Doom With a SiDe SalaD
Novelist TC Boyle’s cheerful pessimism
It was one of those perfect Southern California afternoons, the sun peeking through a thick grove of trees, the air just a touch autumnal. I was eating lunch with the novelist TC Boyle in the backyard of his Frank Lloyd Wright– designed house in Montecito, the posh enclave of Santa Barbara where he has lived for more than two decades, raising three children with his wife of 42 years.
“It’s quite clear to me that our species is on the way out,” Boyle said casually, as if the scene had grown just a little too suburban. It is the novelist’s job, after all, to jostle us out of our comforts, while being entertaining — that is, to make discomfort pleasurable. Boyle has proved remarkably capable in this regard through his 26 works of fiction.
Boyle’s latest novel, The Terranauts, is set in the desert of Arizona — which, with global warming on the rise, much of California is starting to resemble. It is the story of a Biosphere 2–like experiment to prepare for the colonisation of space, giving humanity the chance to ruin another planet with Starbucksladen strip malls.
The sunny tranquility of Southern California seemed like the wrong setting for fantasies of the apocalypse. Then again, no place may be more aware of its precariousness than this state blessed by so much bounty and fraught with so much danger. In the north, wildfires were burning. Earlier that day, I had driven past Lake Cachuma, which Boyle pointed out was at only about 10 per cent capacity because of California’s yearslong drought. And there was going to be an earthquake. Probably a tsunami too.
“It looks pretty damn grim to me,” Boyle said as we popped cubes of salty cheese into our mouths and sipped our seltzer. “Maybe we better get some colonies going real fast.”
If you saw Boyle buying milk at the Montecito Village Grocery, you might think he’s a former Megadeth roadie. With his red goatee and ear piercings, his rings and ever-present beret, he looks like someone who’s done some real living and will tell you all about it, if you’re willing to spend 40 minutes on the Santa Barbara wharf while he bums cigarettes from tourists.
Boyle is the typical Californian in that he came from elsewhere, born in 1948 in Peekskill, New York, a working-class town in the Hudson River Valley. His father drove a school bus; his mother was a secretary. After getting his master of fine arts degree at Iowa, he stayed and got a doctorate too, in Victorian literature. “I didn’t know anything,” he said with a laugh, remembering how he “hungered” for knowledge.
Boyle published his first book nearly four decades ago, in 1979. It was a collection called The Descent of Man, a title Charles Darwin had used a century earlier. Like the naturalist, Boyle applied a clinical curiosity to our intractable species, which in his work seems prone to devolution less than progress. The New York Times praised Boyle for creating vivid characters “in search of the differences between man and beast, man and woman, plunderer and hero, art and silliness,” but warned that while Boyle was “capable of the sublime,” some of his stories were “merely clever.”
His engagement with the headlines, with the world beyond his head, is welcome at a time of literary introspection: memoir as art, confession as originality. Boyle is always going outside himself, jumping into foreign skins. That gives his fiction a restless quality that some readers may find off-putting, but Boyle can’t help himself. He needs to keep exploring, “trying to figure human life and what we’re doing and who we are,” as he told me. “That’s my job. That’s why I do it. And to make art — because making art is a great thing. It takes you out of yourself.”
Published in 1987, World’s End was Boyle’s third novel. A history of the Hudson River Valley from the time of the Dutch settlement to the labour and racial unrest of the 20th century, the novel is equal parts Thomas Pynchon, Washington Irving and García Márquez. Rolling Stone said the novel elevated Boyle to the “top rank of American fiction”. Though Boyle also came of age as a writer in the 1980s, it’s impossible to imagine one of his novels as a John Hughes movie. That’s something to be proud of.
World’s End established Boyle as a literary success; The Road to Wellville, coming six years later, conferred pop culture cachet. The novel, about a sanitarium founded by Dr John Harvey Kellogg, the cereal impresario, became a feature film starring Anthony Hopkins and John Cusack. It is the only one of his novels turned into a full-length movie, though the madcap quality of his fiction seems easily adaptable to the screen.
Two years later came the novel that many regard as Boyle’s finest: The Tortilla Curtain, which brilliantly condenses questions of national identity into a Los Angeles enclave that builds a wall to keep out undocumented immigrants (sound familiar?). “Tortilla Curtain resonates in high school classrooms,” reported The Press Democrat of Northern California in 2010, 15 years after its publication.
The Tortilla Curtain had detractors from the start; in her review in the Los Angeles Times, Jane Birnbaum complained, “This is a book that bigots can love; it drips with racism and xenophobia. If you’re white and angry, reading this book may be a guilty pleasure with its lustily incorrect expressions of white backlash.”
Given the current sensitivities over cultural appropriation, racial identity and immigration, a novel like The Tortilla Curtain would probably receive an even harsher reception today than it did two decades ago, with Boyle denounced on Twitter with woke hashtags and proposed boycotts (yes, he is on Twitter ). The author Lionel Shriver recently gave the literati heart attacks with her speech at a writers’ conference in Brisbane, Australia, where she blasted away at the sanctimoniousness of literary identity politics.
Boyle was at his cabin in the Sierra foothills, so he missed the Twitter outrage to Shriver’s words. However, when I told him the details, he supported her — as have nearly all serious writers and critics. “What can be more racist,” he wondered, “than trying to say that white people can only write about white people?”
It’s strange to think of a writer in his late 60s coming into his own, especially one with 26 titles to his name. Though the novels differ wildly, they all seek to express “the grinding sadness of the world,” as he put it in the 2007 short story Sin Dolor.
The best of Boyle’s novels warn against the varieties of human extremism: Our problems may be grave, he often says, but we make them worse by acting on our unexamined impulses and convictions. His novels are a vivid plea for moderation — the literary equivalent of being a passionate Hillary Clinton supporter in the midst of a Bernie Sanders rally.
Boyle has also become one of our finest chronicles of the American West, a landscape sometimes unspoiled but frequently scarred. His favourite setting is surely the Channel Islands, which sit off the coast of Southern California like a half-submerged beast, largely primeval and free of development. In Anacapa, a short story about a fishing expedition to one of those islands, the narrator marvels about how “the world opened up all the way to the big dun humps of the islands before them.” Yet in the distance are “oil rigs like old men wading with their pants rolled up,” suggesting the conflict at the center of Boyle’s work.
Boyle plans to devote himself to writing full time, though it is difficult to see how he could write any more than he already does. Although The Terranauts has not yet been published, he has already handed in a collection of short stories and is researching a new project, which he wouldn’t tell me about.
It’s quite clear to me that our species is on the way out... It looks pretty grim... Maybe we better get some colonies going real fast. TC Boyce, novelist