by A. D. Mira
SR: That’s a great pattern to get in.
T.C. BOYLE: I don’t want to mess with it, either.
SR: You’re a lot like Flannery O’Connor in that many of your stories are "without a hero"—without any one character who necessarily elicits readers’ sympathies. This is very hard to pull off successfully, and you get away with it very well. Generally, how much do you identify with your characters? Do you feel that you need to?
T.C. BOYLE: I guess I stand back from them. I love the comparison with Flannery O’Connor, who is one of my all-time heroes. I stand back from them as the god of my characters’ universe. I don’t usually identify much with them. They’re all an amalgam of people I might know, or that I’ve invented. The closest characters to me are somebody like the kid in "If the River Was Whiskey," or the narrator of "Greasy Lake," the narrator of "Back in the Eocene," but those are all fictions too. They didn’t happen. Some autobiographical elements are put into this framework, and I do identify with those characters, maybe more so than when I’m standing back and narrating in the third person, for instance, like in "Big Game," where it’s a kind of Evelyn Waugh type of satire of a kind of person, and a kind of mentality in our society.
I feel equally happy about both sorts of stories. I don’t have to identify with the characters. Some idiot criticized Tortilla Curtain, as I recall, some very jealous, kind of second-string writer said that I’m "disdainful of my characters" or something like that. Well, the guy should read a little satire, he should read a little Evelyn Waugh, a little Kingsley Amis. That’s what satire does, it makes fun of certain behaviors in order to change them. A lot of people don’t quite get sophisticated humor anymore. It seems that we’re in this kind of grimly realistic phase, where if it’s not straightforward naturalism, people don’t think it’s any good, or don’t get it, and I’m trying to work with all different types of humor. You know, the kind of slapstick of "The Champ," which has a kind of serious undertone to it, to a much more horrifying kind of humor, a Flannery O’Connor kind of thing, where you’re caught off guard, as in "King Bee," where you’re horrified by it, and the same in Tortilla Curtain, and other books that I’ve done, Riven Rock even.
SR: Your Ph.D. from Iowa was in Nineteenth Century British literature, and your first novel Water Music was a satire of Victorian fiction. The Road to Wellville and Riven Rock are both set around the turn of the century. What is it about this period that makes you gravitate towards it?
T.C. BOYLE: Well, the period has always fascinated me. I thought in the original conception of World’s End that there would be a period around the turn of the century too, but there wasn’t. With the two books you mentioned, Riven Rock and Wellville, they both have to do with things that are happening in our society now, and I think that the beginnings of them are what interests me. I don’t just write a conventional historical narrative, because they never work. The historical impulse overwhelms the aesthetic impulse, and you wind up with a rather dull read that seeks to replicate the way people lived in the past, or the way they spoke, or what they ate, and all that kind of information, which isn’t necessarily germane to a novel.
I’m interested in writing novels that reflect on how we are now, how we got to be what we are now, which is one of the things that attracted me to the Riven Rock story. This kind of skirmish between men and women, the alliance between men and women, human sexuality, what’s normal, what’s not, who decides, what is marriage all about. I look at Katherine McCormick, and a woman in her condition today would just probably get a good divorce lawyer, take half the estate, and move on to Aruba.
So things that point to who we are today fascinate me, and I think that’s why I’ve twice tackled the beginning of the century. I don’t think I will again, because now we have the new beginning of a new century. And actually, part of my new novel is set in 2025.
SR: Oh really? Do you have a title yet?
T.C. BOYLE: It’s called A Friend of the Earth. It’s about the environmental movement, from 1950 to 2025. It begins when the narrator is one, and he’s now seventy-five, when he’s telling the story. It’s a comedy, but it’s grim. It has to do with ecotage, and global warming, and the extinction of species, all that kind of stuff.
SR: Riven Rock was based on the true story of industrialist Cyrus McCormick’s son Stanley McCormick. How important is research to you as a writer, in this and in previous works?
T.C. BOYLE: I agree with E.L. Doctorow, who said in response to this question that the research, for a novelist, is really a spur to the imagination. So that when you’re doing the research, you begin to formulate what the story might be. You begin the story. If your research is incomplete, or the story takes you in an unforeseen direction, you can always go back and find supporting material. I think many writers get bogged down in their research, because they enjoy the research for its own sake. I don’t, necessarily. I need the research to spur my imagination, so I know what the story’s going to be, and I don’t feel good unless I’m actually doing a story, and making a story, and involved in it. So research is important, but it’s not all-consuming. I’m not trying to reproduce information; I’m trying to figure out what the information means. I can’t figure that out unless I write a fiction.
SR: As a subject for a novel, sexual deviant Stanley McCormick seemed to me to be a particularly challenging character, a kind of emotional minefield. Yet, in terms of character-writing, it seems like you invested more in developing a human understanding of his psyche than you had with previous protagonists. Do you this novel marks a kind of shift in approach for you in terms of writing character?
T.C. BOYLE: Boy, I don’t know how to answer that. I feel that I’ve been working hard to improve my concept of character from the beginning. Character in satires often isn’t as relevant as it is in a more conventional narrative, because what’s more important is the overview. But it’s in my books, in East is East, for instance, I feel that I created a very solid character in Ruth Dershowitz. I think in this book Eddie O’Kane is a good character portrait, so is Katherine Dexter McCormick. I think the characters in Tortilla Curtain hopefully rise above satiric portraits, and become affecting, and more fully fleshed, characters. So I’ve been aware of this, and trying to work with it. In fact character for me, in some of the new stories, like "Mexico," for instance, is something that’s a kind of a new toy for me to play with.
Stanley—I don’t think anybody else would have written a story about Stanley McCormick. But I’ve got my own territory, it’s my own thing. I don’t want to be like all the other novelists. Even though the critics can’t quite—I shouldn’t complain about them, they’ve supported me from the beginning, the reviews of Riven Rock were overwhelmingly favorable—but there were still some that aggravated me, and that are kind of niggling. I want to be different, I want to stand apart from the other writers, and pursue my own territory, and go where I have to go, on my own, as an individual. That doesn’t necessarily conform to what more conventional critics think literature should be. Well, I piss on them from a great height, and I’ve said many times: I know what I’m doing, and I don’t know where they’re coming from. I guess they’re getting $500 to review a book, you know?
Yeah—who’s going to build a book around a sexual maniac who assaults women and has to be locked up? Unless it’s some stupid thriller or horror crap, you know? I don’t know, it intrigues me. What does it mean? Why would a man have to be locked away for twenty years without seeing a woman? What does it mean? Why should it interest me? Why should it interest readers? And yes, I did want to explore his mind, and his psychology, as a way of getting at the relations between men and women.
I invented Eddie O’Kane as a character to stand as Stanley’s alter ego. Many men are deeply misogynistic, as you know, being a man, and talking with other men, and sitting around the sports bar and all of that. I think they’re misogynistic because they’re afraid of women. To be in love with somebody, and to declare your love for them, really puts your he
art and soul on the line in the most naked way, because women might reject you, and often they do, and then you become bitter about it. Eddie O’Kane is a womanizer, he’s misogynistic. He’s even very casual about it. He’s, in his own way, very little different from Stanley. But there are degrees. And I wanted to explore those degrees.
SR: What kinds of music do you listen to?
T.C. BOYLE: When I’m working I always listen to music. Almost exclusively classical music, string quartets, trios, sometimes vocal music. And also, sometimes, John Coltrane. Jazz. When I’m not working, I listen to rock ‘n’ roll.
Riven Rock, it was strange, it was set around the turn of the century, you’d think I’d listen to classical music, but I got into a Coltrane phase again, and made tapes of all my favorite cuts from his albums, so a lot of Riven Rock was written to 60s jazz rather than turn of the century classical music. I just need the rhythm.
SR: When you start out writing a novel or short story, do you pretty much know where you’re going to end up? Do you work with outlines, or do you just sort of jump in with both feet?
T.C. BOYLE: I have no idea where any story or novel is going to go. I have to follow the opening lines, and I find out where they go. It’s a puzzle, and that’s why it’s so magical and interesting for me to write fiction, and why I’m not interested in writing anything else. With novels, I generally do research, and as we said, helps to suggest what the story might be. And I might jot some notes down then. Usually those notes aren’t really relevant though, as to what evolves. But just the process of thinking about it in that strict way is helpful. I also like to have a title for a novel before I begin. It’s been that way with everything but Budding Prospects. And some kind of sense of how big it will be, and what division of sections there might be in the book. Because that also helps as an organizing principle. Beyond that, I have no idea. There are no outlines. It’s too abstract to make an outline. I will, at some point, leap ahead and think, "Oh yeah, well this will happen, and that will happen, and this is why, and it will end here," and I jot down a few lines to that regard, but basically I’m just following the story through to see where it will take me.
SR: Do you have any kind of set routine for writing? Do you set any schedule for yourself?
T.C. BOYLE: I work 7 days a week. I get up, and I read the newspaper, then go to work, and I usually work four hours a day, on average, something like that, and then I’m done, I don’t even think about it until the next day.
SR: That probably helps keep you sane.
T.C. BOYLE: Yeah. I think you need to give the unconscious time to resolve some of the questions of the work, some of the problems. Hemingway said that when he would stop writing each day, he could only stop if he knew where he was going the next day. I think he was pretty much saying the same thing I am. I get to a certain point where it goes dead. I don’t know if I know where I’m going to be the next day, but I know that nothing more is going to come out of banging my head against the typewriter today, so I may as well move on.
SR: When you were growing up, were there any particular books or authors whose work was particularly important to you?
T.C. BOYLE: Well, it depends on how you define growing up. When I was a kid, I didn’t read much. I read comic books, and animal stories, and things like that. When I went into college, I began to read, and especially to read contemporary authors. In that period of the early 70s, I was reading: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Borges, Julio Cortazar, Gunter Gras, Pynchon, John Barth, Coover, Barthelme, the absurdist playwrights, Flannery O’Connor, people who were on the scene current at that time. Usually it was stuff that was a little extra-real, stuff that had a little bit more of a sweep, or a larger overview of life than, let’s say, the minimalists that we had in the 80s, that kind of thing.
SR: I hope that period is over.
T.C. BOYLE: Well, I think there’s great work that was done then, and I love many of the writers—
SR: Yeah, well, I mean, Carver was great—
T.C. BOYLE: Carver’s the best, and Mary Robison did great work too, in that style, Richard Ford as well, but it wasn’t exactly my style. Although I’ve written some stories that—they’re not minimalistic, exactly, but they are of that ilk, because, you know, this is a grab bag. I want to try everything.
SR: Food and restaurants seem to be a recurring obsession in your fiction. Restaurants make for an interesting milieu in your stories, in that they are often the site of both an essential activity, eating, for the human-as-animal, and yet also a place where the superficiality and peccadilloes of "high culture" are put on display. Do you see restaurants as places where visceral humanity puts on its cultured airs?
T.C. BOYLE: Well that is a great question, and brilliantly phrased, and it answers itself, pretty much. I very much like the idea. I’ve thought about food a lot, because I’m always asked about it. I think it stands as a kind of symbol of conspicuous consumption. My restaurant critic piece ["Sorry Fugu"] began with the idea that it’s so absurd. I mean, people are starving all over the world, and we’re concerned about how they’re cooking the sea bass tonight. But eventually, as you know, it became a story not so much about restaurants and restaurant critics, but my little love letter to the critics of the world in general, as opposed to the artists.
And yeah, it does bring our animal natures into conflict with what is polite. And to be civilized, to be able to go to a restaurant, without killing everybody, eating their food, and then eventually eating them too, is a miracle in a way.
SR: So were you the guy in "Sorry Fugu" with the burnt steak and potatoes?
T.C. BOYLE: Well, I’m a pretty fancy guy these days. I get wined and dined a lot all over the world. I like good food and good restaurants. But I’m not obsessive about it. I’m not obsessive at all. I’ll eat anything. I never met a food I didn’t like. During the Wellville tour, all the journalists thought it would be hilarious to take me out to the chili stand, and eat hot dogs and stuff. Sure, no problem.
SR: So what are some of your favorite dishes?
T.C. BOYLE: My favorite cuisine is Japanese. I love sushi. It held me in good stead when I did my book tour in Japan, in ‘89. A lot of Westerners, I guess, are kind of squeamish about Japanese food, or unfamiliar with it. Invariably, when I went out to dinner, my hosts would say, "So Sensei, is there is any food that you do not eat?" and I would say, "No, bring it on. I’ll eat it all." The way they do it in Japan is: You don’t order sushi, you just come in, everybody sits down, the chef is going to bring you twenty pieces of sushi, and he cuts it up, and everybody eats the same thing. A lot of times they just set it on the wooden bar and you eat it with your fingers. You’re having fun, you’re drinking saké, and then the chef brings out another round of stuff down, until you say stop. It’s a lot of fun. And good stuff.
Of course, one of the jokes I’ve already developed for the Friend of the Earth tour in the year 2000 is this: Don’t invest in a sushi bar, because everything they serve there is going to be extinct in ten years. That be the truth. It’s all going to be extinct, everything. Everything in the sea is gone. I just finished a book yesterday called Cod, by Mark Kurlansky, that Penguin just reprinted. It’s a wonderful, wonderful book about the history of cod, cod fishing, how it’s effected us, how it helped us to break away from England and all of that. And the sad fact is that the cod stocks are depleted and there is no cod fishing anymore.
SR: You’re known as the P.T. Barnum of American fiction—
T.C. BOYLE: Am I really? I think I should get a T-shirt that says that, "The P.T. Barnum of American Fiction"—I think I will. My god.
SR: Your readings are legendary, and you’re far less reclusive than J.D. Salinger. To what degree do you see fiction-writing as a kind of performance?
T.C. BOYLE: I came up with a formulation years ago of levels of fame. The first level of fame is: Nobody knows who you are, and nobody cares. The second level of fame is what I have achieved: People read my books, they come out to see me, a
nd sometimes they will come up and say "T.C. Boyle?" I’ll say yeah. They’ll say "We love your work," and then they’ll go away. The third level is the same scenario only they’ll say, "T.C. Boyle?" I’ll say yes, they’ll say, "You son of a bitch," and punch me in the face. And then the final level is J.D. Salinger.
So, I’d like to stay at level two.
Well, fiction, all art, is a performance. It’s a performance, and it’s a seduction too. You have to get the reader’s attention, I guess that’s where the performance comes in. You have to seduce the reader into entering your world, and believing that it’s true, and staying there.
As far as being on stage is concerned, unlike most writers, I am extroverted. I like to be onstage. Most writers are introverts—that’s why they became writers in the first place. They didn’t want to have to deal with anybody. I don’t mind, and I get a real charge from giving a live performance. To connect with the audience in the way that comedians do, or musicians do. It’s one-on-one. You deliver a line, they laugh. I mean, that’s a great feeling. It reaffirms the power of the work, and the power of the written word. And also the rhythm of it. You don’t hear the rhythm of it if you leave it in your own head.