Author Profile: T.C. Boyle
Photo by Pablo Campos
"Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea."
T. Coraghessan Boyle from an autobiographical essay This Monkey, My Back
The context of the above quote is more interesting than the quote, because he was actually talking to a friend, who had startled him by saying he was retiring at age 49, about when he would retire. He ends by saying, "Have you been in a bookstore lately? Have you seen what these authors are doing, the mountainous piles of the flakes of themselves they're leaving behind, like the neatly labeled jars of shit, piss, and toenail clippings one of John Barth's characters bequeathed to his wife, the ultimate expression of his deepest self? Retire? Retire from that? Sure, we'll all retire, all of us, once they drain our blood and pump the embalming fluid in."
Translation: T.C. Boyle will be writing till embalming fluids flood his right common carotid artery. Or perhaps just prior.
Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle and also known as T.C. Boyle and T. Coraghessan Boyle) is often my favorite novelist and short story writer. Yes, I'm a bit fickle when applying that moniker. Since the mid-1970s he has published thirteen novels and over a 100 short stories in eight collections. He won the *PEN/Faulkner award in 1988 for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. Since 1978, he has taught as a Distinguished Professor of English in the University of Southern California's English Department.
I've read eight of his thirteen novels. My introduction to T.C. Boyle was his second novel, Budding Prospects, from 1984, a hilarious story about Felix, an ex-hippie consciously escaping the bullshit hippie ethic for a disastrous get-rich-quick scheme involving the illicit cultivation of marijuana. The irony of the story is that even one not bent on the success of Northern California marijuana cultivation finds himself rooting for Felix, silently pouring onto the pages encouragement for the plants to grow.
This will likely sound simplistic and immature of me, but I have to admit that what grabbed me about Boyle's writing was his ability to use language. I'm so glad I have my Nook now, because I have the Look Up Word link I can use while I'm reading a Boyle novel or short story. Some of my favorite words I found in the pages of a Boyle novel. And not only words, but the word for a thing or a part of a thing. Boyle has a propensity for identifying some design feature, part name, or pedestrian thing with its name, where most of us might just call it what it does. Boyle doesn't just call it a gear, he tells me it's a worm gear, which, after I look it up, I find looks like a screw and turns an ordinary disk-shaped gear. But the visual enhanced my reading experience. Instead of ticking me off that I had to occasionally look up something while reading his fiction, I was fascinated by the skill at which he raised my interest of something integral to the details of the story but not to the whole of it.
Boyle's self-described obsessions--"the search for the father, racism, class and community, predetermination versus free will, cultural imperialism, sexual war and sexual truce"--his Ph.D. degree from the University of Iowa in Nineteenth Century British Literature, and his B.A. degree in English and History from SUNY Potsdam molded the mind that created novels about historical figures and older times but also about those blessed souls we call "baby boomers." When not taking me to Northern Westchester County, New York in the 17th Century, and then 1949 and, finally, 1968, in his novel, World's End, or to the early 20th Century in his fiction/fact-based novel about architect Frank Lloyd Wright in his 2009 novel The Women, he's taking me to California and New York in the mid-2000s in his novel about identity theft in Talk Talk.
Historical personages find themselves in his novels. Mungo Park, the African explorer, in his first novel, Water Music (1982), which took me to London, Scotland and Africa to find the source of the Niger in 1795; John Harvey Kellogg (of Kellogg's Corn Flakes fame) in 1907 Battle Creek, Michigan, in his 1993 novel The Road to Wellville, which was made into a 1994 film starring Anthony Hopkins as Kellogg; Stanley McCormick, the hopeless lunatic son of the renowned Chicago reaper manufacturer, which is set in the years 1905-1925 in Montecito, California (where Boyle also lives) in Riven Rock; Alfred Kinsey from 1940-1950 in Bloomington, Indiana; and artist Hu Tu Mei in 1980s Georgia (American South) in East is East.
Boyle creates characters that are timeless, but he also knows how to take historical figures and put them under a microscope and show me the timelessness of the human experience. When I read about Mungo Park or Frank Lloyd Wright in a fictionally-driven, fact-engulfed story, I found myself having no problem identifying with their conflicts, just as I was engaged by the obstacles raised in his The Tortilla Curtain (illegal immigrants), Drop City (the reality of alternative lifestyles), and Talk Talk (identity theft).
Boyle's 13th novel, When the Killing's Done, which was released on February 22, 2011, takes place off the coast of both his and my home in the Channel Islands. On Boyle's Web site at www.tcboyle.com he describes the story:
It is set in the past decade on the California Channel Islands, where a rather testy turf war was fought between animal rights activists and the biologists of the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy over the elimination of non-native species of plants and animals, and this provided the inspiration for the book.
I just this week learned of his new book and plan on reading it in the next week or two. I look forward to reading it, because I know he'll treat the subject with an even-handedness that is steeped in story not in philosophy or political agenda. That the story is so close to home--literally--adds to my eagerness and urgency to read it.
Finally, here are T.C. Boyle's previous twelve novels:
Water Music (1982)
Budding Prospects (1984)
World's End (1987)
East is East (1990)
The Road to Wellville (1993)
The Tortilla Curtain (1995)
Riven Rock (1998)
A Friend of the Earth (2000)
Drop City (2003)
The Inner Circle (2004)
Talk Talk (2006)
The Women (2009)
*From the PEN/Faulker Foundation: "The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction is a national prize which honors the best published works of fiction by American citizens in a calendar year. Three judges, chosen annually by the directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, select five books from among the more than 300 works submitted, making this the largest peer-juried award in the country. The winning writer and four finalists are honored at a ceremony held in Washington at the Folger Shakespeare Library in May."
Posted by Tom Eubanks at 3/20/2011 1:58 PM 
Categories: Author! Author!, Profiles in Guile
Tags: Essay Writers Who Write
Categories: Author! Author!, Profiles in Guile
Tags: Essay Writers Who Write
He will be at the SB Writers Conference in June. You going?
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I'm hoping I can.
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