by A. D. Mira
It's interesting--you start out your career, and you don't think, "Well, these are my psychological problems, these are my obsessions, these are the political statements I want to make." It doesn't work that way for me. I'm not a political novelist--despite the fact that this is my most political novel, I am not a political novelist. I don't have a platform that I want to urge you to go for. I think fiction is much more seductive than that. I'm going to seduce you to my point of view. I may make you angry to get to my point of view, and when I begin the book I don't know what that point of view is. I know what my point of view has been from the previous nine books, because I can look at them and see, "Oh, yeah, I see how that adds up, and this is who I am." But it's always evolving, and it's always evolving in different directions.
HFR: How do you think your writing has evolved over the years?
TCB: Well, we've already addressed this to a degree. I think when I began I was more interested in form and concept, over character. The characters were almost incidental to me, especially if you look at some of the stuff in Descent of Man. I think through writing novels I've learned to deal more with character, and I think maybe I'm into more conventional territory in a way with the last couple of books because this is a new tool I have now, to work with characters. The new stories that I've written coming out of The Tortilla Curtain are very much influenced by it--they're much longer, they're realistic and they focus on characters. It's just a new toy for me to play with. I only write half a book of stories at a time because I want to have a fresh approach to the next half of the book, that is after the new novel. So I think you'll probably see me going in a more comic direction again. I just didn't, with this book, want to replicate another Road to Wellville, which would have been easy. But I tried to do something totally different.
HFR: What's it like to have one of your books made into a movie?
TCB: I loved it. I was thrilled to see it. It's very exciting to see how someone else might interpret something of yours, just in the way that when actors read my stories over the air, it's just very thrilling to see the emphasis they put on different phrases and how they pronounce things and the rhythm of it. On the screen, it's even more exciting because now someone has taken your work and selected a face to go with it--it may not be the face that you envision, but it's kind of thrilling.
This is the third film made of my work--the first major film, the other two were half-hour films, one of "Greasy Lake" and one of "The Big Garage." All three, I thought, were really superb efforts. I think you could direct some criticism at Alan Parker's film, but I like to, unlike some critics, emphasis what he's done right. And what he's done right is capture the spirit of the book. If he's had a problem it's maybe taking a book as rich, complex and as long--it is 500 pages, after all--and trying to work it into the two hour format. Maybe there are instances where he has some exposition that isn't necessary, like with Charlie Ossining and his aunt, and what their relationship is, and how she had sort of adopted him. We don't need to know that, maybe, for a two-hour movie. So sure, there are some rough edges, but I thought overall it was great. I thought it was very unique. Most films--in fact, the trailers to most films that I see--I've seen the film a hundred times already, I know exactly what's going to happen, they're totally predictable and formulaic. With The Road to Wellville, or, I think, hopefully, any of my stories, you have no idea in the first paragraph what's going to happen or where it's going to go. It's not formulaic, it's original. I think that was true of Alan's picture. If you hadn't read the book, you went into the theatre, within the first ten minutes you have no idea where this is going or what this is. I think we need more of that in the film industry, and less formula.
HFR: When you think about that book now, your book, do you think about the characters and the locations in terms of the original conception in your mind, or in terms of what the movie showed?
TCB: Choice A.
And I think that's why many people didn't care for the movie. I think if a popular book is made into a movie, it doesn't go down well with the public, because the director really is invading their turf, because they each have directed it in their minds and have their own idea what it looks like and what the characters look like and how the scenes go and so on, and so he's now codified it in one way. Better, I think, a film of a book or a script that no one knows--it's just a film. I think it's hard to make films from books.
HFR: What about films from books that you didn't write, say, a book you had read once and then later you saw the film, which image prevails in that case for you?
TCB: You'd have to be specific--I think every situation would be different.
HFR: Say, The World According to Garp.
TCB: I think that the reading experience of that for me was so strong that the movie really was secondary to it.
But take A Clockwork Orange: I think the movie is as brilliant a work of art as the book. They are each amazing.
So I think that's specific to the book. And to the director, and how great the director is. Again, I felt very lucky that it was Alan Parker who made the film. I haven't had a bad experience yet, although, of course, I've never worked with Hollywood and I never will. Alan wrote the script, I had nothing to do with it. But still, if that happened and it was a movie that I felt was really bad I might change my mind about letting people have access to the work. You don't have to sell them the film rights. I do because, number one, I think it's a sort of marketing tool for the book. Now obviously Wellville has been my most popular book in terms of sales, so far, and the movie had a lot to do with that, in paperback version. And, of course, they pay you money, and money is handy to have in this society.
HFR: Is there going to be a movie in the works for The Tortilla Curtain?
TCB: I don't know. There are two very prominent people in the industry vying for rights to it. No one has made the sort of offer yet that I think is appropriate, so as of October 5th, 1995, I don't know. I hope so. But I hope, again, in the wrong hands this could really go wrong. Because of the wide variety of reactions to the book, and the wide, bizarre interpretations--one review will say, "This man is a nihilist, he has no moral center, he should be shot, he's taking advantage of a painful situation," and the next one will say, "Here is Boyle once again on his moral high horse shoving his morality down our throats." I just can't help but wonder how we can get two such radically different readings. I think this one will be real tricky, and I hope that a good filmmaker will do it, if it's ever done. It's not your typical Hollywood fare. It could be very moving and very compassionate and it could really be thought provoking. On the other hand, it could be soppy and sentimentalized . . . .
HFR: It could be Bonfire of the Vanities?
TCB: Actually I didn't think Bonfire of the Vanities was that bad of a movie. I don't think it approached the book. I saw it when it came out; I disagreed with most of the so-called critics, who couldn't make a work of art if they had the next fifty centuries to do it. I thought it was pretty good, and pretty true to the spirit of the book. I then read the wonderful, wonderful book by Julie Salamon, The Devil's Candy, about the making of the film. Then I went back and saw it again with a whole new view of it in terms of what it took to make it. I wouldn't criticize that one necessarily. There are some dreary movies made of books though that I think hurt the book, ultimately. What's Margaret Atwood's futuristic book about the women?
HFR: The Handmaid's Tale.
TCB: The Handmaid's Tale. That movie was so bad and so humorless and so wrong, that I think if you hadn't read the book, you wouldn't want to. It can be dangerous. With a thing like The Tortilla Curtain, Hollywood could really, really blow it with this one, because they tend to want to paint in broad strokes, they don't want to provoke people, they want people to buy popcorn and go to the movies. They want people to feel good. So, they would probably, I think, tend to sentimentalize Candido's story and, maybe make that last sentence a great big moment of happiness and joy and everyone comes back together again, where
in my version it's just the tiniest moment that might lead to something better and might not.
HFR: I'd like to back away from the book a little and ask some questions that maybe you're not going to get from people who have to write for the next day's newspaper.
TCB: Good, because that's why I enjoy interviews like this one.
HFR: Are you a walking writer? Do you think about writing when you're walking around?
TCB: Yep. I certainly do. Sometimes consciously, sometimes just let it seep down and ferment deep in the unconscious. Also, sometimes I whisper the names of my characters just before I fall asleep, as well. (Laughs.)
HFR: Cynthia Ozick--maybe not your typical writer, but--she said, "If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage." Does courage play any part in your writing? Or has it?
TCB: Hmm. That's an interesting quote. I think it's more an obsessive-compulsive disorder, to tell you the truth. You have to be really cocksure of what you're doing, and really have faith in your own vision, that's for sure, because no one really gives you encouragement, or very few give you encouragement. People don't like to see others succeed, somehow. Right from the beginning I wanted to be a writer and people said, "You're crazy, how can you be a writer, writers don't make any money." Then I wanted to be a professor and they said, "There are no jobs for professors, you can't be a professor." And I always felt, fuck it, you know, if there's one job for a professor it'll be mine. If one person's going to be a writer, it'll be me. So I guess, in that way, you need to fairly sure of yourself. I don't know what Ozick meant exactly, but again, with five and a half billion people all clamoring for attention why should we give you attention? Why should we care what you write? So that's all part of the process too, in communicating what you write, in making it into a work of art, making it seductive and attractive so that you can communicate to an audience.
HFR: Did you ever go through a period where the desire to be a writer and a successful writer got in the way of your writing?
TCB: Yes. The first five years of my career, and they went like this. Before Iowa--my apprenticeship as I like to say. I discovered that I liked creative writing, and could do it, in my junior year in college. And, for the next three or four years my apprenticeship consisted of backing people into dark corners at three or four a.m. in bars, stone drunk, and telling them that I was going to be a writer. Because I wanted fame and glory. After awhile I figured, well gee, maybe I ought to write something. From then on it really hasn't come into play at all, despite what, again, some of my enemies may think. I do exactly as I please, I do my work as best I can, and then I realized starting in '87 with World's End, that there's another job involved with this, and that is going out and pointing out to people that your work exists. It is true, and I think it will continue to be true, that great writers like Ray Carver or Don DeLillo who do not like going before the public, will emerge anyway. On the other hand, it's a real catfight out there. I'm not concerned about other literary writers so much. I think the good literary writers will get their audience, I'm glad they get they're audience, I admire them, I like them. I'm concerned about all the genre crap that's out there. I just want to, by going before the public and seducing them in a public arena, to let them know that literature's OK. It's self-serving, yes. It's my literature I want them to know about. But I want to get that in there and wedge it in amongst all the vampire books and the rest of the crap that they read--I don't understand why they shouldn't read mine as well. The story is certainly as good, the language is better, and there's sure a hell of a lot more to it in terms of its structure than genre writing. That's one of my missions, which has caused some of the press to say that I'm the savior of literature, or the next best thing that literature has, or whatever. And I've been happy to take that mantle on. Sure. And of course this provokes my enemies too, niggling reviewers, wondering, "Well, gee, why aren't I the savior of literature?" Well, maybe because you haven't written any books yet, you know? Give me a break.
HFR: Were you always so confident that writing is something you would be successful at?
TCB: Yes. Because if you're not, then you don't do it.
This is not to say that I don't have my doubts, daily, about a given project. If you don't, then maybe you just reproduce something you've done before. Maybe you're just going through the motions. I think there's a lot of--I don't know if I want to call it torment exactly--a lot of turmoil involved in resolving all the problems of a given work, whether it be a story or a novel or whatever, and maybe that involves doubt. I've never gotten to the middle of a book without doubting that I could finish it, that despite the evidence I had ever finished any other books, or, even, despite even larger evidence that anyone had ever been able to write a novel, cause it's so impossible. So, in those terms, yes. But as far as the gift I've been given and what I plan to do with it and what I have done with it and what I plan to do with it in the future if the great white doesn't get me, I have unshakeable confidence. I know exactly what I'm doing in a book like The Tortilla Curtain or The Road To Wellville or Without A Hero and I hope that that will play over into the new book that I'll writing in December.
HFR: Is writing still as much fun for you as it was when you began? Is it ever a chore?
TCB: It's always a chore, every day of my life. I think, if anything, it's less of a chore now, though, because it tends to absorb my entire life, it's what I do. And I know I have to do it. There are fewer distractions in my life than there were when I first began writing.
HFR: Is it ever difficult to sit down in the morning?
TCB: Every morning it's difficult to sit down. Except when you get toward the end--then you're eager to sit down. But that's only a small percentage of the time that you spend writing.
HFR: Your imagination stands out in your work, especially your early work. Do you do anything to pump your imagination, to prime your imagination?
TCB: It's just a gift. We all have different gifts as writers, and you can try to develop them. As I said, I've try to develop my knowledge of characters and my ability to create characters and work with characters, which I didn't do in the beginning, which many writers have as a gift, like Ann Beattie, who is so great at creating characters. It's just a gift of being able to picture things in words. I don't think it's something that you develop, except that you develop it by writing and reading.
HFR: Let me give you an example: your story "Bloodfall" in Descent of Man. I love that story for the turn of point of view, for the idea of the story, of it raining blood. . . .
TCB: It begins as an image. That story began as image, almost a dream image, an image of blood in the snow that I sort of dreamed. Most of the stories don't come from dreams, most of the stories come from, you have an experience, someone tells you something, and you write down a line, a story about. . . that's it. And then you think how that might go when it's time to write that story. This one was unusual in that it began with just a single image. I guess it's the only allegory I've ever done. It just. . . happened, and I can't really say how.
HFR: If you wrote that story today, would it end the same, where after raining blood it rains shit?
TCB: If I were to do another version of that story it would probably be longer, and you would get into the characters more. That would be the only difference.
A number of people have asked me on this tour, and at this conference on my work, if I would at some point go back and revise the old stories and change them and so on to make my life's work complete. I think it is complete, and I would never change anything. That's the way it was, that's an historical fact, that's who was then, that's what I emphasized, that's what I wrote. I don't worry about what I've done--I worry about what I'm going to do.
HFR: One of the things that stands out for me in your stories are small, little nuggets that lend authenticity to the story. For example, in "Big Game" you drop in the "Ngorongoro Crater," and later you have "Bender's .375 Holland & Holland, the lady's Wi
nchester .458 Mag and his own stopper--the .600 Nitro." What type of research do you do for your stories?
TCB: You look the stuff up! What kind of guns would they use to shoot elephants? How do I choose the Nitro? Because it's the funniest--it has the best name. What a great name--"the .600 Nitro!" I mean, you could probably shoot this building down with a .600 Nitro. I don't know what it is--I don't care. It's accurate--they do use it to kill elephants. . . . But I could have chosen several other guns, maybe ones that are more modern, for instance. But I like the name. I think it has to be a real gun, because there's some gun nut reading the story who will write a letter to the magazine and say, "this is inaccurate, Boyle doesn't know what he's talking about." And you are casting a spell on the audience that suspends their disbelief. If you pull them out of the story because there's something factually inaccurate then they're going to mistrust the whole spell that you're casting. . . .you do have to be accurate with those details.