This profile is third of three in support of the Lane Lecture Series. T.C. Boyle reads in Cemex Auditorium on Monday, May 6th at 8pm. “I want to be taken away to a different place every time.” – T.C. Boyle, in an interview with Peter Wild Tom Coraghessan Boyle’s twenty-four books of fiction—fourteen of them novels, ten of them short story collections—include the novel World’s End (1987), winner of the PEN Faulkner Prize; The Tortilla Curtain (1995), a national Book Award Finalist; and “T. C. Boyle Stories” (1998), winner of the PEN Malamud Prize. He grew up in Peekskill, New York, a small manufacturing town fifty miles up the Hudson River. The son of working class parents, the teenage writer-to-be was “a wise guy. He and his band of friends turned to the more normal (if not placid) kinds of adolescent michief, and, his grades slipped. At seventeen, he headed to SUNY Potsdam with his saxophone. He intended to study music. He’d been reading the whole time, however, and when his audition went poorly, he tried history:

I didn’t know at the time, or I couldn’t have defined it, but it had to do with writing. I didn’t yet realize it, but I could write, and in history—unlike, say, biology or math—what you did was write essays. His junior year, he tried a creative writing course—a relative novelty in 1967, three decades after the first of its kind was created at the University of Iowa—and upon writing “The Foot,” a one-act play in which a couple places its dead son’s severed foot into the dining table’s centerpiece. (The boy was eaten by a crocodile.) In an essay called “This Monkey, My Back,” the writer remembers the moment he read the story to his class:I finished, flushed with the sort of exhilaration that only comes from driving the ball over the net and directly into your opponent’s face … Examine the elements involved in this essential scene I’ve just described to you—visible triumph and public adulation, the trumping of one’s competitors, the humble acceptance of the laurel wreath, and the promise of dizzying triumphs to come.

Today, T.C. Boyle can certainly claim triumphs: a professorship at USC, a happy family filling a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home in Santa Barbara, the meter-long span of bookshelf that holds his collected works. He is a prolific writer with a burning work ethic. He writes every morning and describes the process as a drug, a near-physical necessity, but he didn’t start writing seriously until attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. There, while working simultaneously on a fiction MFA and a PhD in 19th century British literature, he wrote “mad, absurd, hyperbolic” stories, wanting to be, like legendary Iowa man Raymond Carver, a short story writer and nothing else. He changed his mind the day after graduating and went straight to work on his first novel, Water Music, a historical adventure rooted in (you guessed it) 18th century British history. The past would continue to fascinate Boyle and filter into his books. His breakthrough novel, World’s End, takes place near the writer’s hometown of Peetskill.

Like its contemporaries, the historical novel contains disillioned, aimless potheads and a punky kind of irony, but its historical reach (some 300 years) and its intese wittiness set it apart. modern green trail eyelet curtainsBoyle dedicates World’s End in “memory of my own lost father,” provides a chart of characters (there are sixty-two), and begins:golden scissors curtains dubai On the day he lost his right foot, Walter Van Brunt had been haunted, however haphazardly, by ghosts of the past. the tortilla curtain zusammenfassung part 1It began in the morning, when he woke to the smell of potato pancakes, a smell that reminded him of his mother, dead of sorrow after the Peterskill riots of 1949, and it carried through the miserable lunch break he divded between nostalgic recollections of his paternal grandmother and a liverwurst sandwich that tasted of dead flesh and chemicals.home depot levolor roman shades

Boyle has said that he writes his books from a single, first sentence. the tortilla curtain part 2 chapter 1It’s certainly true that ghosts of the past—mostly grudges and strange tastes—haunt Walter, whose sad life as a protopunk is juxtaposed with that of his Dutch ancestors, who bully their way to power upon settling the area. net curtain rod 250cmThe narrator, concerned with the politics of power and the startling parallels between eras that seem incongruent, is sly, empathetic, and bold: Boyle attacks the ghosts of history from many angles in the 500-odd pages of World’s End.dunelm mill black and gold curtains His prose has been described as “maximalist,” a sharp contrast to contemporary writers like Wolff, Carver, and Ford, who, though they shared Boyle’s fascination with the middle class, favored hard, pared-down sentences over the flowing, almost manic descriptions that Boyle offers.

Differences emerge in his particular sense of humor, too: he brings a slapstick sensibility to the dark humor in vogue in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Chance meetings and freak accidents occur often enough to test credulity, but more often than not, they’re outrageously funny. Humor is the strongest candidate for creating unity across Boyle’s twenty-four books. Critics have tried from other angles, but none work completely: not fascination with history (A Friend From the Earth is set in 2025), nor autobiographical influence (he’s all but absent in books about Frank Lloyd Wright, Dr. Kinsey, and John Harvey Kellogg), nor even humor. Tortilla Curtain (1995) remains Boyle’s most controversial book for its subject matter, and stands out as his only un-hilarious novel. Both conditions owe their existence to the book’s subject matter: illegal immigration. A writer living in a gated Los Angeles community crosses paths with an undocumented couple who hope to live the American Dream.

What follows is more of a nightmare, as Boyle takes the reader into the slot canyon that the couple calls home, up to the scorched parking lot where they hunt for work. He contrasts it all with peeks into the social and mental lives of wealthy Angelos whose ignorance of their poor neighbors doesn’t last. The narrator’s depiction of one character’s dream recalls Steinbeck: “I want one of those houses,” she said. “A clean white one made out of lumber that smells like the mountains, with a gas range and a refrigerator, and maybe a little yard so you can plant a garden and make a place for the chickens.” Recently, the author’s novels have held to the social/environmental track, as in When the Killing’s Done, an eco-thriller set on California’s Channel Islands, and its companion piece, San Miguel, a historical book in the same setting, albeit further back in time. This shift in content has ushered in a change in style: the books are less ironic and playful, and settle into a familiar realist mode.

The same cannot be said of Boyle’s recent short fiction, however. “The Night of the Satellite” appeared in the April 15th edition of The New Yorker. Inspired by the chunk of satellite that burned a hole in a Peekskill resident’s car trunk, the story tells of a couple who, happening upon a lovers’ quarrel on a blacktop road, are swept up into a conflict of their own. Where humor appears, it’s unexpected (“I hate you” is rejoined by “Ditto and square it”), and the two couples bump into each other not once, not twice, but three times. In deference to Boyle’s upcoming reading at Stanford, no more of the story will be revealed here. His prodigious output suggests that he will read new work at Stanford—likely a short story, in his entirety—and, if his own opinion of his readings is accurate, attendees will have a good time. I perform,” he told The Guardian in a video interview. “I’m a tremendous ham and I love attention.” Just what the New York native and Southern California resident will read is anyone’s guess.