by A. D. Mira
There was a little, minor debate going on the other day on a call-in talk show, where one of these right-wing nutballs called up and was saying, "I'd kill off this and that creature -- and the environmentalists, too!" And then we got onto the idea of mosquitoes: "Well, what about mosquitoes?" And this guy, of course, would press the button on mosquitoes worldwide. But an ecologist would say that mosquitoes are essential to the ecosystem.
By the way, I was in Alaska this summer, where you have a fur of [mosquitoes] over your entire body at all times and you actually breathe them. I love them so much that I feel, "Why should I deny them my own flesh and blood?" Actually, I'm only kidding! I'm very quick to slap them. When the ticks and the mosquitoes attack me -- no matter how stealthily -- I always feel them at the moment they start to bite. And then they suffer for it, by God!
Q: Ty Tierwater seems to be a combination of Theodore Kaczynski and yourself.
TCB: [Chuckles] Yeah, I guess he has a lot of me in him. I wasn't thinking of Kaczynski exactly. More, I was thinking of some of the people from Earth First! who really pioneered [Edward] Abbey's idea of "monkey wrenching" in the '80s and '90s. But Kaczynski certainly was part of this ecological fringe, wasn't he? A seriously disturbed mental individual, but his ideas about going back to nature and destroying the technological machine have a lot of sympathy among many people, including me -- although, like Ty, I'm addicted to my machines too, and I'm just a criminal and enemy of the environment in many ways, even while I love it and want to save it. We're all, in the Western world, suffering from these contradictions. And that's another reason why I've written "A Friend of the Earth."
Q: Like your character Sierra Tierwater says, "Everything's a compromise" -- isn't it?
TCB: Yeah, I guess so. I like to have electricity. I like to drive a car. I like to go to the grocery store and find food there, rather than have to go out into the wilderness and find it under rocks. I wonder when enough is enough, though. And I wonder when there [will be] enough of us big apes that we not only destroy all of the other creatures but destroy ourselves as well.
Q: Have you ever had the urge to destroy any heavy machinery yourself?
TCB: Oh, you bet I have! I am outraged when I go into the national forest of the sequoias and see clear-cutting going on. I could, of course, plead the Fifth here, so as not to incriminate myself. But, in fact, I am an artist; I am not a rabble-rouser or a politician of any stripe. And I've never belonged to any kind of group.
So I haven't done acts of "ecotage" (aside from, maybe, stealing a clear-cutting sign and putting it up on my wall). And I have mixed feelings about people who do. While I subscribe to cutting back on raping the environment, I wonder if anybody can put themselves above the law for an ideal. While I subscribe to a degree to what the eco-saboteurs do, just as self-righteously someone could defend shooting abortion doctors, because God speaks to them and they don't have to obey the laws of the country or even the individual rights of a given woman, because God has made them vigilantes of a higher cause. So I think there are dangers in saying that you're above the law, no matter how reasonable your cause seems.
Q: What did you think of Julia "Butterfly" Hill [who protested logging by occupying a redwood tree for more than two years]?
TCB: I was already writing this book when Julia went up her tree, and she was certainly an inspiration to me. Sierra Tierwater, Ty and Andrea's daughter, who goes up that very tree, was certainly inspired by Julia Hill. But there were also many other tree sitters and tree spikers and so on who inspired me.
But Julia was up the tree while I was writing the book, and, in fact, I finished the book before she came down. In my version, my tree sitter, Sierra, stays up in the tree for three years. I had no idea how long Julia would actually stay up there. She might have stayed up still to this day; she might have been there for 25 years. I hoped that she would be, actually. She's like the mad saint of the movement. I think it's wonderful.
Sierra, however, for the purposes of my fiction, came down a lot more precipitately and less gracefully than Julia "Butterfly" Hill, unfortunately.
In "A Friend of the Earth," you have the weather wreak havoc with one of the blights on the landscape of the Western United States: condos.
We've got to have an image for the great future, and for me it's the condo. Where are we going to put all these people? Well, we're going to put 'em in condos. And there's going to be nothing left of woods or nature or animals. The oceans are depleted, and this is a true fact: The oceans will be depleted utterly within a decade or so. Read [Carl Safina's] "Song for the Blue Ocean" and you will weep.
American condos
Condos are it. We'll be living in condos and drinking our locally brewed sake. The rain will be lashing at the windows. Mold will be growing on everything. We will be bereft of almost all animals. And we'll be on the Internet. In some ways, the Internet is a great boon, because we need virtual reality -- since there will be no more nature for us animals to live in.
I don't think the human race is going to go on much longer in its current manifestation, that is, this kind of society. I don't think everyone will be wiped out by the pandemic that will get us first; there will be a lot of dislocation and wars, too, because of the changing of the environment. But I think it's inevitable that when an animal species has overbred to the point we have, there are natural curbs on that animal species -- and they're coming, and I don't think there's anything we can do about it.
It sounds pretty cold. And it's also kind of cold to talk about all those useless people out there, those billions. Each one is an individual, and a great and beautiful creation.
February 26–March 5, 1998
20 questions for T. Coraghessan Boyle
Interview by Justin D. Coffin
T. Coraghessan Boyle is such a deft conversationalist he probably could have given me an hour's worth of material without me even being there. Like much of his writing, his discourse tends to be playful, erudite and dark. Since the late '70s, he's published seven novels and more than 60 short stories. His first novel, Water Music, was a mock Victorian novel about a trip up the Niger River. He won the Pen/Faulkner award in 1988 for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in his native Peekskill, NY (called Peterskill in the book). Boyle has a television series in the works for next year—13 one-hour episodes of his stories. (He's crossing his fingers.)
The 49-year-old writer is surprisingly tall with tight, wiry red hair. Currently, he's on tour promoting his new novel, Riven Rock (Viking), a work of historical fiction (more history than fiction) about the marriage of Katherine Dexter (one of the first female graduates of M.I.T.) and Stanley McCormick (a schizophrenic who was heir to the McCormick fortune). It is set primarily in Montecito, CA, where Boyle resides.
I met him at New York City's Royalton hotel—a place Robin Leach would describe in two words: "Opulence and splendor!" Boyle wore the dogged look of the pomo promo veteran and introduced himself as Tom. During our talk he nibbled away at a lunch of tomato soup and warm Roquefort salad.
Q: You're perceived as a literary hooligan. Do you think that persona plays out in your work?
TCB: I tend to make fun of everything that I really hate or really love. I don't have much good to say about critics, who are essentially parasitic. When I seize power in this country—and it's going to be soon—they'll be the first to go. Let them criticize the food in the gulag.
Q: But you have also come out and said that the critics have been right.
TCB: Sometimes they are right. The critics have supported me from the beginning, but I think—and this is self-serving of course—that they're right. I think I've done great work and I think I've done it honestly. One genius critic said that World's End is a kind of fictional autobiography. And I loved that, because that's what it is. I don't know my genealogy much: I would just rather invent it.
I wondered, what is the history of my own region? And I wanted to explore the idea of biological determinism. Here
I am talking to you, making a great living, traveling all over the world because of one thing: the Irish gift of bullshit. Where does that come from, and what comes with it? And now, 11 years later, as they're mapping out the genes, they're beginning to feel that [laughing] we're not really responsible for anything—which [may mean] the end of democracy, the end of laws.
Q: Did you have a team of researchers to help you with your historical work?
TCB: Oh, no, no. I'm not James Michener.
Q: God bless you for that.
TCB: Thanks. Of course, he is dead now, and we can't speak ill of the dead.
Q: In Riven Rock, you look at turn-of-the-century life and, more specifically, psychiatry and analysis, sexual depravity, Prohibition and women's suffrage. Do you think these things ended up shaping the 20th century?
TCB: I think to a large degree, and that's what attracted me to this story. I'm not interested in the traditional historical novel—what Ben Franklin ate and how it smelled. I'm interested in taking some bizarre thing from the past and playing it to reflect on now.
Q: Like Thomas Pynchon did in Mason & Dixon with all the anachronisms, like Ben Franklin wearing sunglasses.
TCB: Exactly. Or like I did in Water Music, which is pure metafiction.
Q: Riven Rock appears much more faithful to the time, though. More so than anything else you've written.
TCB: I think because I'm so blown away by the original story of Stanley and Katherine. Everything you read is true, right up to the crowning irony of the most dysfunctional marriage in history funding the birth control pill.
Q: Caleb Carr (author of the Alienist) has basically condemned everyone writing historical fiction except himself, saying they play too fast and loose with it. He says that he only has his characters say the things they would actually say.
TCB: I don't know Caleb Carr. I never read him. But when writers start telling other writers what to do, we're in trouble. However, that being said, that approach to the historical novel doesn't really work. How do you know what they're going to say? That's why a lot of historical movies are so ridiculous. You've got Tony Curtis dressed up in a Roman toga, saying [in a Brooklyn accent] "My fadduh awaits dee."
Q: Are there any stories or novels that you wish you had written?
TCB: Oh, definitely. Are you kidding me? I would die to have written The Remains of the Day [by Kazuo Ishiguro] or White Noise [by Don DeLillo]. And White Noise is right up my alley.
Q: Have you read Underworld [DeLillo's new 850-plus-page novel which is also a work of historical fiction]?
TCB: Not yet. I would have brought it with me, except it's too heavy. You travel all over the world with two bags. Mainly I carry underwear. I will read him in the spring. I loved Mao II as well, and The Names. He's written some really fine books.
Q. Do you watch television?
TCB: I haven't watched a regular TV prime time show since 1972. Why? I'm a crank. TV is my enemy and that's why I want to take it and use it against itself. And if we do the show and it succeeds, I can do less touring.
Q: You'd have more of a media presence.
TCB: Yes. But here I am out on this tour because I'm supposed to be selling this new book so the publisher will be happy. I don't care about that. I'd rather sign an old copy of Water Music that has sperm on it, and ketchup stains, it's dog-eared and yellow, because I know somebody read it. I mean, it's very rewarding in a lot of ways to meet people who came out to see you because they like your work. Great. But tiring.
[The check arrives—$40 for a soup, salad and cup of coffee—and Boyle attempts to sign for it.]
TCB: What room am I in? [Pause] Sorry. What floor…? I've been on these tours, in hotels, and I have gone to the room I had the night before in a different city and inserted the key in the door of the wrong room.
An Interview with T. CC. Boyle from Spring/Summer 1996
Originally published in Hayden's Ferry Review, Issue 18, Spring/Summer 1996.
Interviewer: David Appell
Conducted October 5, 1995, by the pool of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, Phoenix, Arizona.
Hayden’s Ferry Review: In her review in The Nation, Barbara Kingsolver called The Tortilla Curtain "the most political of your books." What are your feelings about the reception that the book's been getting?
T.C. Boyle: Well, you know, I've never had as viciously bad reviews in my life, nor as passionately good reviews. Nobody is indifferent towards it. I guess I'd be disingenuous if I expected to make fun of people and have them love me for it, especially in so sensitive an area as their own racism.
I think, too, people are coming into the book with preconceptions about the issue, and whether they feel along with me or they don't, and I think that's part of it. Then there's there whole fascism of the politically correct, where some people don't feel that it's my prerogative to write from the point of view of someone of a different ethnic origin, or sex, or whatever--which of course is patently absurd, but that doesn't stop them.
And then I think also what's operating is at this point everyone perceives me as being on top. I've been very productive--I've had three books three years in a row, they're tired of reading about me, and they think, "Well, let's take this guy down a peg."
So, I've got all of that working. But I think the ultimate effect is, it publicizes the book. It's not fun to be called "human garbage" on the radio, as I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago--I thanked her for the compliment, by the way. But I guess that's what your publicist wants, is some kind of controversy surrounding the book. It's doing well. I keep building my audience every time I go out on the road.
HFR: Do you set out deliberately to cause a controversy?
TCB: No. This is the third book I've written on the subject of racism. I lived in L.A. all that time, I heard all of the kind of scapegoating that goes on at the cocktail parties that the white liberals like Delaney and Kyra attend and give, I read the Times every day, articles on illegal immigration. I just wanted to sort out my own feelings on the issue. And as I said earlier, there are plenty of people who are willing to say that I have no right to sort out my feelings on the issue, or to write from the perspective of a Latino. None of the people who say that are Latino, by the way. I think that it's, for me, anyway, an obligation to try to challenge myself, try to do something different, and I think that a good novelist should be able to inhabit anybody--and I always have. I've always written from other points of view from other cultures, the other gender, whatever. If you take this kind of argument to its conclusion, it's absurd; only then could a Mexican write about Mexicans, and only could a Mexican appreciate it. Only could a woman write about women, and only women could read it. It's just absurd to place that kind of limitation on any artist.
HFR: That's a nice lead to my next question, which is, of the two lines in the book, Delaney's line and Candido's line, which came more naturally to you? Which was easier to write?
TCB: They were equally easier to write. As you know, I often range between different points of view in the books, like in Water.
HFR: Did you do anything special to. . . .
TCB: . . . I mean, "equally easy"--that's not to say that I whipped it off in my spare time! It's always a struggle day-by-day to get the book going, but neither point of view was harder than the other. What was hardest was reining in my natural propensity to make fun of everything in an absurdist, flat-out comedy. I wanted to do something different here. I wanted to produce a sort-of fable, and to do that I had to curb some of the hyperbolic tendencies that I have.
It was particularly hard in terms of Delaney's columns. I wanted to make those even more absurd, but I realized that I couldn't, because then they wouldn't be credible as having been written by Delaney, who feels that what he's doing is good.
HFR: That was one of my questions: I thought those were some of the funniest parts of the books, actually, his attempts to be his own type of Annie Dillard. Was it hard to write mediocre, to find that type of mediocre kind of voice tha
t Delaney writes in?
TCB: It was hard. The whole thing was hard to rein in my own voice and try to do something a little different here. I realized as I went on with the book that this sort of comedy. . . well, I realized this when I was first starting it, or was on the Wellville tour, people asked me "what are you doing," and I said "well, I'm writing another novel that is comic, but by definition only." I realized I wasn't going to do my usual sort of comedy. I just wondered if I could do it, and I realized about a third of the way into the book that, yes, if I'm going to point out satirically some of the foibles of people like Delaney and Kyra, I'm certainly not going to make my Mexican characters be saints, because that doesn't work either; Candido beats his wife, for instance. Jose Navidad rapes and robs people and is an evil man, etc. But I thought there had to be some kind of moral center to the book. . . or not a moral center, really. A center to the book, and I think that winds up being Candido--he simply is an animal like all of us, trying to survive. Basically, that's it. I think you can put own interpretation on that last line and how that all lines up.