by A. D. Mira
TCB: No, it's not.
RB: People still try to break the walls down. Every year there is one other guy who writes in a genre but is supposed to be more than that.
TCB: Well that's good. Hallelujah. I don't want to diss any writers, we are all in it together, but I'm a not a genre fiction guy. I don't read it, don't like it, don't think about it. I have never read any science fiction, never read any detective novels, thrillers. I am just not interested in them because they are conventional. That's why people like them. They want the same thing, the same characters. Great writing to me is, you open the book and you are surprised each time out. That's what I want to do. That's literature. Genre writing is limited not only by the fact that it is a genre and so that are certain expectations that have to be fulfilled. Like filling in the blanks. But also, the writing isn't usually as good as it is in literary fiction. And I need to read something that is as good or better than I can do or it doesn't interest me.
RB: That would be a high standard.
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.
TCB: Yeah that's right. Well, there are a lot of great books to read. If human life lasted ten thousand years, I couldn't get through the books I want to know about. So why waste my time? It's thrilling t o read something that is a literary book that is great. Much more than reading some whodunnit or thriller. They are so standard. I have no objection to going to movies to see a thriller or a SCI fi movie or something. Two hours, my mind goes numb I'm having fun. I love it. It's great. But I am not going to waste my time reading a pulp book when I could be reading great stuff.
RB: There are writers who recognize that one of the problems with genre is that the good guy always comes out alive…
TCB: But Robert, I know anyone who reads this will think, "Well what a schmuck Boyle is." I am not coming down on these people. I am just expressing my opinion. It doesn't interest me. And yo, okay, so you change the formula slightly and the good guy gets killed. Who cares? It’s still the same convention. People fudge the margins a little bit. Look at Borges, what fun he had with the idea of detective stories.
RB: Umberto Eco.
TCB: Yeah Eco. Calvino even. Much more with folk stories, which I loved. There are people who can do new things with it, and then there are people who are part of the genre because that's what they love and that's what they know. Fine, let them do it. It doesn't interest me.
RB: Do you look at current literature and say there is a book that people will be talking about in a hundred years?
TCB: Of course I am a great fan of many, many writers and many books.
RB: Part of your criteria is that a book will last?
TCB: Right, it's one man's opinion. Just as I have an opinion on genre writers in general…Raymond Chandler, I've read him; I like him the fact that he takes me back in LA history. But I am always disappointed because it has to adhere to the conventions. Ian McEwan just won the National Book Critic's Circle for Atonement. That's one of the best books I have read in years. The Remains of the Day by Ishiguro is a masterpiece. To me is one the best books ever written by anyone at any time. Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine is a masterpiece. Denis Johnson's books, Fiskadoro and Jesus' Son, brilliant writing going on out there that is utterly new, utterly unconventional. Beautifully wrought, beautifully structured, thought out. It's amazing stuff. The Hours…why would I want to…? I couldn't get through all of these books if I had a million years. So these are the books I want to read. By the way, I read popular books. I had never read Seabiscuit. Because I don't like horses. Their eyeballs are too big. I don't like racing and I don’t know anything about it and don't like it. But people kept telling me. "Ya gotta read this." And I just finished it, and I had tears in my eyes. It was wonderful. I now love horses. That's a popular book that is just brilliantly done. It's not conventional in any way. I was blown away by it.
RB: It's somewhat neat that a book like that sold. I wonder if they thought it would be big.
TCB: I don't think they know what fiction will sell either. Fortunately for some of us who have a track record and I been with the same publisher all this time [Viking] and all my books have always been in print which I love and it's a kind of miracle in itself. They will look at what I give them and put it out there and hope for the best. I can't say why one book gets more attention than another. But for some reason Drop City is back in the loop and getting huge attention including from my own publisher. When the NY Times ran its cover story you open the page and there's the full-page ad. I haven't had that before. I'm very pleased.
RB: Who is your editor at Viking?
TCB: Paul Slovak. He edits a few writers whom he has really has loved over the years. The late Ken Kesey was one of them. Bill Vollman is one of them. I think Bill Kennedy might be one of his authors. This got us off the subject—we were talking how editors edit my books. I am a nutball perfectionist and now with the computer what I deliver to them is pretty much what you are going to see. Which is not to say that I don't appreciate comments and sometimes adopt them. For instance, in A Friend of the Earth, there is a scene when which the two protagonists as protest against environmental destruction and logging strip naked before the press, hand them their clothes and walk off in to the Sierras for one month to live off the land. With nothing. Paul said this is a great scene. Why don't you extend it a little? And he was absolutely right. I had a lot of material to get to in that book and to move this story, Perhaps I had summarized too much of that. And I went back and added four or five pages and I think the scene is richer for it. That sort of thing can be wonderful. This book, Drop City, is exactly what I gave them. Exactly, that's it.
RB: How many drafts did you do?
TCB: I can't really say because it is all done in one draft. One long repeated draft.
RB: Sentence by sentence.
TCB: Over and over, over and over before I move ahead. And the next day I go back to where I was the day before. Over and over until I move ahead. So it's one single draft that has been gone over many, many times in the process of writing it.
RB: Usually people who work that way take a very long time.
TCB: I work a little faster than most because I began to realize that you generally produce most of your best work before death. So that's a stimulant. What I am doing right now is the problem; it interrupts the flow of books. I am flying on this book The Inner Circle, the Kinsey Book. And I didn’t want to stop. I got farther than I even thought I would before I went on tour.
RB: Wasn't there a Solzhenitsyn book by that title?
TCB: He had book with circle in the title…The First Circle.
RB: What's your response when a critic makes an judgement that Drop City is a hundred pages too short?
TCB: Yeah, I'm glad. I think that's wonderful. Many people felt this about Tortilla Curtain too. Each book, each story has its proper moment to end and sometimes the author doesn’t know that until he gets there. I'm delighted, that means he's thinking beyond it and he liked and wanted it to go on. In many of my historical novels, I give you a coda, like with the Road to Wellville, or Riven Rock or Water Music. This is what happened in subsequent times. But with books like this one and Tortilla Curtain I feel like I have come to a point when you can write the ending yourself. You know what's going to happen the next day, the next week, six months from now. And to limn that for you would be wrong. Because the best books—and genre writing doesn't do this—invite you in as much as possible to create the book yourself. At the very end of this book I am glad that you want it to go on. Obviously, we can go on…all of the questions the reader should be posing for themselves.
RB: Occasionally people come back to a novel they have written—Richard Ford with Independence Day, Julian Barnes with Love Etc. and Frederick
Busch is writing one for Girls—and a few years later want to write a sequel.
TCB: I've never written sequels of my own work. Of course I have written sequels of classic works. I wrote the sequel to For Whom the Bell Tolls in fifteen pages. Also, wrote the Overcoat II, to help the memory of Nikolai Gogol, The Devil and Irv Cherniske. I love to do that. I love to play with literary form and classic stories. I have never written a sequel yet. Because I am so caught with what's next and what's new, I don't want to look back. I don't want to go back. When I present something to the public I have put everything that I possibly can into it and I have made it as good as I thin it can be. I don't second-guess. I don't go back. When I did the Collected Stories in '98 I looked at some of my very earliest stories and I obviously I would write then differently today. But I didn't want to change them at all. Why do a collected stories? Especially, at that stage in my career. I hope to do a second Collected Stories. Well, it's for the interest of people who want to see where I came from. Whether they be scholars or students or people who just want to be inspired. Or just have a good laugh. Here it is. As far as my next book will be this Inner Circle but the following book will be another collection. I have half of that ready.
RB: Gee whiz.
TCB: Of course, of course. I am totally committed to the short story and I will always write them equally with novels.
RB: I brought up the sequel idea because I see an opportunity here because a child is about to be born at the end of Drop City which wouldn't compel you to…
TCB: Rehash the old characters…I am kind of sly in the way that I have learned from Vonnegut when I was kid. By making references to my other works In this book, for instance this was proceeded by the story Termination Dust in my last book, After the Plague, which is also set in Alaska in a town I invented called Boynton. Some of the people in that story were young then. I am waiting for an irate fan or astute geographer to point out that I have changed the geography of the Boynton from the story to the novel. I did that intentionally.
RB: For some people you are in the heart of Babylon in Southern California. The last time I talked with you mentioned that you were going to have a TV program.
TCB: I had a television show going down. I don't watch TV. I'm not a TV guy but I will do anything to get my stories out to a greater audience and my agent came to me that Fox would do a series of my stories and I would be the host. I would only have to be the host. At the last minute they went with a horror anthology instead. Which I understand is no longer on the air. I hadn't invested much in that but I had hopes for it. I love when my books are made into movies because it will get a boost for people reading the books.
RB: What has been made besides the Road to Wellville?
TCB: It looks like next we’ll see The Tortilla Curtain. Luis Mendocky will direct it; he's a Mexican director who did The White Palace. Robin Williams and Helen Hunt will play the Mossbachers and Benjamin Bratt and Eve Mendez will play the Rincons and it will be financed through HBO films for theatrical release. And they are going to start filming in May. But you know, with movies until you have the extra buttered popcorn between your thighs and it's playing on the screen, you never know. I loved the idea. Really it was a thrill—when Alan Parker made the Road to Wellville—to go there and see characters that you'd imagined and lines that you had written, there and appearing on the screen even if it's in a different version form how you pictured it. It's just a thrill. And it helped to broadcast the book. That's my only interest. I don't work for the movies, I don't participate in any way. I don't go on the set. I don't care about that. But if it's a really sappy horrible movie (laughs) I'll have to distance myself from it because after all I didn' t do the movie and people will blame me for the movie. So it can cut both ways.
RB: So whose picture will go on the cover of the paperback?
TCB: They put Anthony Hopkins and Bridget Fonda on the cover of The Road to Wellville. And I resent that. To a degree. But it sold lots and lots of copies. Benjamin Bratt is extremely handsome and young…
RB: Did you see his movie Pinero?
TCB: Yes I did. He's handsome, he's young and doesn't look like Candido. I'm hoping he's going to go the Robert De Niro/Raging Bull way, gain thirty pounds and let his hair fall out and get real dirty and sleep in a pit for a couple of weeks. Otherwise, I don't know…I also hope that they use Spanish for when the Rincons start talking to each other. If they talk with an accent which Hollywood will probably do, I think it will spoil the effect. I have nothing to do with this. I am sure they are not going to listen to me (both laugh) but I really hope that the Spanish portions are in Spanish. But don't hold your breath.
RB: You are here with me in Boston talking about a book you finished a year and half ago. And you are almost finished with the next one. When will it come out?
TCB: It depends on the endless book tours. And when I get my life back together again. I will have the summer I hope to be finished by fall.
RB: And you have a story collection…
TCB: Once the novel is done, I will start writing new stories again.
RB: It's a collection?
TCB: I already have nine.
RB: They have already been published?
TCB: Yeah some were published. The first came out in January of last year, "Swept Away," in the New Yorker. I'd finished this book and then I put together a textbook for Heinley, a book I have always wanted to do—for classes like—mine of contemporary writers. It's called Double Takes. Thirty-two writers, each one has two stories, I've done head notes and an introduction. It's an anthology. It a lot of work. Then I began to write stories. I went up to the Sierra Nevada. I always do. And the first I wrote is a very whimsical piece based on the notion, I had read about the windiest town on earth, it's in the Shetland Islands and cats blow by, so I wrote my flying cat story called "Swept Away." I continued to write stories until May and then I began the research on this Kinsey book. I went to all the biographies and histories and went to Bloomington [Indiana] and I began writing the book on Halloween, a propitious day. I'm writing better and faster than I ever have. It's the first 'I' narrator of a novel since Budding Prospects. I'm really enjoying it.
RB: Your daughter is writing now.
TCB: I am very proud of my daughter and a little jealous of her, by the way.
RB: Is she better than you are?
I work a little faster than most because I began to realize that you generally produce most of your best work before death. So that's a stimulant.
TCB: Well, of course she is. What's great is she is a very different writer. She is very textured with dense beautiful writing. As if William Gass were her father instead of me. Her name is Kerry Kobashe Boyle. She just published her first story in McSweeney's, a great place to publish. On the strength of that she has gotten into two anthologies and NPR has asked her to be a commentator. Now when I published my first story nobody cared, nobody noticed. (Both laugh) And furthermore she is in the Iowa Writers' Workshop right now.
RB: Somebody at Slate wrote a piece on fam fic, children continuing the work of their parents or relatives…
TCB: Has that ever happened?
RB: Well that was the premise of the piece. Tolkien, Jeff Shaama, Brian Herbert. As well as the Godfather saga continuing, a sequel to Gone with the Wind…
TCB: I think it is mainly unhappy…the best example I can think of that seems happy to me, although I don't know the circumstances, is Martin Amis and his father Kingsley. Both brilliant. In fact, I think Martin is more brilliant than his father. But they both have successful careers as writers.
RB: I am more interested about the legitimacy of one writer continuing another's work. Robert Parker finished a Raymond Chandler book at the behest of the Chandler Estate…
TCB: I have no idea why anyone would do that. I would never do that. When I have done rewritten classic stories, It's for my own purposes in order to make a point. And it's somewhat of a homage to the story, but it's not an attempt to write in th
e mode of that author but rather to do a riff on it for fun. To make a comment on how this story holds up now and the attitudes of this story hold up now. The Over Coat II, I wrote in the mid '80s and it retold the story with the same characters and the same scenario except that it took place in the worker's paradise. And it was rather harsh commentary on the Soviet System. I haven't been fully credited for this, but it was I who was responsible for bringing down the Soviet Union by having written that story.
RB: I will inform the rest of the media. (laughs)
TCB: Thank you.
RB: Are you familiar with the Will Self book Dorian?
TCB: No. But I know Will and I have read Cock & Bull and his Great Apes, which is a wonderful book. He has new one?
RB: Yes, and he calls it an imitation.
TCB: Oh. Dorian Gray?
RB: Yes.
TCB: I'd be interested because he is a guy who could really ring changes on that. He has an amazingly idiosyncratic point of view.
RB: I'm not sure what the conclusion is but that other than for commercial reasons to continue an author's work.
TCB: I think it is corrupt actually. The writer's work is individual, and we love the writer for having taken us someplace we have never been before. And to imitate for commercial reasons is kind of artistically bankrupt. It's like writing the novelization of a movie or something.
RB: Wait, you aren't suggesting that multi-national corporations that publish books are corrupting the arts?
TCB: Well, I don't even know what the subject is exactly. I hadn't even heard of this. You asked my opinion and there it is. (Both laugh)
RB: Let's end there before we provoke dark forces... Thanks.
TCB: Thank you.
Interwiew by Alan Gottlieb
(an edited version of this piece appeared in the October 22, 2000 issue of The Denver Post)
Q: The role of freak accidents in Friend of the Earth ...
TCB: There is a kind of voodoo involved. If God doesn't exist and you don't have guardian angels and you have no purpose on earth, then it is a mighty mean place which is ruled by accident, which has kinda been my unfortunate, bleak outlook since I discovered that when I was probably age 17. It does play a big role in this book, but I think it belongs here because it just points out that we are at the mercy of nature and we are animals living in nature, no matter how we might protest to the contrary or feel that we are in control of the situation.