Introduction to T. C. Boyle
By Julie Schumacher, Associate Professor of English
In a Washington Post review of Tooth and Claw, Annie Proulx wrote, “Cherish the writer who stretches your mind a little.” This probably qualifies as a significant understatement about tonight’s speaker, whom the New York Times called “one of the most inventive and verbally exuberant writers of his generation.”
T. C. Boyle, aka Tom Boyle or T. Coraghessan Boyle, was born in Peekskill, New York, and received an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop, studying with John Cheever, Vance Bourjaily, and John Irving; he then went on to receive a Ph.D. in British Literature from the University of Iowa. A professor of English at the University of Southern California, Boyle has won numerous literary awards—among them, two NEA grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Faulkner award, multiple O. Henry Awards, the Prix Medicis Etranger, and the Bernard Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. Boyle is the author of 17 works of fiction, including, most recently, Tooth and Claw, a collection of short stories; The Inner Circle, a novel about Alfred Kinsey and his infamous “sex research”; and Drop City, a portrait of a group of 1960s hippies who attempt to create Utopia in the wilds of Alaska.
If part of the fun of being a writer of fiction is the ability to “play god”— to dream up characters with vastly different ideologies and habits and beliefs and desires and then construct a setting and a plot within which they will live—T. C. Boyle must be having more fun than most. His novels and short stories often center not simply on conflict, but head-on collision. A few examples: in Tortilla Curtain Delaney Mossbacher, “a liberal humanist with an unblemished driving record and a freshly waxed Japanese car with personalized plates” runs over a Mexican illegal immigrant, sending a shock wave of events throughout both of their lives; in the short story “Killing Babies” a jaded ne’er-do-well checks out of rehab and moves in with his older, decidedly unenthusiastic brother, an abortion provider whose clinic and home are under siege by pro-lifers; and in The Inner Circle the fictional John Milk struggles to balance his adulation of his powerful mentor and occasional sexual partner, Professor Alfred Kinsey, with his love for his stubbornly traditional wife and child at home.
It’s difficult to classify Boyle’s work except to say that it is invariably startling, unpredictable, and provocative. Who else could write a story called “I Dated Jane Austen”? Who else could organize a nearly 700-page collection of his short stories into three categories called “Love,” “Death,” and “And Everything in Between”? Writers, Boyle has said, should function as “loose cannons.” They should resist the idea of literature as a subject limited to theorists and critics and the denizens of higher education. “Art is for entertainment,” he has said. “You can put it in the university, but it is for entertainment. . . . If a book doesn’t entertain it’s useless. Everything else must derive from that.”
The word “entertainment” shouldn’t be misconstrued, though, to suggest that Boyle steers away from difficult or weighty subject matter; instead he steers unswervingly toward it, writing about obsession, apocalypse, race relations, sexual power, politics, and environmental disaster. In prose that is often characterized by spectacular, dazzling description (one reviewer speculated that the author had written his books “in a locked room with his hair on fire”), Boyle lifts up the thin veneer of what we call civilization and looks underneath. His subject, like Alfred Kinsey’s, is the human animal—the tug of war between realism and idealism, between our primal nature and our poignant, often failed efforts to create a functional and beneficent society. In his own words, his fiction indulges in “a sort of Beckettian humor about the grim things of our world, while struggling toward the light.”
Probably because his scope is so large and varied, critics have been uncertain as to how to categorize Boyle. He is said to have been influenced by Vonnegut but also by Cheever; by Flannery O’Connor but also by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He has been praised as a satirist, a surrealist, a trickster, a naturalist, and a writer of the grotesque. Recently, his novel Drop City was favorably reviewed as both a condemnation and an endorsement of the radicalism of the 1960s. I imagine that Boyle, who believes that “art is supposed to be unconventional,” might enjoy the disagreement.
Please welcome T.C. Boyle.
April 11, 2006
Ted Mann Concert Hall