by A. D. Mira
HFR: What about a story like "Beat"--how do you get in the mood of that story? Do you do certain reading or listen to certain music?
TCB: Well. . . . I guess I probably just read a book by Kerouac at the point. I think I read a biography too, to get some of the details, and just let it fly. I'd love to read that one in public sometime. I never have. I think it would be really fun. You'd have to be really on your mark though, because of the speed of the language. It might be exhausting for the audience, but I'd like to try it sometime.
HFR: For The Tortilla Curtain, did you go stand down in Topanga Canyon next to some little trickling stream and see the garbage strewn about, or does that come out of your head?
TCB: I lived right there, and hiked in there all the time. I know it intimately, and people are camping there. So that was easy to see.
HFR: How is literature faring in today's world given the domination of television, movies, the Internet and everything else clamoring for people's attention to which they seem to want to give it?
TCB: I think it's harder. This addresses what we were talking about earlier, in terms of my role of being out before the public. I do feel I need to wave some flags and bring some attention to literature, and try to get literature back in the position of selling as well as detective books or vampire books or whatever.
I think it'll always be necessary, because it's a type of entertainment that is very special, that nothing else can give you. I think that the Internet is great. . . . People were wondering about the telephone and how it had superceded the writing of letters, that people didn't write anymore. Now the computer has superceded the telephone and people do write to each other again. We can't predict what's going to happen. That's got to be good, people writing to each other again. One of my students is in a workshop just like the one he takes from he. He's made some good friends, they workshop their stories. It's great.
I do feel that books and literature will be around--as long as we're around! I have less optimism about that.
Scott Rettberg Interviews T.C. Boyle
November 23, 1998
Sandye's Note: This interview originally appeared on About.com's Authors' Site. It was taken down by About.com recently and after I contacted Scott Rettberg to find out what had happened to it, he told me that all of his work from the past three years had been removed. He generously offered to let me reproduce his interview here so that others may benefit from it. 15 April 2001
T.C. Boyle is one of America's most prolific contemporary authors, with seven novels and five short story collections to his credit, written over the course of his twenty-five year career. Boyle's oeuvre runs all over the map, from historical novels, including Riven Rock and The Road to Wellville, to the zany story of a marijuana farm in Budding Prospects, to politically relevant satire like The Tortilla Curtain. I talked with Boyle one afternoon at the Whitehall Hotel in Chicago. He was in Chicago to read at Harold Washington Library from his new collection, T.C. Boyle Stories. The volume is a thick tome of sixty-eight stories, including the complete contents of Boyle's first four short story collections, and seven stories which have never before been published in book form. Boyle said that he was enjoying his visit to Chicago, and noted that the church right down the street from his hotel was the same one that Stanley McCormick, the subject of Boyle's novel Riven Rock, attended with his mother a hundred years ago. Boyle was reading David Quammen's The Flight of the Iguana, and he mentioned that Quammen's long non-fiction work, The Song of the Dodo, had been an inspiration for him to work on the novel he’s currently writing, A Friend of the Earth. Chicago was Boyle's last stop on a three-week book tour. While you'd expect most writers to be exhausted after such a long haul, Boyle, the consummate raconteur, proved to be a buoyant, energetic conversationalist.
SR: This collection spans twenty-five years of your career as a writer. As you put the collection together and as you go on this tour, have you yourself noticed ways in which you have changed or grown as a writer over that period?
T.C. BOYLE: Well, it spans twenty-five years of my career, which is the entire career, from the beginning till now. The earliest story in there was composed before I went to Iowa, it was one of the stories that got me in there, and got me published. Now I also have probably thirty or forty stories I published in that period that I have never collected, and never will. And again, this collection wasn't my idea, it was my editor's idea, to kind of show the audience that's come to me over the last three novels that there's also a lot of work in the short story. I liked the idea after a while, they talked me into it, but I do like it, because I see it as Volume I, you know? I have a lot of work, this is Volume I. Volume II, give me twenty more years, we'll have Volume II.
I can see that I've changed in this way: I had never written any novels when I wrote the first stories. In fact, I probably published forty stories before I began a novel, Water Music. In the early stories, I'm very much interested in the design of the story itself, and the idea, and characters are truly secondary to the concept of these stories. They're very wild, and funny, and bizarre stories, in which the characters function with the same valence as some of the other things, or maybe even less, maybe they are sort of in the background. Language and other things take over. Since I've written novels in the interim, the very latest stories in there, like "Mexico" for instance, are more character-oriented. Everything else is there, but the characters are—richer maybe, because I've learned how to develop them through writing novels.
SR: The collection is divided into three sections: "Love," "Death," and "Everything in Between." Why did you choose to organize the book along those lines, as opposed to say a chronological order?
T.C. BOYLE: Well, I think you probably already know the answer to this: for fun, purely for fun. I didn’t change any of these stories, really. I don’t think that’s my purpose. My purpose is to present this work that I’ve done for whoever’s interested. And you can see the development, I’ve put the dates of composition in there. But that’s where it ends. I didn’t want to an academic thing, I didn’t want to put it into chronological order for many reasons. One of which is that the reader, you know, might not make it to the later stories if only the beginning stories are there. So I think it makes it into an entirely new book, and it interests me, I can have fun with it. They’re sort of random categories, but it was a lot of fun to arrange the stories to balance one another, and make a new book. If I just stuck them together as the English—when the English did a collected stories with my first three volumes a few years ago, they just took the three volumes and stuck on a new cover, that’s it. This makes it into a real book, something that’s different.
What the French are doing really intrigues me. They are going to do three or four separate volumes, one per year, and they’ll use Love, Death, Le Disastre, and Le Bizarre. So you get four books and it’s great, and they all have a uniform cover.
SR: That’s great—Le Bizarre. Just out of curiosity, you said that some of the stories that were written before you went to Iowa. Which one got you in there?
T.C. BOYLE: "Drowning" is the earliest story in there. You know if I were doing a selected stories or a "best of" I probably would eliminate many of the stories from the first collection and a couple from the second collection. But I didn’t want to do a selected stories—I could have done fifty stories, that would have been an enormous book, and would have no stories that I think are weaker, but again, that’s not the purpose of a collected stories—the purpose of a collected stories is to show your development. To show it all. All the stuff that I want to keep that has been published in book form before, and a couple of older ones that hadn’t been published, and then some new work to bring it up to the present time. Although I’m holding off some of the new work too, for the next collection—I didn’t want to publish a 1,000 page book.
SR: You studied at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop in the early seventies and stayed on to complete your Ph.D. How important of a period was that f
or you as a writer? And also, was Robert Coover was there at the time?
T.C. BOYLE: No, he wasn’t actually.
SR: Oh, never mind that then—
T.C.BOYLE: But I’ll address it nonetheless. The time when I was at Iowa was a time when I became serious about writing—as my life. Before that, as you probably know, I was pretty much of a degenerate, writing sporadically, and listening to a lot of bad habits and so on in New York. I’d never been west of New Jersey at that point, and I kind of grew up, because now I knew what I wanted to do, and I pursued it vigorously. I’m very proud of the fact that I made a perfect 4.0 in all of my graduate work, that I was a good student. Prior to that—I’d been in school since I was four years old, and I didn’t want to do it, you know? It was like punishment to go to undergraduate school. So in that way, yeah, it started a whole new phase of my life. Iowa bailed me out, really.
SR: It’s a good place to write.
T.C. BOYLE: Yes it is. You’re in a place where everybody is a writer, including the waiter and the bartender and the pizza delivery guy, everybody’s a writer. And writing is the chief art, and writers are revered. I got to see all my heroes coming through town and give a reading in the five and a half years I lived there. Whether they’re nice people or not, or whether they’re idiots, who cares? There they are, they’re living and breathing, you know?
Coover is my mentor, in many ways. When I first started to write stories, I was writing these very fragmented pieces that wouldn’t quite stick together, and then I found Pricksongs and Descants and realized that he’d done what I’d been groping for, perfectly and brilliantly, and I really loved the book. A few years later—one of the reasons I went to Iowa was that Coover had been there, and all the other writers of that time that I admire—I won a fellowship there and the job I had was to work on the Iowa Review as Assistant Fiction Editor. Coover was the Fiction Editor, but he was living in London. So I would screen the stuff, and send him ten manuscripts, and he would pick three or four or whatever, so we corresponded for a couple years. When I finished my Ph.D. I did the whole Eurail thing as a ragtag hippie with my wife, trotting around Europe. When we got to London, Coover gave a party for us. He was just great. He introduced me to my agent, as well. And I’ve heard him read many times. He is a brilliant, brilliant reader, one of the best that there is. I never read with him until last Monday night, a week ago, at the 92nd St. Y. So that was really a special occasion. That was fun, tremendous fun.
SR: As I’m making my way through your collection, I’m amazed at how often animals appear as metaphors, plot devices, and even characters. You have to be the most versatile author of animal stories in the history of American Lit.
T.C. BOYLE: My favorite is the point of view of the elephant in "Big Game," where I’m actually in the elephant’s head for a while. That was fun.
SR: Is there something about storytelling that makes you gravitate towards animals?
T.C. BOYLE: No. It’s just that everybody has his own territory, and own interests. My stories come from anything that interests me, or that I discover. And I’ve always been very fascinated by biology and ichthyology. And always very fascinated with the idea of us as just another animal species, and not separate from the animals. So my first book was called Descent of Man, for instance. I think that’s why the animals appear so often, throughout the work.
SR: Do you have any favorite stories in the collection?
T.C. BOYLE: Yeah, I do. But there are lots of them. The stories that I think are the ones that are my contribution to our literature are the ones that the critics don’t usually single out. They single out the more conventional stories, and say how mature I’ve become because I wrote "If the River Was Whiskey." Well, fine, I’m glad. But I think the stories that distinguish me from other writers are the wild ones, the really nutball stories, like "Bloodfall," or "The Miracle at Ballinspittle," or "Ike and Nina," or "Sorry Fugu," stories that other people wouldn’t conceive of or write in that way. Because the idea is to be individual, right? These are individual stories. Nobody else is going to write them, maybe nobody else would want to.
I like those stories because I think they’re unique, more than the more realistic stories. I don’t rule out writing any kind of story. I’ll try anything: literary parodies, or a story like "Sitting on Top of the World," where you get kind of tense, just to see how it will go. What I love best is just the crazy, crazy stuff: "56-0," the football story or "Respect," the story about the Italian doctor and the mafia guys. I mean, I’ll try anything. Why not? Why limit yourself?
SR: "Heart of a Champion" is one of my favorite stories. I’ve taught that a few times. It’s a good story for an Intro. to Lit class, because it helps get people over the bridge from watching TV to seeing what can be done with literature.
T.C. BOYLE: Right, and also discussing the ramifications of it, and what TV feeds you, and the sentimentality, and other notions that we’re fed and how it forms our society and our view of society, and how the author subverts all of that. You start at ground zero again.
SR: Your 1993 novel The Road to Wellville was made into a film, directed by Alan Parker. How much of a role did you play in its production? Did you enjoy the process, and would you look forward to seeing more of your work translated to film?
T.C. BOYLE: Well, point A, the answer is simple. Zero. Point B, I love the movie that Alan made, and I like Alan very much. I consider him a good friend, and I consider him a very fine artist. I love the film he made of Road to Wellville. But he knows that I would have nothing to do with writing it. He wrote the script himself. I don’t want to work for anybody else, I don’t want to write scripts, I don’t want to write histories, biographies, book reviews, I just want to write fiction. That’s what gives satisfaction, it’s my life’s work. And what was the third part of the question?
SR: Would you look forward to—
T.C. BOYLE: Yes, yes I do. I look forward to more films coming out. I think next will be Budding Prospects. Columbia Pictures has stepped in. It’s been under option forever, since it came out, and they just signed a director, Peter Cattaneo of The Full Monty, and writers, the writers of Grosse Pointe Blank. So that sounds like a good combination to me, because what both of those movies lacked was a strong plot-line, and I think here they have a strong story to tell, and the writers of Grosse Pointe Blank are hilarious, that’s some hilarious stuff, and then Cattaneo did a great job with his characters and his cinematography. So I’m hoping that it will be a great combination.
SR: Sounds great.
T.C. BOYLE: But more to the point, there’s my TV show that may materialize, I think, for next fall. Probably for HBO. It would be a given number of episodes of my stories dramatized. It would be—I think thirteen, they were talking about, but you know, don’t quote me on that. When you turn it on, and it’s on the screen, then you know.
I think it will be great, if they will spring for it. Tony Bill is producing, he’s an old friend of mine, I’ve known him since I moved to LA, the writers are people I met in the Writer’s Workshop, Mitch Burgess and Robin Green, who used to write Northern Exposure, and my job is to be the host. Which doesn’t involve a lot of time, and I don’t have to write anything except brief intros to each one, and appear on the screen for a minute.
SR: Wearing a smoking jacket?
T.C. BOYLE: Yeah, yeah, of course—we’re going to take off the Rod Serling thing. I want to do it because it would get the word out on the stories, to a huge audience, whereas, no matter how many books you publish, you still fight against the tide. I mean I might read to five hundred people tonight, but one minute on the screen and you got thirty million, you know? So I’d really like to do it, especially because it doesn’t involve any participation on my part, except two days, at most.
SR: Of course while you’re in town, you could always stop by Harpo Studios, pitch it to Oprah, and shoot right to the top of the best seller list.
T.C. BOYLE: Oh yeah, that’s my other plan. If the TV
show doesn’t pan out, I intend to marry Oprah. Because of my deep physical attraction to her. After about two weeks, we’ll be in bed, and I’ll turn to her and say, "Hey Ope, how ‘bout the TV show?"
I’ve never watched her show and I wouldn’t, it’s not my kind of thing, but I do love what she’s done for books, and I would love it if she picked one of mine. It would be great, it’s an instant large audience. Barring that eventuality, though, I would love to do my own show. I think it could be very popular, and it could be good for everybody. I’m really hot on the idea, but again, with the film industry, until you turn on the tube and there it is, nothing is a go.
SR: You write long novels and short stories, and write the short stories in between the novels. Do you ever work out ideas in your short stories that then make their way into your novels? Is there a kind of rhythm?
T.C. BOYLE: No. It never happens. When I’m locked away with a novel, as I am now, anything that occurs to me as a short story, I just jot it down: a brief, one-sentence description of the idea. When the novel is done, and my head clears a little bit, I turn to a period of writing short stories, which could last anywhere from 8 months to a year. I wait until the ideas kind of peter out, and then it’s time to write another novel. I really love to be in that rhythm. And even further than that, I have a rhythm of a long, more complex novel, a book of stories, and then usually a shorter, contemporary novel, which is the pattern I’m working on right now.