He also compares historical and contemporary fiction, shares his experiences living in a house designed by the famous architect himself, and discusses his current and future projects.
Question: How long have you lived in the George C. Stewart house? What is it like to inhabit a Wright design?
T.C. Boyle: My wife and I and our three children have lived here for sixteen years. During that time we have done out best to restore it, a task that included sanding and refinishing the woodwork with Wright’s own mixture of linseed oil and turpentine, doing an earthquake retrofit and jacking up the east end of the house, which had been listing toward the rising sun, in order to pour foundations. The experience of living here is otherwise rich and varied, the landscape lush, the lines of the house, with its layered battens, as dramatic as those of an Aztec temple. In short, it’s pretty cool.
Q: Did you always plan to write a novel about Wright? What draws you to a particular subject?
TCB: Ever since we moved in, I’d wanted to learn as much as I could about the architect, by way of understanding and appreciating how his genius had touched us personally. Throughout my time here I had contemplated writing about aspects of his furiously complicated life and work, but other books and subjects intervened. Finally, in 2006, I began research and completed writing in July, a year later.
Q: In addition to Wright, you’ve also written novels about John Harvey Kellogg and Alfred C. Kinsey. If you had to choose between being Kellogg, Kinsey, or Wright, whom would you pick and why?
TCB: Each of these three hugely influential figures of the twentieth century was an egomaniac and a narcissist who could not relate to people except as they fit into his scheme. Novelists are a lot like that. Which is why, I suppose, I am attracted to such figures. On the other hand, each led a life that would have put me in the mental hospital within a year. So, I’ll equivocate: none of the above.
Q: What’s more fun to write, historical or contemporary fiction? What kind of obligation do you feel to a historical subject (e.g. Wright)?
TCB: I get a charge (obviously) out of both the contemporary and historical settings. In fact, creating art --- living in a dream most of the days of my life --- is a kind of miracle I will never tire of. As for my obligation to historical subjects, I feel no constraints whatever and follow the path the story lays out for me. That said, I do like to present these odd characters and odd bits of history as they actually happened for the great good fun of it. To my mind, history wasn’t necessarily made by generals and politicians, but by visionaries who changed the way we live and think. Wright, Kellogg and Kinsey certainly qualify in spades.
Q: Can you discuss your choice of narrator? Was there a real Tadashi Sato?
TCB: Tadashi Sato is an invented character, but of course the apprenticeship was international, and Wright was very much influenced by Japanese culture and architecture. If Tadashi didn’t actually exist, then he should have. Certainly there were any number of acolytes flocking to Taliesin to bask in the aura of the great man, and I like to think that Tadashi is representative of them.
Q: In the course of your research, what was the most revealing thing you discovered about Wright? What nonfiction resources would you recommend to someone interested in learning more about him?
TCB: The thing that most interested me about Wright was how different his method of creation was from my own. I need peace, serenity, beauty, a good dog, and a good night’s sleep in order to create. Wright needed scandal, lawsuits, animus, tumult, mayhem, and catastrophe just to feel alive and engaged. God bless him. It takes all kinds. As for nonfiction works on Wright, they are innumerable --- perhaps more books have been published on him and his work than practically any other figure of the past century, some one thousand or more. I list a number of the more engaging titles in my acknowledgments.
Q: Miriam’s presence dominates the book, inhabiting a good many of the chapters about Olga and closing Mamah’s section. Did she similarly dominate Wright’s life? Are the excerpts of Miriam’s letters real or did you create them?
TCB: Miriam came to dominate my life as well. She was a furious, heartbreaking, delusional and grandiose woman, and yet she was afflicted by the same needs and hungers that afflict us all: the need for security, love, affirmation. Make of her a figure of fun but also, on a deeper level, of tragedy. As for her letters, some are invented (after her style) and some paraphrased from the actual letters which were printed in the newspapers. Her scandals --- and those of Olgivanna, Kitty and Mamah --- made for the juiciest tabloid reading of the day.
Q: Why did you choose not to include more about Kitty and Wright’s first family?
TCB: This phase of Wright’s life, when he used his prodigious energies and genius to formulate his Prairie style and build the majority of his houses in the Midwest, could take up a book all on its own. But the story is more conventional than what was to follow and, perhaps, not quite as compelling or racy or tragic.
Q: In a footnote, you make a little dig at your own profession, writing, in describing one of Wright’s casual lovers: “like all novelists, she had unrealistic expectations” (p. 27). Do you think that authors tend to be more demanding in a romantic relationship than other people?
TCB: Authors tend to be more demanding in all modes of life than other people. They are, like Miriam, delusional. And they are, for the most part, not a pretty lot at all. Are there exceptions? Are there novelists as pure and shot-through with benignity as the saints themselves? Well, maybe one.
Q: In your view, are there similarities between writing fiction and architecture?
TCB: But of course. The architect constructs his drawings from the same sort of vision a novelist sees as he/she begins to construct a story with the bricks and mortar of words. The difference is in the improvisation. The architect, finally, works from plans, but we build our word-houses day by day, adding by accretion (and sometimes reducing by subtraction) until the ultimate shape reveals itself.
Q: What are you working on now?
TCB: Ah, what pure joy! Work is the essence of my life and the reason I am able to face the world each day (without coffee: I was born naturally caffeinated). For next year, I’ve already delivered a book of fourteen stories called WILD CHILD. For the following year, if the fates allow, I hope to present my next novel, now about halfway finished. It’s called WHEN THE KILLING'S DONE, and it has a contemporary setting and returns to the theme that seems to dominate my work in recent years: our place in nature.
© Copyright 2009, Viking Adult, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA). All rights reserved.
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PAST INTERVIEW
November 24, 2000
T.C. Boyle --- short for Tom Coraghessan Boyle (if you'd like to learn how to pronounce it, you'll have to visit his website) --- has blessed readers with another masterpiece to add to his prolific body of work, titled FRIEND OF THE EARTH. This new novel takes on a possible apocalypse in the near future of 2025, need we say more? Join Bookreporter.com's Jana Siciliano as she travels through Boyle's vibrant and intriguing landscape of the mind. Find out...how music has helped him with the rhythm of words and language, about his literary kinship to Charles Dickens, how he came to embrace California, and much more.
TBR: FRIEND OF THE EARTH is set in a temperamental future ruled by shifting weather patterns. What prompted you to write this cautionary tale?
TCB: I wouldn't call A FRIEND OF THE EARTH a cautionary tale exactly, because there is no behavior to caution the audience against or chastise them for in my view, for us, as a species, it is already over. No matter what we do, no matter how assiduously we recycle or how strenuously we vow to give up beef, the damage (irreparable) has been done. Good-bye. It's all she wrote. Better start digging your graves now. Read the environmentalists and popularizers, from Bill McKibben to E.O. Wilson to Richard Leakey to Laurie Garrett and David Alston Chase. There's nothing left to do but weep.
TBR: Underneath everything else that happens in FRIEND OF THE EARTH, it is a love story. What part of the book did you imagine first, which characters rose fully formed and which took a while to take shape?
TCB: Well. After my answer to the first question, it seems almost trivial to talk of love; but then the book does, I think, raise questions of human worth in the face of an unforgiving Darwinian universe, and so love perhaps becomes relevant. As for the characters, the book began with Ty, with his voice, and his view of Andrea, who only had to grow in conception to accord with his view and then veer from it to surprise him and, I hope, you too.
TBR: For a boy from upstate New York, you seem to have found your real home in California. What is it about the landscape and lifestyle there that has inspired you to write books like FRIEND OF THE EARTH?
TCB: Before I turned twenty-one I'd never been west of New Jersey. Since then, I've lived nearly half my life in California, and that has been a serendipitous thing. Since California is still (and will be forever) new to me, and since it is the place where everything happens so fast I've just missed it by blinking my eyes, it's been a real source of inspiration. And my mountain in the Sequoia National Forest provides me with solitude and nature and has given me at least two stories and the setting of the end of A FRIEND OF THE EARTH. But I haven't really answered the question. Let's just say that we really are on the edge out here.
TBR: You often tackle socially important issues in your work: the environment here, the use of immigrant labor in TORTILLA CURTAIN, the health craze in THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE. Do you consider yourself something of a Dickens for our times?
TCB: Wow! Great question. It would be presumptuous for me to consider myself anybody other than the humble (or is that 'umble,' as in Uriah Heep?) wordsmith that I am. Critics and reviewers have compared me with Dickens, and I take that as a compliment, though they've also compared me with just about every other writer who ever existed, as well as my favorite, for the stretch --- Leonardo Da Vinci. But I do seem to be more interested in social and historical matters than many American writers of our time, and I look to writers like Dickens and Mark Twain, not to mention Steinbeck and Dos Passos, for inspiration.
TBR: My favorite book of yours is EAST IS EAST. It's the funniest one you've ever written, in my humble opinion. How much of it actually came out of your experience as an attendant at a writer's colony?
TCB: Thank you, thank you, thank you. I too consider EAST IS EAST a very funny book, but a very sad one too. But please know that I have never been an inmate of a writing colony, nor do I suspect I will ever be invited. At least not while EAST IS EAST is still circulating. More than one critic has suspected me of being a sort of petty, backbiting, callow castigator of my fellow writers in reference to the portraits in that book, but I can assure you that I do not know my fellow writers and have invented them as types. If people see these types as actual writers of our time, they may well be mistaken. EAST IS EAST is most definitely not a roman a clef.
TBR: Music is so important in most of your books. Aside from the fact that you've named whole books after Bruce Springsteen lyrics, what do you think is the single most important thing your music-loving has taught you in your writing life?
TCB: Music has taught me rhythm, and the rhythm of language is all-important to my work. I have never written without the anodynic (or, in contrast, hyper) strains of music playing behind me. As for my own musical accomplishments, they are very limited indeed, and I invite you to take a listen to one of my old band's tunes on my webpage, tcboyle.com --- click on multimedia on the menu page: the first feature is a filmed interview; the second is a Ventilators' tune.
TBR: You write so many great books that have a foot in history somewhere ---WORLD'S END, THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE, RIVEN ROCK, now FRIEND OF THE EARTH. How long does it take you to latch onto a subject and then how long does it take to research it fully before you feel ready to start writing the story?
TCB: Research, as E.L. Doctorow said, is not an end in itself for the novelist. It should be self-evident that the novel is. Some, however, get so swept up in their research that they cannot leave it for the fiction that must be somehow constructed from its odd parts. So for me, the research is necessary as a way of informing and inspiring the fiction to come. Typically, for books like WORLD'S END, WATER MUSIC or THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE, the research will involve four or five months, but it is likely to continue throughout the writing of the book as the book takes me in unexpected directions.
TBR: Your article "Charlie Ossining Goes Downtown," documents the production of the film version of "The Road to Wellville." How many of your other films are ready for production? What book would you most like to see on the big screen?
TCB: Nearly all of my books and a sprinkling of my stories have been optioned for the movies, most recently RIVEN ROCK, THE TORTILLA CURTAIN, and the new story that appeared this September in Esquire, "Peep Hall." As of this writing, no firm offer has been made on A FRIEND OF THE EARTH. That is the one I would most like to see as a film --- it would just be many thousand buckets full of fun, what with the earth turned to shit and the deluge coming down and the liveliness of that hyena. Oh, yes, indeed!
TBR: You were developing a television series based on your short stories. What happened to it?
TCB: To my everlasting sorrow, Fox canceled the show.
TBR: We always like to let our fledgling novelists get a word of wisdom from established writers. What would you say to young writers starting out?
TCB: The usual: come from a very wealthy family and stay on very good terms with your parents.
TBR: What part does being a dad or playing in a garage band have in terms of your life as a writer? Does the rest of your life enhance your work, detract from it, or do these things barely factor in career-wise?
TCB: I live my monkey life, just as we all do. Art, love, fathering, procreating, finding lobster at the other end of the fork: all these things come naturally to me and to us all. This is why we have joy and sorrow, and this is why we are doomed (the procreating part especially).
TBR: On your website, you are asked how to pronounce Coraghessan and what is its origin? Would you answer the same question here for our readers?
TCB: Ah, but they can just click on the link and find out for themselves, n'est ce pas?
TBR: When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
TCB: I have told this story many times, and I would refer the reader to my essay, "This Monkey, My Back," in The Eleventh Hour, edited by Frank Conroy, published last year by HarperCollins. In short, though, I will say that it dates from my fortuitous entry into Krishna Vaid's writing class in my junior year at SUNY Potsdam. I didn't really know what I wanted or what I might be able to do till then. I had wanted to be a musician. But that didn't pan out because I simply didn't have the talent required to perform at the highest level. I drifted, like all undergrads (except pre-med students). And the Liberal Arts came through for me, praise be.
TBR: I know you just published, FRIEND OF THE EARTH, but can you tell us what you are working on next?
TCB: The next book, due out from Viking in September, is a collection of sixteen new stories. It is called AFTER THE PLAGUE (the title story appeared in Playboy, as well as "Termination Dust" and "The Black and White Sisters"); most of the stories, however, have been published in The New Yorker in recent years. It is a full, fat and rich collection, I think, and it should provide a nice high-caloric snack after the eighteen-course meal that was T.C. Boyle Stories (the collected volume, that is, published by Viking in 1998).
TBR: What is the most invaluable advice you've ever been given about writing?
TCB: Please see my response to the advice I'd give to fledgling writers. Unfortunately, in my case, it didn't work out purely as an accident of birth, you understand. And so, as night falls over the jungle and the monkey troops settle down for the night in the fastness of the high canopy, I must bid you farewell, but not before thanking you for the opportunity to respond to your generous and toothsome queries. If you would like to read more, please take a look at my website, www.tcboyle.com.
PAST INTERVIEW
1998
TBR's Senior Writer Judith Handschuh (JHScriba) interviewed T.C. Boyle, author of eleven titles including RIVEN ROCK, EAST IS EAST and IF THE RIVER WAS WHISKEY. Boyle's answers will give readers a taste of his brilliant use of language as a well as a glimpse at the way he crafts his work.
Q. You have written seven novels and four collections of short stories. Do you have a preference for one or the other form? Why?
A. To me, everything is a story --- my dreams, my enemies' dreams, what passes for life and consciousness, the startling inexplicable world outside the window. I'm confused by it all, and stories are a way of dealing with that confusion. I write fiction in order to make something, in the way of the obsessive-compulsive, the potter and the carpenter, but also as a way of discovering the world through ordering it --- making it my own world, that is. Some stories are very complex,
like the ones my aunt attempts to tell me over the phone when she's in her full-on talk-somebody-to-death mode, and these take some unraveling and plenty of space to tell. These are novels. Short stories --- as the term denotes --- are briefer. But they are just stories, whether related at length or in brief. I have no preference, though when writing a novel, you have the great joy (or misery, depending on how it's going) of knowing what you'll be doing tomorrow morning. With stories, you can address anything that assaults you in the present --- ugliness, beauty, what you overheard last night at a party, what the Serbs are doing in Bosnia, the newest modes of science. But with a novel, you're pretty well locked in --- can't really make Viagra jokes when you're dwelling in the eighteenth century (see WATER MUSIC).
Q. To you, what constitutes really good writing?
A. Good writing, first of all, is beautiful. So beautiful that it jolts you, sending a direct hit to the beauty receptors in your worn-out brain. Secondly, it entertains through the unfolding of a story.
Thirdly, it invites the reader's participation in a deep and sophisticated way, so that the reader takes pleasure in discovering the subtextual meaning of the work. Finally, it is new and individual --- rather than formulaic. This is why I've never been attracted to genre writing, which is confined to and constricted by its formulas. (No problem for the great TV-narcotized public, though --- it's just what they seem to want, if a stroll back from the restroom at the back end of the DC-8 is any indication --- a stroll, that is, with an eye to spying out what books are spread open before each hunkered and miserable passenger. Though even this is problematic now, since all the transcontinental flights seem to have those little TV screens sprouting from the back of every seat.)
Q. In an essay you recently wrote for Amazon, you mention that accident and depravity rule the world, and this theme appears often in your novels and stories. Could you explain what you mean by this, and why you are so fascinated with this idea?
A. Accident and depravity, oh yes. It has been and will be a bully-boy world, now and ever after. Think the playground writ large. Think Amin, Moamar, the Taliban, Pol Pot, Saddam and the late Deng. Think gangs. Power is the way of the world, and we are blessed in our small moment in our big country to have it, and to have a system that has so far kept the Nixons, McCarthys and Haigs in check. So far. But when they put up the "Sorry, No Food" sign in the window of the supermarket, we'll see.
I'm no optimist. I want meaning, I want eternity, and I get Darwin. And the latest evolutionary thinking corrects what made even Darwin (absent God) palpable finally to so many--the notion that evoltion progresses to an ideal, i.e., us. Uh-uh, say the new thinkers, like S.J. Gould and Richard Leakey. Accident rules. Catastrophe. Cyclones, asteroid thumps, warming and cooling, disease. Evolution's winners and losers are as much rewarded (or punished) by pure blind luck as they are by adapation or lack of it. Once an interviewer asked me if I wasn't worried about earthquakes out here in shimmering California. Sure, I said, of course I'm worried, and I'm worried about everything else too, from the fate of the birds and fishes to desertification in the Sahel to the lunatic on the Coast Highway with a phone glued to her head, six margaritas in her gullet and a two-ton Chevy Suburban dancing under her lacquered fingernails. Worried? Hell, yes.
Q. What contemporary issues engage you?
A. What contemporary issues engage me? See above. I've already spilled on this one. But of course readers of The Tortilla Curtain will know of at least one other issue that bugs me. And I'd like to create an issue while I'm at it. How about a proposition to exile all the soidisant critics and semi-literate book reviewers of the country to Patagonia, where they can burn remaindered books for their poor pathetic cooking fires?
Q. In that same essay, you explained why Evelyn Waugh, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Flannery O'Connor were among your literary heroes. If I hadn't read that, and had been asked to hazard a guess as to which writers you admired, I would have said Gogol, Kafka and Camus. Do you count any of these writers among your heroes, and, if so why?
A. Good observation. But you must realize that I have at least a thousand literary heroes, and depending on what I had (or didn't have) for breakfast on any given day I'm bound to forget some of them. I like your adducing Camus. Existentialism hit me hard (the body blow to complement the left jab of Darwin and Earth Science) at a tender, post-Catholic age. I quote THE STRANGER for one of the two epigraphs of WITHOUT A HERO (". . .all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration"). Kafka, of course. Probably too obvious an influence to even list--he got to me long before Borges. Gogol's DEAD SOULS is a killer, but I haven't read anything else by him.
Q. What are some of your personal interests? Do you enjoy music or film? What do you do in your spare time?
A. Personal interests? Strange diseases, primitive rites, the sex life of the capybara and just about anything else that thrills and amazes. Music is my birdsong, films are my eyes. Because life has become increasingly complicated --- book tours is what I'm talking about here --- I don't play music anymore, but I have the hankering still (Davey Magahee, are you listening?). As to what I do in my spare time, I've got to throw that question right back at you: What spare time?
Q. Are you working on anything new at the moment, and if you are, could you tell me something about your current project?
A. My next book, coming out in November from Viking (to whom I am bound by blood and the forfeiture of my firstborn), is a volume of collected stories --- the first four books, new stories and some uncollected pieces that seemed to keep popping up in anthologies. It's called, simply, T. C. BOYLE STORIES, and instead of arranging it in the usual chronological way, I've hit upon the expedient of dividing up the pieces under three rubrics: 1. "Love"; 2) "Death"; and 3) "And Everything in Between." Currently, that is, like now--right now, when I get off this screen--I'm working on a new novel about the environment, the ecology movement and the death of everything we know. Needless to say, it's a comedy.
PAST INTERVIEW
1998
TBR's Judith Handschuh is passionate about the writing of T.C.Boyle, so when she gets the opportunity to talk to him the conversation is always lively. Here she interviews him about his latest book, T.C. BOYLE STORIES. Hear what he has to say about why he grouped the stories as he did, why he chose to publish this work now, and what he thinks about the craft of writing being taught.
TBR: What, for you personally, constitutes a good short story?
TCB: A good short story takes you by the nose and doesn't let go. The voice is central to this, more important than plot even. I think of stories like Leonard Michael's brilliant "In the Fifties," in which the narrator recounts the formative years of his life in wickedly honed vignettes informed by the main character's ironic hindsight. Or some of John Cheever's beautifully evoked suburban pastorals "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill," for example, in which pathos, nostalgia and morality are all linked in the narrative voice to nature and normalcy. Or the pure fun and magical novelty of the voice in Garcia Marquez's "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings," in which the transcendent becomes comically mundane. Denis Johnson's pieces in JESUS SON are revelatory. Raymond Carver is the master. And let us not forget Flannery O'Connor and her ability to navigate through the convoluted points of view of so many of her protagonists. And more: a good story should leave you gasping. There's something about endings. It's almost ineffable, because it's unique to each story but they lead you out into the night, or into the deepest realms of beauty and rightness, and leave you there struggling for emotional breath. But it's late at night and I'm romanticizing. They punch you in the gut, hammer your head, drill you right between the ... That sort of thing.
TBR: How do you decide which of your ideas deserves a short story and which deserves a novel?
TCB: This one is easy: there are complex ideas and situations, and there are simpler, smaller ones. Everything I've written, is, to my mind, a story or a series of stories. Some stories, in the very initial, most glancing rush at conception, seem to need two pages or five or twenty-five or three-fifty or five hundred. Somehow, and this is part of the voodoo associated with writing fiction, I can see the scope of a story without having any idea of its themes or content or not in any conscious sense, that is.
TBR: Do you think writing can be taught?
TCB: No.
TBR: What do you tell your students about writing?
TCB: I tell them to read authors who turn them on, authors they can absorb from the inside out, authors whose bones they can crack to get at the marrow. And I tell them to be true to their talent, if they have it. I am always stunned by the discovery of just how many do have it.
TBR: Do you think people can be taught to appreciate a particular author?
TCB: Most definitely. And here is where a teacher can really do some teaching. Interpretive teaching. A naive or uninformed reader may not have the tools to appreciate a given writer. Enthusiasm, showing the way, rolling out the carpet: that's the ticket. Of course, on the other hand, here we must enter the murky waters of taste. Given a certain agreed-upon set of good, competent and great writers, each of us will have our favorites and those we cannot abide. And who comprise that later group for me? No specifics, sorry, but as you all know, I am not an aficionado of genre writing.
TBR: Your new book, T. C. BOYLE STORIES, is a new arrangement of your short stories; they've been divided into categories entitled Love, Death, And Everything In Between. Did you decide how to categorize the stories?
TCB: I didn't want to do the standard thing here; that is, arrange the stories chronologically. Much more interesting for me (and so, I hope, for the reader) to do something new. A few years back, in the U.K., Granta Books brought out my collected stories, and that consisted of the first three volumes stapled together. That was fine. The book helped introduce the stories to British readers, it remains in print, and is doing very well. But this book seems to me much more than that. It's an attempt to bookend the first period of my writing life, from my earliest stories to the ones done in the past year. I fervently hope that I will have a Volume II lurking somewhere in the future. The sections Love, Death, And Everything In Between are pretty loose to stimulate readers to question the categories and come up with their own sequences.
TBR: I'm curious as to why you placed "Juliana Cloth" in the "Love" section. And it seems to me that "Bloodfall" could have easily found its way into the Death category.
TCB: Juliana Cloth could as easily have wound up in Death as in Love (but oh, that last line? Ain't that love?). Similarly, Mexico could have been very happy under the Love rubric rather than Death. From John Donne to Woody Allen (and everybody in between), writers have been equating love and death. Again, my sticking the stories in one category or another makes the arrangement more interesting, and stimulates readers to question the categories and come up with their own sequences.
TBR: In "The Fog Man," the narrator says, "I wanted reason and meaning to illuminate my life." This is an idea that many of your characters seem to be pursuing, whether they verbalize it or not. Do you want reason and meaning to illuminate your life also, or do you think it is an unattainable dream?
TCB: A lovely question. Yes, is the answer. Most definitely yes. I do want reason and meaning to illuminate my life. But it's a fond and lonely quest, isn't it? It's the goal of all art, of all thought, of all that is spiritual in us and yet, and yet ...I know with my senses and my senses only.
TBR: "Ike and Nina" could have been written last week though it was actually written in 1981. Are you surprised at how prophetic that story turned out to be?
TCB: I very much like your observation. As Ike and Nina suggests, the tell-all memoir, undertaken with profit and other suspicious motives in mind, is not a new thing on this earth. It further suggests, I hope, and I am presuming here that history, any history we know and command, is simply somebody's version of something that may or may not have happened. I'm pleased that you see the story as a universal one. It is one of my favorite pieces, influenced by Borges and Nabokov, but, I think, all mine. That is, for better or worse, I can't think of anyone else who could have written it. And I don't think this is true for all my stories, but for the wilder, more absurd and bizarre ones ("The Miracle at Ballinspittle" comes to mind).
TBR: In your last interview with TBR you said that you were working on a novel about "the environment, the ecology movement, and the death of everything we know." How is it coming along? Do you know when it will be published?
TCB: The novel, which is approaching the one-third mark, is called A FRIEND OF THE EARTH. It is about environmentalism, and, as I said, the death of everything we know. Much of the action takes place in 2025, when the weather is very, very bad. It is, needless to say a comedy. If I can ever stop touring, I hope to finish the book in '99 for publication in 2000; the following year I hope to publish the next regular collection, called AFTER THE PLAGUE, the title story of which will appear in Playboy this coming February. (Let me clarify vis a vis the touring: I'm off now for a month with T.C. BOYLE STORIES, and then in January and early February, will do eight cities with the paperback version of RIVEN ROCK).
TBR: Also in our last interview, I asked you what contemporary issues engaged you. As part of your answer to that question you mentioned that you would like to create an issue --- a proposition, you said, "to exile all the soidisant critics and semi-literate book reviewers of the country to Patagonia." Have you been able to get this idea moving in a positive direction?
TCB: The critics and I have a rapprochement. Need I say more?
TBR: How is your website coming along? Are you excited about it? And when can we expect to see it?
TCB: A good number to quit on. To be brief: poorly. It exists: T.C.Boyle.com, but there is nothing there yet. I wanted to get it up and running to at least post tour dates, but have not yet for shame found the time. I've been too busy writing. But I will get it up as soon as I return, to post reviews, profiles, photos, and the tour schedule for January and February. I promise. I think.
ARTICLE
I've been avoiding contemporary male novelists for a number of years now, largely because I don't find their books interesting or relevant. Perhaps it's a reaction to the women's movement, but lately I've noticed that quite a few men seem to be engaged in what I call macho-writing. If they aren't writing techno-thrillers or slice-and-dice detective stories about women who have been beaten, raped and murdered, they seem to be using the pages of their novels to indulgently express their angst about impotence, growing older, losing their hair, or whatever.
There are exceptions, of course, but they are few and far between. And rather than waste what small amount of time I have for reading trying to find the wheat amongst the chaff, I prefer to curl up with a good novel written by Jane Hamilton or Anne Tyler.
But a while ago I was dragged --- kicking and screaming --- to the novels and short stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle.
By a man, of course --- a man I have never met in person.
Matt (not his real name) is an online friend with whom I've been having a continuing literary debate on the subject of male and female writers for some time. He read UNDERWORLD and insisted it was one of the best books ever written. I did not find it all that compelling. I suggested he read Amy Tan and Ann Tyler, and he dismissed them as "minor," and not worth his time
One day he asked if I had ever read T. Coraghessan Boyle. When I replied no, he said I would be missing the literary experience of a lifetime if I didn't pick up one of his books.
"More male angst," I said, bolstering my opinion with the comment that he was Irish, and Irish male novelists tend to be more sexist and angst-ridden than most.
"Nope," he replied.
The debate had been raging for a week or so when Matt made me an offer I couldn't refuse. He agreed to read A Patchwork Planet if I would read any one of Boyle's wrote. Anything --- one of his novels or a collection of his short stories ---he didn't care. I believe his exact words were, "Just get off your feminist high horse and read the man."
So I did. After all, fair is fair, and Matt was keeping his end of the bargain. But I admit to buying my first Boyle book more from a sense of duty than with any expectation that I would enjoy reading it.
I picked up IF THE RIVER WAS WHISKEY, and alternately laughed and cried my way through sixteen of some of the best short stories I have ever read. At least I thought they were some of the best until I read WITHOUT A HERO. These stories were even better. I moved on to Boyle's novels, reading in one week, THE TORTILLA CURTAIN and EAST IS EAST. Then I read THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE, laughing out loud as the hapless Will Lightbody's experiences at the Battle Creek Spa. I eagerly awaited his newest book, RIVEN ROCK, which is perhaps his best yet.
Boyle's great talents are his sense of the absurd and his wit. His stories are painful --- and in his world failure comes with the territory --- but his ability to weave humor into the bleaker moments of life make for rich, fully-told stories that illuminate the human condition.
Eventually I had to tell Matt how much I loved Boyle's books, and I even had the grace to apologize for not listening to him early on.
His reply read, "No apology necessary. Just pay attention when I tell you something. I'm usually right. Now read all of Mailer and DeLillo."
Maybe some day. But for now I'm re-reading T. C. Boyle and loving every minute of it --- and vowing not to dismiss all male writers.
--- Judith Handschuh (JHScriba)
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