by A. D. Mira
Q: Is there something in particular that happened at age 17 that led you to that conclusion?
TCB: Well, I think, I was raised Roman Catholic in a largely Jewish community and most of my friends who were either Jews or atheists. With their influence and then studying science in school, I told my mother that I wasn't going to go to church and I didn't believe anymore. And I guess through most of my life I've been trying to find something to believe in because it is so depressing. And science seemsto fill the bill for most people these days, but science is ultimately voodoo too, because what we want is purpose and it doesn't offer us any purpose. It doesn't give any final solutions or purpose to what we're doing here. For me, I guess I just have a very Darwinian view of our species. That is about the best explanation I can find. That seems to me very reasonable and true. I'd like to have a lot better news for everybody, but I don't.
I like that people are discussing on the web page whether FOE is pro or anti-environmentalist. It's great. I am an environmentalist and I believe in it. But on the other hand, environmentalism is very elitist. I write these books to sort out my own feelings and also as a corrective to my own behavior. As is the case with TheTortilla Curtain. As Ty says, what is an environmentalist? Well, that's somebody who already has his mountain cabin. When I moved into the place I live now with my wife, a very nice neighborhood, I said, "Well, you know, now I'm against everything. "
To answer those people on the web page, I think it's for them to decide. It's certainly not anti-environmentalist. I believe in being an environmentalist, in trying to preserve the other species. But I'm also kind of hopeless, as well. I think it doesn't matter anymore. I don't want people to read the book and be so depressed they feel, 'all right, let's throw our garbage in the street,' you know, 'let's pollute all the more.' I don't have a message, I'm not running for office, I don't have a platform, I'm not supplying answers. I'm an artist. I'm creating entertainment, part of my life's work, and I'm writing it in order to see how I feel. I don't know how I feel about anything unless I write about it. It's a way of deep thought, somehow, for me.
Q: When you conclude the last chapter with, "what did all this accomplish? Not a thing," you seem to inject a note of hope after that with "and I'm a human being.."It left me feeling bleak, that all the suffering etc amounted to nothing, and earlier, you talk about the piggish way we live,but if it doesn't make a difference...
TCB: I can't interpret my own books, because it's not fair, I think. It belongs to the audience. That's why the "is he for or against"-- that's for them to decide. Ty says, what has he accomplished, absolutely nothing. And yet he says, but I would do it all over again. It's about a character, somebody a lot like me, probably a lot like you. And the end result of environmentalism is misanthropy; man is the enemy. To be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people. But Ty does understand something about himself, kind of in an epiphany at the end. I'm a human being. Yep. That's a dog and I'm a human being. It was kind of a magical moment for me. I don't know what's gonna happen. It's art. It works. It invents itself as you go along, and your mind is unconscious but leaping and leaping ahead and what does it mean and how do you conclude it? I was really happy when he discovered that about himself. I felt that it's a mutedly happy ending, you know? It's a love story on one level. The guy makes a discovery about himself.
Q: The stuff about how people live now, how Americans live. You can take stock. But then to think, aggh, maybe it doesn't matter, even if you change your own behavior, it'll make you feel better, but it's not going to save the world.
TCB: That is the bleakest view of it. I think at least we're aware. I worry about everything. I'm aware of everything. Maybe I read the newspapers too much, you know? I was trying to figure out why people are responding so well to this book. Truly, we've got about 30 reviews in now and there's not a negative word amongst them. It is a misanthropic book, to degree, it's deeply pessimistic and maybe even devastatingly depressing. Yet, on the other hand, there is a liveliness to it and an entertainment value and fun. Maybe what it is ? I just discovered this yesterday, by the way, on a talk-radio show maybe it's that everybody feels as I do; guilty on the one hand and yet, I'm here. I've got to draw a breath, I've got to eat a sandwich. Wanting to do the right thing, but then being frustrated by the doomsayers. I mean, every environmental writer screams doom. We're interested in nature because we're part of it and we love it. It's just fascinating that there are other creatures. The unconscious moments that Ty has occasionally, like when he's naked in the wilderness. When you're not thinking about your job or your career or your life or God or anything else; you're just not thinking. You're just experiencing. We all want that. And yet, the narrator comes over the nature show and says, yes, and all these glorious creatures will be dead in five years. Everybody just rebels against that. There's nothing but bad news. And maybe my approach is honest but subversive in some way. And maybe that's how people want to view it. Are you going to laugh, are you going to cry, what are you going to do?
Q; Sierra in some ways is the heroine, because if you're going to take it to its logical extreme, that's how you have to live. Or admit that you're not going to live that way and make whatever accommodations you're going to make.
TCB: The real model for her, Julia Hill, who went up in the tree while I was writing the book, and came down from the tree after I'd finished it, was an inspiration. She brought attention to a grave problem. I have a lot of sympathy for eco-sabotage and for the radical part of the environmental movement in drawing attention to these problems. I like extremes. Extreme cases. She (Sierra) is an extreme case, but she becomes a martyr, and the question is, has the movement used her? Has her father used her? Ty also is an extreme in that he becomes the loose cannon. Is he environmentally committed, or is it a war? Is he just out for revenge? Is it anger? Is it beyond control? It makes the characters more human than if theyíre just kind of stick figures in some program I have. I don't know what theyíre going to do or how they're going to behave. But it sure is fun to justify it after it's written. I'm glad I don't have to interpret the books and tell about my deep meaning, which is certainly there and I certainly have my own interpretation, but I don't think it's fair for me to say what that is.
Q: But it sure is fun to talk about it with the person who created it because you can have your own ideas, and people may disagree with your own interpretation.
TCB: Yeah, well you just told me the debate on the web page--is he for or against?
Q: So have you gotten angry reaction at other times when you've gone out there after publishing a book?
TCB: The Tortilla Curtain, they ripped the flesh from my bones. I was reviled from one end of the country to the other. Insulted, called human garbage on a call-in show in S.F. (I thanked her for the compliment, by the way), irritating everybody. The right-wingers said, "Oh, you're too soft on immigration. These Mexicans..." And the liberals said, "He's an apostate. We're not really that bad." But the only people who liked it were the Mexicans themselves. Someone's calling attention to the problem. My justification has been the book is an acknowledged American classic after only five years in print. It's got double any of my other books in print. It's read all over the world. Every California school child reads it in the 11th grade. My own son had to read it in his school. It's had a huge impact around the world. And yet at the time, I felt terrible. I was skulking through Denver like this (holds jacket up over his face) defending myself. I'd sit down with a journalist, they'd say, "So what do you think about that review of so and so?" What do I think about it? I think it's unfair and I don't like it. It was a hot-button topic, a yes or no topic. And to an extent, so is this one. And I guess it provoked a lot of people. And really, it wasn't that much fun being attacked, but I guess I really did my job well. At least it got people excited.
Q: And it ends with much more an element of hope than FOE.
TCB: Yes, it does. There's help for a larger number of people. At the end of FOE, the
hero and heroine have come to an accommodation with themselves and the earth. I think in the end of TC, I don't expect that Delaney and Kyra will change their behavior radically. Maybe slightly. But yet there is a gesture of hope for everybody. For all of us. I loved where it ended. Many of my books have codas. That one ended in a place where I could have gone on a great deal more. It ends in a place where what happens in the next second is really important. I thought that was just where I wanted it to end. So that you can supply the ending yourself.
Q: I think you really hit some deep truths in that book...
TCB: I'm really glad you feel that way. I haven't heard from a lot of Mexican writers, but I have heard from some, and they feel that I have captured some deep truths about their culture. Which is, to my mind, an accomplishment I should be proud of because I put it as a challenge to myself to try to enter the minds of someone from another culture, another sex, and see if I can do that, see if I can humanize them, make their problems real and vital for us, for the readers, most of whom are going to be people like me.
Q: It seems that you do a fair amount of research, yet it's unobtrusive. How do you do that?
TCB: I know what you mean. I don't know, Alan, each writer works in a different way and my way, I guess, is to dream something or imagine something, to exercise my imagination in a given story. So the research for me is not all important. It's necessary to kick-start a story. I'm also not the journalist type of fiction writer, like Tom Wolfe, for instance, or James Michener, who feel they must go and interview the fireman and join the society to protect the earth and meet everybody and write little capsule summaries. I don't feel comfortable doing that. It might be interesting for me sometime to do it, but I just don't like to do it; I don't feel comfortable with it. I'd like to imagine them, invent them. A journalist, his job is to represent the truth as best he can or what he feels is the truth. My job is to seduce you into my world view and to make it seem real. So the details have to be accurate, otherwise it takes you out of that picture and ruins it. Beyond that, though, it is fiction. I have no need to be exact, beyond convincing you that this is true. My first book, Water Music, is set in Africa.I have never been to Africa. And yet at almost every reading I give, even to this day, someone from the Peace Corps will pop up and say they passed that book around Africa, they really loved it and I got it exactly right. I love that because I invented it. Thatís what fiction is; itís a kind of testimony to the power of the imagination, to invent it and for the imagination of the reader to decode it and reinvent it.
Q: But imagination can also spin wildly into stuff that isn't even remotely close to what anyone would consider reality.
TCB: I'm lucky, just lucky. I don't know how to explain it other than that. But I certainly know what you're talking about when writers get bogged down in their research, because they're so involved in the subject they want to show it off. And maybe the research in certain areas takes precedence over the story. I've never been that way. I just want to tell a story or make a story out of some information. It could be an experience I've had, something you tell me, something I read in the paper. It could be everything I ever wanted to know about the beginning of the cereal industry, you know? I find joy in that material. I find it absurd and crazy and I want to communicate that to us, to everybody who reads it. But not in a way that is going to be a tome or ponderous or an essay or a lecture. In a way that catches you by the nose and drags you along and by the time you wake up, you've got it all. It's all there it's done, you're not drawn out of the story at all. The story takes primacy. It seems like an obvious thing to say, that the story takes primacy. But many writers aren't able to remember that or to make that happen.
Q: Or flat out don't believe it.
TCB: There always are literary fashions and, in some quarters, it is fashionable to write stories that move by indirection. That move, for instance, by a shared image from scene to scene rather than plot. Some would say this is the post-modernist way and is the best way. I don't say what is the best or worst, or better or worse. There are different approaches, different ways. My approach has always been to tell a story. Literature is entertainment. One of the reasons I always go out on the road and entertain audiences, and I teach students, is to try to remind them that literature is entertainment at root. It's fun, it's not some assignment in a textbook. You don't need a critic to mediate between the audience and the work of art. It should speak directly to anybody. That's my war, and I guess I'm losing it.
I'm often criticized for this [his theatrical readings]. People think that I'm demystifying literature, that it's holy or sacrosanct in some way. I don't agree. Like the plastic arts, like music, even the most complex and beautiful music, it still is an entertainment.
Q: You're extremely prolific. What is the source of all this? Where do the ideas come from...and you seem to write in a very consistent voice. Have you ever experimented with really different voices?
TCB: I'm really pleased that you can pick up any of my books and know it's mine without seeing the title. Every writer develops his own style and his own voice, and that's my voice. I do experiment with other voices. By having different narrators or different points of view especially. It's nothing that I would work out abstractly. It's not that mystical a process. Not that abstract a process. It just happens, it evolves, if you're lucky, over time. Where do I get the ideas from? Again, I feel a story is an exercise of the imagination. You don't write what you know; you write what you don't know so you can discover something. So, for me, instead of feeling circumscribed by my own experience, as many writers are, I've always felt I can write about anything that interests me, anything I've learned, anything that amazes me. My title story out of Descent of Man, for instance, came out of a fact that I had discovered in the mid 70s when I was a student at Iowa that apes can use language as we do. Our justification for our dominance over all the other animals, and killing them and herding them into cages and torturing them, etc., is that we are superior and the proof of that is our ability to use language. Well, that was when they were first doing experiments with gorillas and chimps with computer boards, where they could make sentences and so forth. I wondered, well, what does that mean? So I write a story to find out. And so, I'm always looking for anything that's fascinating. Look how much our lives have changed due to technology in the last 30 years. I have to respond to that. I just had a story in Esquire about Internet voyeurism, you know, come and see the sexy co-eds 24 hours a day with the camera in the toilet, etc. Why? What does that mean? So I write a story to find out. So there are infinite ideas, you know? Infinite. Whatever interests me, I'm going to chase it down. And, of course, they all recycle. All the ideas keep recycling and become my themes of my whole life's work. As I said earlier, this book comes directly out of The Tortilla Curtain.
Q: "Unfriendly Skies,"which appeared recently in The New Yorker, takes an everyday experience, one to which we can all relate -- flying on a plane-- then has something over the top happen. You do this quite often.
TCB: I suppose, if you stand back, you could say, well, that's a comic method that I employ and other writers employ. It's a kind of hyperbole or exaggeration. It's taking a standard situation or a disturbing situation to its farthest conclusion, it's wildest possible or most surprising thing that could happen. It makes for good comedy and, in fact, I don't know if you've noticed, but I do have different approaches to each book. They are comic sometimes almost by definition and, yet, I will also write stories that you laugh aloud over as well. What I've been working toward, I think, is not so much just a satire, which is kind of limited, but a mode that is not really satiric exactly, or ironic exactly, but also can have a heart and can turn on you and surprise you and be genuinely passionate and moving, as well, all in one mix. So that the reader is always very uneasy as to are we in a comic universe in which everything will work out OK and I don't have to worry, or is something really dark going on here that is going to be disturbing to me? So you laugh, but the laugh sticks in
your throat. I think I tried to achieve that in TC as well as this one. Though TC is a different kind of humor than FOE, which I guess is more absurdist really. The other one is closer to reality.
Q: Your approach to satire. You skewer some of your characters, but in a certain gentle way, so that you never--even someone as infuriating as Delaney, he's got some sympathetic qualities. You're a little gentler than a lot of satirists.
TCB: It's not conscious. Each of these characters is part of me. And part of me says, 'close the gates, keep them out,' and there is a corrective part of me that says 'how can you say that? How can you put yourself above anybody, ever?' So, yes,the characters are all reflections of myself in one way or another, even Candido, who like his namesake in Voltaire, just has things happen to him. You know, a world of accidents. He's not perfect, he's not the sappy hero of a polemic. He comes from a macho society, he's disturbed by
the fact that his wife is working and he's not. He beats her up.