by A. D. Mira
Q: He also whines about his fate..pinche vida.
TCB: He whines about his fate. But he also has admirable qualities, in that, like all of us, he wants to work. He wants to build what we consider the American dream. He wants the house. He wants the basic accoutrements of life.
But there are some bad guys. There are some bad guys who get skewered. In Big Game, the Benders, the real estate people get their comeuppance at the hands of Bessie Bee, the elephant. And I was really pleased to be able to write it from Bessie Bee's point of view, if only briefly. But I guess I'm not as nasty as some satirists are. And I don't know why that is. It's so hard to explain your method, you know? Because your method is 95 percent natural. It's what shakes out. You move as an artist, you move toward your strengths. I admire many, many writers, and many of them do things very well that I don't do so well and, hopefully, I do things very well that they don't do so well. It's a mix, and everybody gradually plays toward his or her strengths. Maybe that's where the voice comes from, and why you can have a distinctive voice and why you can pick up any of my books and say 'oh, yeah, that's Boyle.' I couldn't identify exactly what that is. But I'm glad to have it, because you do want to be distinctive. It's like music, pop music. Many songs sound alike. Then there people that the minute you hear the arrangement or their voice, you know exactly who it is, no matter what song they're doing.
Q: Maybe that's what I was getting at, talking about trying out other voices. Like Russell Banks, ranging from a street kid in "Rule of the Bone" to "Cloudsplitter" and its stilted 19th century language.
TCB: It's very difficult to do a historical novel. My historical novels are almost anti-historical novels or post-modern historical novels. It's not the history, I like the history, but it's not the history that overwhelms me. I don't want to recreate a historical situation as much as have fun with it as it reflects on today; as we were talking about the Kellogg example of Riven Rock. I think the biggest problem with the historical novel, the traditional one and why it doesn't work is because the author wants to replicate a moment in history because he loves it. Well, how did they talk then? Take the film Gladiator. Have you seen it? It's heroes and blood and guts and all that. But they talk in the only way they could possibly talk in such a movie, which is this kind of pseudo-Elizabethan, mock-Shakespearean, what the hell else could they talk, know what I mean? And it makes a mockery of it. At the end, I burst out laughing. I think novelists have the same problem. How do you have them talk? I solved the problem in Water Music by writing it as an anti-historical historical novel. It's narrated by a wise guy from the 20th century, making fun of the genre, but also using it to tell the story. So that, for instance, of the 104 chapters, there's one called "And Mama, Can This Really be the End?" That sort of thing. You have to stay true to the era and know the era perfectly in your research, but that doesn't mean you have to be a slave to it. It depends on your approach. All the approaches are different in all my historical novels.
Q: In both "Riven Rock" and "Road to Wellville", you're writing from a contemporary point of view.
TCB: Absolutely. That's why, again, the distinction I'm trying to make. The traditional historical novel is often dull. The author is perhaps too true to the historical moment and so loses the story in the process. Some novels get lost in the research because the author loves the research and wants to bring it forward and entertain you with it. But maybe it's not as entertaining as the research in context or in the service of a story. Of course, it's easy for me to sound so articulate about all of this in hindsight.
By the way, I only know how my books are linked and what I'm doing because of going on tour and talking to journalists and scholars and wondering about it. I'm just pursuing something that I don't know what it is. It's just my life to find out what comes next.
Q: What's next?
TCB: After the Plague, 16 new stories. It comes out next year at this time. The stories I'm pretty pleased with. I just did my collected stories two years ago and I did not write a preface to it because I view it, if the gods grace me with a long life, as Vol. 1. I'll write the preface to Vol. II. I wanted to sort of demonstrate to the critics that I'm only half-way done yet and here's a really solid collection following up.
German audiobook cover of "After the plague"
The novel I've just begun, and I don't know whether it'll be successful or not, is a non-comic novel, which I've never done before. And it's told in the voices, the very, very close third-person voices, of three different characters. It's set in hippie times. I've gone 25 years in the future; I'm going 25 to 30 years ago, as an outgrowth of this book. A different approach, but it's an outgrowth of it. That was the last time there was a back to the earth movement. People were extremely suspicious of technology and trying to draw back from it. I wanted to remember that and see how it plays out in the light of what I know now, about the environment. Further, I spent some time in Alaska this summer. In Alaska, until 1973, you could homestead. You could live like Daniel Boone. You could go there, go into the woods, find a nice place by a river, cut trees down, build your own home, live off the land; trap animals, sell their fur, prospect for gold, grow your garden, and live exactly as people lived for hundreds of years. What about that? Is that possible, is that conceivable? It seems to me that even then it was not. But I want to find out. I really want to find out, because it intrigues me. There's a great book by Billy..Billy...Four Seasons North by Billie Whitelaw, I believe her name is. She and her husband went up there and they were sort of old hippies. I think she did this in the 70s. Went to the Brooks Range and lived there for a year. Built their cabin, lived off the land. And she makes it sound very magical. And she's very connected with the earth. And yet she makes no qualms about the fact that they have to live the hunter-gatherer existence; they have to shoot their moose and kill things without mercy because they must survive.
Q: A more prepared version of Ty and Andrea.
TCB: Exactly. She makes a point of warning her readers, "Don't try this." Because really, we can never go back from the population we have and the civilization we have. To exist as she did, you'd need 20 square miles of virgin territory full of critters. There are no more critters. There's nothing left. If you read E.O. Wilson or you know that what is operating here is island biogeography. What operated in evolutionary terms on islands operates throughout the continents now because in essence animals only live in islands. The rest is shopping malls and condos, you know? So I wondered how it would be to go back to that time, with that hippie ethic, the back to the land ethic, in Alaska. Would it work? Especially starting a new community, in the commune movement. And, by the way, I'm doing research on the period. It's wonderful. I think it was always too close to write about before. If you notice, World's End only goes to 1968. But now, I've read a couple of books written in the period, The Hippie Trip, written by a sociology professor, and he went out like a sociologist and explained to the world who are hippies, what is their tribe, what do they want, what do they eat, what is their sex life like, what are their ideals. And it's like ancient history. So I think the time is right. I'm kind of excited about it.
Q: Why is it not a comic novel?
TCB: I don't know. I just have no idea why it's not a comic a novel, and it's kind of difficult. I've been having a difficult time. It started writing itself , but then, as always happens because you have to figure out what does it mean and where is it going, suddenly I've come into some more difficult parts of it and I think I'm seeing clear of it and getting some structure and so on, with maybe a quarter of the book done and finished. Now I'm here and I've forgotten entirely about it. There's no conceivable way of working on the road. If you want to talk about craft, another thing, for me, anyway, I must have no worries, no problems, and have a regular period of many, many, many consecutive months of every single day to let it grow. Anything that intrudes on it destroys that. I would prefer not to interrupt books by being on the road. But because I have to do this so often, the truth is the las
t several books have been interrupted by being on the road, and I feel that if I've been able to do it before hopefully I can do it again.
Q: Does the interruption change the books?
TCB: Boy, I don't know. I hope not. I hope--I like to think I can take up where I left off because that's the way life is going to be from now on. Riven Rock I believe I wrote straight through, with only a minor interruption, going to Germany for two weeks or something. A tour like this is a major interruption. I will be out of sync with my work habits till Thanksgiving. It's tough. I also feel it's necessary. Although I may be wrong. After all, there is not a control group here. There's not a me who did not go out before the public. Maybe I would have been just as successful if I was Thomas Pynchon. I doubt it. But maybe. Unlike most writers of my generation, all my books have always been in print. And unlike most literary writers, I have a strong following and do very well. I don't know whether it's because I really enjoy doing publicity and being on stage and the word gets around, or it's simply the work itself. I don't know. But I'm not going to take the chance and, furthermore, I enjoy doing it, and I also, and this may sound corny, but my publishers around the world have a big investment in me and I'm loyal to them. I have a long relationship with them. I want the books to succeed and they feel that going out and shaking a leg onstage helps. I'd hate to have to go back to the beginning again. I'm very pleased and gratified that the fans are so supportive worldwide.
Q: When you talked about Alaska and your new novel, I wondered whether you had read Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild?"
TCB: Read it twice and read it again as research into this book. The guy who went out into the wilderness in that way is a very interesting type for me. Because he was sort of cocksure that nature would support it. I suppose this little bit where Ty and Andrea go out and strip naked in the woods is the same kind of thinking to a degree. I guess that's what I'm concerned with in the book I'm working on now. Is nature nurturing? Can it support us? Will it, does it? Or is it purely harsh and will we be wiped out because of our own excesses?
Q: And the answer to that, I suppose, depends on your own theology or lack thereof.
TCB: I would love to believe in something and I'm struggling towards it, I think. Maybe that's another reason people feel interested in these books I've been writing in recent years. I think they are an honest reflection of my searching for some answers. I don't have answers. I don't have the message. I'm not a guru. I'm just working it out on my own terms. In this forum, which is the only forum I know. That's why I don't work for the movies. I don't write book reviews if I can avoid it. I don't write essays. I just want to do this.
Interview by Gregory Daurer
The author of "A Friend of the Earth" considers "ecotage," talks frankly about mosquitoes and describes our barren future. Think condos.
Before writing his early, PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel "World's End," T. Coraghessan Boyle researched the Indian and Dutch history of his childhood town of Peekskill, N.Y. "The Tortilla Curtain" -- which chronicles the painful intersection between an impoverished Mexican couple without green cards and their suburban counterpoints who live in gated California communities -- emerged as he weighed the issue of illegal immigration.
Naturally, after reading several tomes about our worsening environmental predicament -- and finding himself utterly depressed and horrified -- Boyle didn't go downtown in a white robe to tell passersby the end is near. Instead, he used his timber-size sense of humor to pen his brand-new fiction, "A Friend of the Earth."
Boyle laughs often, even while we discuss environmental degradation. But he also tends to fix on me a dead-on, apocalyptic stare (look at the book jacket photos) as soon as he finishes answering a question. Not only does the chilling look signal the termination of an answer, it resonates with its own interrogation: "These issues I'm examining within myself, what kind of thought have you given them? Where are your moral boundaries fixed?"
Q: "A Friend of the Earth" is set partially in the future, yet there are only a few cyberpunk trappings. Did you consciously try to stay away from something like that?
TCB: I did purposefully stay away from talking about technological advances much in this book, because I'm not a sci-fi guy. I've never read any sci-fi. I'm more interested in creating a kind of literary, satirical future -- like, maybe, if Jonathan Swift were around, he'd do something like this.
So the machine part of it didn't interest me much, except the sorts of machines in the '80s and '90s that we had, like the feller buncher and so on that we use specifically in logging. I'm much more interested in going back to nature. Is that possible?
Maybe I'll think about machines in another novel. In my basement lab I'm always working on technological advances -- like the automobile. You know the parking situation? You know the little "blippo" you have to lock your car? I've designed one now where you "blip" it and the car immediately shrinks to the size of a wallet. The technological glitch is, it's a really heavy wallet. So I'm working on it still.
Q:Do you see any hope for us collectively as a species?
TCB: Not a single breath of hope. No. And this is an informed opinion because, by the way, I've read all the environmental tracts. And boy, that's why the public doesn't want to know about it, because it is so bleak. I can't find any hope in anything anybody's writing about the environment, and they're all trying to tell us cautionary tales, too. But as Ty Tierwater says in this book, "I'm not preaching. It's too late for that."
And I really, truly believe that it's the population pressure that's killing us -- no matter what we do. We've made tremendous advances in a higher consciousness of the environment in the last 30 years or so, since Earth Day, since [ecologist and writer] Rachel Carson. We recycle, we try to turn the lights off, all of that. But I think it's way too late to have any impact on a world with 6 billion people. And so I feel guilty about eating, breathing, drinking water, turning on a light -- so does everybody else. The only thing I can think to do about it is make fun of it.
We just had the hottest summer on record in Denver.
Well, get used to it. The only people who would deny that we are in a period of global warming like no other our species has ever experienced are the few remaining shills for the oil companies. People don't seem to understand what global warming is: As the temperature rises, there's evaporation; and water vapor is the biggest greenhouse gas, so it's an unending cycle. The more water vapor in the air, the less stable the weather patterns are. And so we have these 100-year floods every day, it seems.
You can see I've had a lot of fun with that notion in terms of, for instance, the California wineries that are all out of business because they're flooded out and they can only grow rice now.
That was one of the funny aspects of the book: Everybody's drinking microbrew sake.
I like sake actually, but I'm making fun of it anyway, because most people hate it. I did a gig in a bar the other night in Minneapolis. It was wonderful: Cover charge, I'm the opening act, they've got a band playing later. The people there had read the book and liked it, and they had a big bottle of sake. So we had a little sake on the rocks to toast the end of the world.
What do you hope to be doing when the world ends -- if it happens during your lifetime?
I'm not a prophet of doom. I'm just trying to sort out my own feelings on the subject, just as with "The Tortilla Curtain." How do I feel? I don't know. I need to write fictions in order to know how I feel about things.
I'll answer your question in a roundabout way. One of the books I read -- even before I started to think about this book -- five, six years ago, was Paul Kennedy's "Preparing for the Twenty-First Century." It was an overview of geopolitics in the coming century, the century we are now in. I remember one reviewer writing, "The overall view is so utterly depressing, most of us reviewers are happy we'll be dead by the time this comes to the fore."
I'm very deeply concerned. And when I'm very deeply concerned, I tend to try to set the concerns into
a story with characters, set them in operation, put them against impossible tasks and have fun with the misery that they suffer as a result. Fans of my work will not be surprised to find that's the way "A Friend of the Earth" works.
Q: In "The Tortilla Curtain," the totem animal was the coyote. If you could say there's one for this book, it would be the hyena.
TCB: Indeed, yes. As I've been announcing to audiences around the country, I can't really recall a great American or English novel that has "hyena" in the first sentence. Maybe there is one, but certainly "A Friend of the Earth" has "hyena" in the first sentence.
For those who haven't read the book, the hero, Ty Tierwater -- a baby boomer who is now 75 in the year 2025 after his third prison term, where he's been locked up for being an ecoterrorist -- is working as an animal man, managing the menagerie of a fading rock 'n' roll star, Maclovio Pulchris, who has a big estate in the Santa Ynez Valley, where he has a menagerie of some of the last of the major mammal species on Earth. But they're not the ones that you would think of as needing preservation -- not the cute gazelles and so on -- but the animals, as Maclovio says, "only a mother could love": the hyenas and the warthogs and peccaries and the pangolins and those sorts of animals. Obviously, my idea is that all creatures are valuable because we can't foresee what their place in the ecosystem is.