Interview with T. C. Boyle
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For many a novelist, personal geography can be an unwanted poetry. Suffused with lived-in details, sensorial charm, and familiar beauty, localism bears a wealth of literary attraction scented by the sensual schoolroom aphorism, “Write what you know.” The works of Borges, Murakami, and most notably, Joyce, all enthusiastically find mischief in the reality of their creators’ surroundings. Even Nabokov’s most un-Russian characters carry the motherland nostalgia portrayed in Speak, Memory .

Examining the writer and his or her experiences informs a good reading of the author’s works. Good detective work with given text and what lurks between the lines can often offer the reader at the very least a positive identification of the person behind those lines, which is the inevitable outcome of the writer’s using personal experience — a metaphysical kind of localism — to endow believable viscera to characters (Jonathan Safran Foer couldn’t even extricate his own name from his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated ). In this day, portrayal seems problematic among readers once it strays from the personally verified, verifiable world of the writer.

Thus localism—the entrenchment in geographically sensitive details and the devotion to familiar nuance—will often aid a writer in that First Novel and then torture the author in all subsequent work. In a period when everyone from accomplished novelist to teenager in Montana has access to the day’s most powerful medium of information dissemination — the Internet — a fiction writer may often inclined to feel that the only story worth telling is a stylized roman à clef, and nothing more. It’s as if readers have caught on to the fiction writer’s ruse and are now asking, Why should anyone read your story about Mexican immigration if you’re a white kid from a whitewashed suburb? The blogosphere’s got a plethora of real accounts on the topic told by people who’ve got real experience in such situations…

I first met T.C. Boyle in early 2007 when I was a student in his advanced fiction writing workshop at the University of Southern California. Boyle arrived the first day of class looking as I’d expected: tall, lanky, fire-haired and sharp-eyed, shouldering a black backpack and sporting his trademark red sneakers. Before the class could even begin entertaining the idea of attaining literary greatness by proxy, he called roll, passed out a few sheets of paper, read George Saunders’s short story, “I CAN SPEAK” – and then dismissed the class. Or, more precisely, Boyle left the room.

It wasn’t until I recently began meditating on the idea of the writer in the context of his or her geography that I realized the symbolic significance of that truncated class. The workshop’s very practical introduction, and its lack of artistic pretension combined with Boyle’s reading of the Saunders story (an actorly inhabitance of the corporate vernacular dictated solely by what was on the page) evinced so clearly, so cleverly, his disposition as a writer — that is, the very essence of the way Boyle inhabits so many different voices. It was as if he’d said, “Entering the game with any artistic pretensions would deny your point of view access to any other perspective. Now, let me demonstrate….” Or something like that.

Localism leads to the myopia of voice. Voice, a kind of all-encompassing indicator of time, setting, and context, serves a fragmented society as a readily accessible texture to the environs it’s representing. Following these standards, voice can only be depicted by those who’ve experienced the characterizations popularly ascribed to those voices. This lands us with a “localist imperative” in literature, a notion that’s as much proprietary as it is artistic where the writer must experience something before writing about it, where the imagination can be relegated to a second-class citizen.

If there’s a contemporary body of work that eschews a “localist imperative”, it is T. C. Boyle’s. Though he was born and bred in a working-class household in Peekskill, New York, his first novel, Water Music (1979), tracks his protagonists—one a thief and a whoremaster, the other an explorer—from London to Scotland to the gator-poisoned depths of the Niger. Subsequent works covered a Japanese cook who sails to Georgia (East is East) and John Kellogg’s cerealizing in Battle Creek, Michigan (Road to Welville ); Drop City ’s backdrop is Alaska while Tortilla Curtain ’s is Southern California. Only World’s End offers evidence of Boyle’s Peekskill, NY origins, and his most recent novel, Talk Talk , is one of few works that breathes the air of his current Santa Barbara home. Boyle’s style could be described as wiseguy-intellectual beefed up by months and months of research.

So when I recently visited his office at USC, I expected to unearth the non-effect of localism in his work. Boyle’s biography, however, actually bears more of the “localist” individual than his work suggests. Boyle’s two working-class parents were pretty much confined to their native New York while Boyle himself hadn’t gone west of the Mississippi until he was twenty-one.

I was certainly prone to that sort of thing,” he admitted. “I went to school [SUNY Potsdam] with the same people whom I graduated high school with and some of these people remain my closest friends to this day,” he said. After spending four post-undergraduate years “washed along in the hippie current like the spawn of a barnacle,” as he put it, Boyle headed out to the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop in 1972, buoyed by the publication of his story, “The OD and Hepatitis Railroad or Bust” in The North American Review. Two of the five years he spent in Iowa were with the Writers’ Workshop; the last three, working on his Ph.D. in 19th century British literature. Upon completing his doctorate, he came to USC to take a professorship.

“It was good for me to come to some place different that is utterly different, where I’ll always be something of an alien,” Boyle explained. “But, when I came out here, a friend I made at Iowa, who’s a novelist herself and who grew up in Altadena, introduced me to all her friends, including the ones she went to high school with. They were a great set of people who eventually became my good friends. I came here when I was young. I loved the club scene. I loved the music scene, like the Whiskey on Sunset. I really liked LA and what LA did for me and now of course I’m in Santa Barbara. Now that I’ve lived here for such a long time, I wouldn’t want to leave.”

The description Boyle gave felt like a picture of T.C. Boyle the Person, the Husband, the Father of Three who appreciates his present situation in Santa Barbara for the access it grants to go everywhere and explore the community on foot. “Writers don’t really need a support group of people,” Boyle said. “They’re for the most part, miserable, mood-licking, cowardly, vengeful, angry people who simply want to be left alone to do their own thing,” he added with a slight smirk. “They can do that anywhere with or without the community’s contact. I am one of them.”

The T.C. Boyle I knew – the Iconoclast/Artist Boyle – was the writer whose1995 Tortilla Curtain incurred a notable amount of negative critical reaction from those maintaining that a well-to-do white man (i.e., Boyle) could not possibly offer a legitimate portrait of illegal immigration. Tortilla Curtain , which Boyle calls his “most controversial novel” (also his most successful to date), tells the story of two couples — one Mexican, the other Caucasian — who live in Topanga Canyon and become inextricably intertwined after the Caucasian hits the Mexican with his car, offering $20 to settle the deed without the cops, an offer which is taken up.

Boyle has already erected the mouthpieces of so many different characters, it would be absolute folly to take any one of them as conduits for the “real” T.C. Boyle. The problem — for some readers — is that his fiction’s very distinct prose style, marked by seductive verbosity and prodigious vocabulary as well as precision in every individual situation, offers an unwavering unequivocalness: his characters and narration deal with life in objective terms. So when the general subjectivity of life is left so willfully trammeled, there’ll inevitably be readers who will mistake the characters’ voices for the author’s thoughts.

“I think a good novelist should be able to enter the heads of anyone,” Boyle said toward the end of our conversation, tempered by the same emotions as always — part intellectualized, part humorized, all tinged with a fun politeness. “The resulting product shouldn’t provide any answers, make statements or speeches, but it should enable the reader to make decisions for him- or herself, and to be moved and seduced in some way by the art. Certainly the artist will have a perspective, will have a point of view as well as desires and prejudices of his or her own, but it’s for the audience to sort all that out and make their decisions.”

Boyle’s upcoming novel, The Women, slated for a February 2009 release, covers a period from Frank Lloyd Wright’s personal narrative through the eyes of an Asian apprentice. For The Women , Boyle’s subject matter awakes him every morning and sees him to sleep every night: his home in Santa Barbara is Frank Lloyd Wright’s first house. Perhaps the setup was all too easy, and too local, for Boyle.

“Living there is what spurred me from the beginning to write about him,” he would later tell me. “The research gave me more of an opportunity to appreciate the house that I’m living in and currently restoring. I thought too it’d be interesting to write a book about him and his architecture while living in his house. But since I’ve written many books there before, it didn’t really operate any more than it normally does.”

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http://www.tcboyle.com/

Published on 1 May 2008 | 3 |