by A. D. Mira
RB: You have been at this writing game for a while. At what point did you develop your "program"?
TCB: Only in retrospect.
RB: (Laughs)
TCB: Only in retrospect, Robert. It's not as if you know what your themes are and what your obsessions are. You don't really know that at the beginning. I look back, and I can see how all of the books are allied. But especially the last six or seven. They seem to be going in a succession and including the one that I am in the middle of right now. Riven Rock talked about a sexual dysfunction, the '98 book that is a novel based on a true story of the McCormack family and Stanley became schizophrenic. He was called a sexual maniac. He was put away. That also reflects back on the Road to Wellville, which is about Dr. Kellogg who never consummated his marriage but in another way. So the book I am working on now, which also has to do with "man is an animal," is about Dr. Kinsey's sex researches in the '40s and '50s. Everything seems to suggest the next thing. I am just riding it. I just want to see where it will go. I write these novels in order to try to understand the world a little better for my own self. And if I help my fans and readers to go along on the journey, that's great.
RB: Did you expect to have such a substantial output when you left Iowa City in 1978?
TCB: Yes.
RB: You have always been a hard-working, steady, persevering type guy?
TCB: No, (Both laugh). So two questions. Let's address the second one first. It's a question of growing up I guess. I was a very disaffected youth and not very much at school. I didn't like school. I was a poor undergraduate, barely got through. But I did discover certain things. Like literature. Writing and history. Then I had a few very rocky years, and it was part of this hippie culture and drug culture. But I grew up. I was about twenty-four or so. I just felt this ability to do things. A kind of power, that I could do it if I wanted to. When I went to Iowa—by the way I had never been west of the Hudson River before that—I knew that this was what I wanted to do and I was a great graduate student. I got my Ph.D. and I am very proud of the fact that while I was a screw up prior to this, now I got a perfect 4 point through all of graduate school. And that's pretty rare there. I am just really proud of that. I knew what I wanted to do, and my whole life was transformed, and I have been going at it ever since. It's my life. It's what I want to do. Everyday.
RB: Was this before the great writing program explosion and before Iowa was known to the world as a writing Mecca?
TCB: I was there from '72 through '78. Five and half years in all. But I went there because it was a Mecca for writers. All of my heroes had gone there or had taught there. Flannery O'Connor was one of the first graduates. That's when the program began in the late '40s. It was good for me. Many of the writers in my classes became well-known writers of today. A lot of them disappeared. I don't know how that works. I think perseverance plays into it and so does luck, to a degree.
RB: You leapfrogged across the continent. You went from upstate New York, to Iowa City and then directly to southern California where you have been for twenty-five years.
TCB: Absolutely. What's hilarious about it is when I got to LA, the first year or so, the New York Times Book Review was asking me to review books by western writers. (Laughs) Hey, I'm a western guy, "Sure, give me a cowboy hat, I'll do it." I didn't wind up doing it. I didn't feel very qualified. I don't know anything about Western writers.
RB: Who were considered Western writers?
TCB: I don't remember at the time. I did do a review for them recently though, of two Edward Abbey biographies. I don't like to do reviews. I do it only as a kind of obligation, once in a while. But they just struck a chord to me with Abbey because I had done A Friend of the Earth much inspired by his work, and so I was able to do that for them.
RB: I remember those reviews. You haven't done any non-fiction in book form…
TCB: No, I haven't and I have no intention of doing so.
RB: Why not do a biography of Abbey since in your review you pointed out certain deficiencies in the two biographies under discussion? Given your devotion to Abbey, I thought, "Why doesn't Boyle do it?"
TCB: (laughs) In a novel, of course! I though the books were informative in a buddyhood sort of way. I spoke to that, actually. The Jack Leffler book would break your heart. He was one of the inner circle there. I felt that they weren't really the definitive biographies, but I loved reading them because I loved reading about the arc of Abbey's life. And I felt it was my obligation, in my opinion, to tell people about that.
RB: You wouldn't even do one of these biographical essays as published by Viking?
TCB: The Penguin ones? I love that series. I was asked by the editor of the series when he first came up with the idea. No, because it would take a year out of my life. And it would take one book out of my life. No, I am only interested in pursuing this whole fiction oeuvre. It will all be together at some point and I just want to see how far it's going to go. And what's next. That's really what interests me, is what is next.
RB: What is your recall of what you have written?
TCB: On TC Boyle.com…
RB: (laughs)
TCB: Which has become a wonderful, wonderful part of my life. We get five thousand hits a day. The people on the message boards are fanatics. I am sure some of them will read this. One guy, in Chicago, his name is The News You Can Use, he will do contests on my web board—all quizzes from my work. And no one has won, though people came close. I couldn't do it. What is my recall? I couldn't win the News quiz and I wrote the book.
RB: I guess you are not concerned.
TCB: Well, what is so interesting, Robert, is that when you get to talk to an author they are in the middle of a new book and have forgotten the others. You read it yesterday. I may sound a little flippant. I don't mean it exactly in that way. I stand by what I have done and I am proud and pleased and particularly of Drop City because this one of all the recent ones seems to be getting the most attention. And the most positive attention. Nonetheless, if you are a creative person you are well into the next project by the time you come around with this one. In fact my publisher held this one for a while. This was done eighteen months ago. Done and delivered and ready to go. They have their managing people and they do their things. And so I trust them and listen—whenever they want to do it is fine with me. I think what has happened is the press seems to enjoy interviewing me because I am somewhat more flamboyant than other writers.
RB: You strike me as a rock of stability. What's this flamboyance thing?
TCB: And I say things that are interesting and they like it, and so maybe I got a little too much attention, and so I have too many books coming out. So they like to space them a little bit. So I listen to my publishers and when they want to bring the books out, that's fine with me. But it's been eighteen months and I am totally in to the new one.
RB: Are you taken for granted because you are so prolific? Like Joyce Carol Oates…
TCB: Updike.
RB: To some degree Roth…
TCB: He's the monk of literature now. I am very impressed with his last four or five books and what he is doing. And there was that great Remnick profile of him in the New Yorker in which Roth is basically going to sit in that house and write books and forget celebrity, forget sex, forget it all. He's just going to write books. That's hallelujah, you know.
RB: Is that happening to you?
TCB: I still enjoy sex, Robert. I am going to continue to do that, in fact that's why I am writing about Dr. Kinsey. And that has been really tough on my wife.
RB: Really?
TCB: I promised her that the next book will be about a monk.
RB: Are you reading sections aloud to her?
TCB: It's been tough, let's put it that way (laughs).
RB: I was referring to your prodigious output. I was looking at the NY Times archive and it seems that at least the last six or seven books have been reviewed.
I write these novels in order to try to understand the wor
ld a little better for my own self. And if I help my fans and readers to go along on the journey, that's great.
TCB: They have done all my books, all fifteen of them.
RB: That would seem to be a benchmark of success and certainly spurs book sales.
TCB: I don't know anything about that. I don't know how the industry works or whatever happens. I don't know about it. I'm a cottage industry sort of guy. I do my thing, and I am very pleased if people respond to it. What I have seen over the years of my career is that the audience is constantly growing and becoming more and more aware. Again, the web page, there are constantly students contacting it for help on papers on my work, and on all sorts of my writings, not just the recent work. Every journalist I talk to, anywhere now has gone to the web page first and gone through and gotten material. There is an allied web page from one of the fans called TCBoyle.net, which is infinite. If you started today it would be a year before you got through that. So there is a lot of interest and I am very pleased. I am an academic guy. I am professor and I was a graduate student. I admire writers and writing. I wrote papers on writers and am very pleased that kids from high school on up to scholars are writing about me. I am honored. It's great.
RB: You seem to be one of those writers that journalists use to bridge high and low art?
TCB: I operate on the highest level of art. I always have. That's what I want to do. But, I made many enemies in this way. And I am a professor, a Ph.D. I believe in all of this. I've made enemies because I have tried to demystify the whole process. I am also a regular guy. I am also a showman. I love to be on stage. I give readings that people enjoy. There is some kind of mystique with being a writer where you are an intellectual, need a bunch of critics in the university to be intermediaries between you and the audience, I think that's just crap. No matter what we want to make of it. Art is for entertainment. You can put it in the university but it is for entertainment. And if a book doesn't entertain it's useless. Everything else must derive from that. And so I am an entertainer. And yet I am often misunderstood or maybe willfully misunderstood by my legions of enemies, who say, "He wants to dumb it down." Of course they haven't read my books. Not at all. I am doing exactly what I am doing for the very highest audience possible. But I also want anybody who knows how to read to be able to enjoy this as a story. They may not get all the subtleties; they may not know all my work. They may not know all of literature. But they can read this and get a charge out of it. That's what it's about. It's entertainment.
RB: Why does it seem that more and more people want to become writers?
TCB: I am the first writer they had at USC in the English Department and I started up their undergraduate program and it's huge. We took over the entire department. I think writing and reading are unique in this—in all of human culture—but particularly in this electronic culture, this busy culture, you can do it on your own. You can be an independent agent. You can be a punk. You can be a crank and a crazy and you can do it and you can find an audience for it. On the other hand the audience for serious fiction dwindles while the number of writers increases. I hope that there will be some point at which that legion of writers—some of which I am helping to push in to the world—will be become the readers of the future. That is probably the best end of this trend. Not every one will be a writer even if they take creative writing, but at least they will understand it and appreciate it.
RB: Most of them won't become published writers…
TCB: I don't know about that. There are no guarantees. It's an art when you get to me at my level as a student it's almost as if you have gone to the academy now. It's like you have played your instrument in high school and you are really good and now you are at Julliard and I'm going to coach you and push you on your way. Who you are, what your work becomes, is nothing that I can help with. I just want you to do it in your own individually way and be as good as you can be and, "By the way have you tried this?" Or my opinion on this, you can take it or leave it. Or structurally, what if you did this? I'm teaching a graduate class now. We just started a graduate program with a Ph.D. lit. And some young novelists are in there; all struggling against the enormous structures of the novels that they have dedicated themselves to. All trying to be as good as they can. And I have had tremendous success that makes me feel great, finding a key for them. One guy in particular is having his book published. He just needed someone to say, "Well, what about structurally if you did this?" And he did and boom it worked. So that makes me feel great if I am able to do that. I am not always able to do that. I am only able to give them an opinion. This is what I think, take it or leave it.
RB: It's probably too large a question to deal with to think about how writers fit into our culture, so I will try to trim that one down…
TCB: I'll take a stab at that. When I meet people out of the reading and writing and university loop and they don't know me or who I am, they say, "So what do you do?" I say, "I'm a writer." "Wow, man, you're a writer. I can hardly read." (laughs) So that's my function. (Laughs)
RB: Oh yeah, there's that too.
TCB: They are impressed but they don't care. I'm not a soap opera star. I'm nothing. I'm joking about it. I am well recognized. People know who I am, that's not a problem. Hmm (pauses), for the general public, it's somewhat off-putting that your profession is writing. It’s untrustworthy. They don't know exactly how you do it, what you do. What that means. They are impressed though. They think. "Well, this pretty good he is a writer." It's not like you are an oncologist. You know what the oncologist is going to do for you. They don't know what the writer is going to do for you. But that's great. That's why we are writers. We are loose cannons. We are beholding to no one. We do exactly what we please. And again that may be why so many people are attracted to writing because it is such an individual expression and this society at least you can get away with it. In this free society you can get away with it.
RB: You have a prodigious output and at the same time you have been teaching steadily since '78.
TCB: Since birth.
RB: Since birth? Why do you say that?
TCB: Only kidding.
RB: There is no such thing as a joke in these matters.
TCB: It seems like it.
RB: Would you prefer just to write?
TCB: If I preferred just to write, that's what I would do. Because the prodigious output that you point out has garnered me many fans around the world and has given me—maybe even as long ago as fifteen years ago, the income to turn my back on teaching if I wanted to. It's a very important part of my life. As I say, I was a student. I had great mentors who turned my life around. I want to do that for other people. And I want to keep literature viable. Again part of this demystifying process. I want them to know that it is hip, that it’s okay. We have things in our culture beyond the latest movie and MTV or TV shows. We have literature too and it's viable and it's great and it can do things for you that the electronic media can't. It’s a kind of a campaign and that campaign involves going on the road an giving public performances, writing the books and encouraging people who are like minded. My students, for instance. So yeah, I will continue to do that as long as I possibly can. I love it.
RB: Give me sense of your view of Southern California as a literary hotbed. Is there a lot going on?
TCB: Hmm. I have to step back first because I have an after-thought here. I now live a hundred miles from USC. So it's a haul to get in there. I teach one class in the spring and two classes in the fall. And so I have to listen to books on tape and fight the traffic and so on. I could do it forever if the Dean will agree to drive me in a limo both ways, but I want him to sit up front a wear a little cap.
RB: (Kind of laughs)
TCB: He's balking at the cap. I don' t think I am being unreasonable.
RB: A black cap?
TCB: Yeah the chauffeur's cap.
RB: That's a little rigid for a freewheeling guy like you.
TCB: (Laughs) Southern California. When I f
irst arrived there in the late '70s, there wasn't much of a literary scene. There were some novelists and of course writers have always been attracted out there by the lure of Hollywood. And many screenwriters, of course, that's changed in the intervening years. We are such a peripatetic society. People choose to live there who have nothing to do with movies and there are a lot of good writers in town. And there is a pretty good literary scene going on. LA Weekly is great. There is Beyond Baroque, it's been there forever, a writer's program. And many of the universities have adopted, now, writing programs and of course they have invited writers to move to town. Cal Irvine has a great program that has produced lots of great writers too. See I think it's a pretty lively literary scene, as lively as any other town with the exception of New York, I suppose.
RB: I always think of LA as a crime-writer central.
TCB: There are a lot.
RB: Besides you, I can't think of a literary fiction writer in LA.
TCB: There are a lot. I'm not going to mention them. I agree with you as far as genre writers.
RB: Why not? You may forget some? (Laughs)
TCB: That's exactly right. Where I live now in Santa Barbara it's mainly genre writers. Almost all, because no one else can afford to live there. I'm just lucky that I am the literary writer who can afford it. (Laughs) They sell a hundred books for every one I sell. I have something that they don't have, which they crave. Which is respect. But on the other hand, they never get reviewed or rarely, and they never get attacked. So they can just make their millions and be happy.
RB: You don't think that's changing?