Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.4 AVERAGE
3.4 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
medium-paced
This book really made me think about what it means to be an American citizen and the current immigration debate. I highly recommend this book. Great story.
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
informative
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I now have a profound sense of gratitude for all I have. I was also amazed at the tenacity of Candido and America, their struggle to simply survive. The reality of their life was much harsher than my own, which I consider to be pretty rocky at times.
I pulled myself out of my YA hidey hole to read an "adult" book, that was a mistake. The idea of this book is interesting, the same period of time, similar events told from the perspective of two different couples. But the focus on how rotten horrible life can be, how one's beliefs and ideas can spiral out of control was not pleasurable to read.
http://newwest.net/topic/article/an_interview_with_evil_companion_tc_boyle/C39/L39/
The Evil Companions Literary Award ceremony is an annual Denver event held in honor of a writer who “embodies the spirit of the West.” According to the Denver Public Library’s website, “The award pays homage to a group of Denver writers who met in the 1950s and 60s to drink and discuss writing, and dubbed themselves the Evil Companions.” Past recipients have included Sandra Cisneros, Annie Proulx, Tom McGuane, and Jim Harrison. I recently spoke to this year’s honoree, T.C. Boyle, for the Rocky Mountain News over the phone from his home near Santa Barbara. The paper didn’t have room to print all of Boyle’s intelligent musings about art, life as a Westerner, and mountain lion encounters, so I decided to share the extended conversation with NewWest readers.
Do you consider yourself a Westerner now, or do you still feel like a transplanted New Yorker?
T.C. Boyle: Choice B. What is hilarious about the idea of regional writing or Western writing is that it no longer applies because we are such a peripatetic society—everybody lives everywhere. It might have been true even fifty years ago when most writers lived in New York City because that’s where the industry is, and everything else was considered the hinterlands. But in my generation and on down, writers live anywhere they like. We have different ways of communicating than we did back then, and it’s unnecessary to be centralized, so writers are everywhere. And you’ll find that people who seem like regional writers might be regional writers by adoption. For instance, Annie Proulx writes these brilliant Wyoming stories, and you’d think that she was like William Faulkner and that her family had lived there for generations, but it’s not true.
Anyway, within a year of my having moved to L.A., the New York Times Book Review was asking me to review Western writers. So I guess I am a Westerner. I will have a unique perspective on things because I always feel a little out of place. On the other hand, I’ve been here a long time. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Sierras, in a tiny little place in Sequoia National Forest, and I don’t think it gets much more Western than that. I spend a lot of time in the forest by myself. I’ve been nose-to-nose with the mountain lion twice now.
NW: And you lived to tell the tale. How close did you get?
TCB: The first time was when I was writing “Drop City,” probably 2001 or 2002. It was a relatively warm day in the mountains, and I was deep in the woods by this waterfall that I know, and I think she was probably asleep under the ledges there, so the noise of the waterfall masked the noise of my coming. And I snapped a twig and she snapped a twig and she was running away from me. I was probably about fifty feet away and I was glad that she was running. One thing you’re not supposed to do is crouch down and be small. Ten minutes later I was on the same watercourse, way far away, nobody had been there for a long time, and I was fishing for golden trout, to see them and then let them go. I was crouching by a big dense bush right in the stream, and I heard a noise. When I looked around to see what it was, five feet away was the track of the mountain lion filling in with water slowly in the sand just like in the movies. That made me think that she was very curious about me. When I got back, I called my wife who was down here in Santa Barbara and I told her and she said, “Will you please stop harassing that poor animal.”
NW: Was this before or after you wrote the story about the man who wins the wildcat at the bar?
TCB: Oh, “Tooth and Claw.” This was well before “Tooth and Claw,” which I also wrote up on the mountain after I had finished “The Inner Circle.” That was a different cat, but I still am so fascinated with nature. I don’t know if this qualifies me as a Western writer or not, outside from the fact that I live in the West. But I suppose that wherever I wound up I would have been equally fascinated by nature and writing about it. It’s one of my chief subjects, and how we are animals living in nature and how we try to deny that, etcetera. And of course environmental stuff, which I’ve always been very keen to write about, as in “A Friend of the Earth.”
NW: You said that regionalism isn’t as important to writers anymore, but what about to readers? For example, “The Tortilla Curtain” has been selected for many community reading programs in the West, and there are other books that are often selected, such as Kent Haruf’s “Plainsong,” and Sandra Cisneros’s “House on Mango Street” even though it’s set in Chicago, not the West. Because these books are chosen time and again, do you think there is a desire among readers for books written about the west that is not always met by the publishing industry?
TCB: “Plainsong” is a great book by the way. I love that book. You may be on to something there, but on the other hand, I suspect that many literary writers like me write about whatever motivates me at the time, and that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with regional writing. I am lucky to have come out to California as a stranger because it opened up new territory for me, and as I said earlier, I’ll always feel just slightly out of place. Nothing is pedestrian for me here. Maybe my eyes are slightly keener than the eyes of someone who had been born and raised here.
NW: It seems like “The Tortilla Curtain” is your book that has been most often picked for community reading programs.
TCB: Yeah, that’s true.
NW: It was just picked for “Silicon Valley Reads,” and at the University of Alaska for a semester reading program.
TCB: I’ve been very lucky. Many universities and cities have chosen “The Tortilla Curtain” for citywide reads, and I go as often as I can. And, by the way, all over the country, not simply the West. I go as often as I can because I want to promote the idea of it, and of course it’s self-serving, I want them to read my book. I want to promote the idea of the community read—it’s fascinating to me because one of the things that I want to do is promote what I love, and that is the reading and writing of books. It’s so rare when we all have a book in common. I mean, you go to a party and people talk about a movie or a TV show or whatever. But not books so much, because if people are reading books, they’re reading different books. We don’t have the phenomenon where a literary book comes out and it jumps on the bestseller list and everybody reads and talks about it. It’s unusual. So with a community read, everybody you see can have an opinion of something, whether they like it or hate it. “Tortilla” is popular with such groups I think because it’s so provocative. It doesn’t offer any solutions, it’s not pat, it’s just kind of outrageous and in your face, and most people appreciate that.
NW: Well that’s interesting, because in Denver they’ve avoided choosing even “Plainsong” because of a sex scene in it, so it seems like “The Tortilla Curtain” is being picked by more adventurous communities.
TCB: One of the problems with the community read is who is picking it, and what does the community think. Obviously if you ask each person, each person will have a different idea, and often these ideas get very politicized. I read that New York City wanted to do a community read for the whole city, and the book chosen–I’m sorry, I forget the title or the author–but it was a book of nonfiction about a Korean immigrant who had come to the U.S. and made his way. But immediately everybody went crazy. They said, “Well, why a Korean? Why not a Jamaican? Why not me?” And so they had to cancel the program.
NW: What was the response like in the Silicon Valley read?
TCB: Well, there were two communities. The first time I went up was in January and it was in the more wealthy part of town, and the second time it was in the Mexican heritage museum in a less-wealthy part of town. The crowds were huge and enthusiastic for both reads. There had been some controversy in Silicon Valley over the choice of this book, on the absurd grounds that a white guy has written this book from the point of view of Mexicans and how can that possibly be and we’re outraged. I just came back from Laguna Beach where the book was read too, and there a woman who is prominent among the Minute Men had been quoted in the front page of the paper saying she would disrupt the reading and she hated it because “it would be a lefty love-fest.”
NW: So she probably hadn’t read the book.
TCB: Well, they asked her and she hadn’t. You know, I think it’s great when people choose something controversial, rather than something so safe and ordinary. Isn’t that what literature is supposed to be? It’s supposed to be subversive and crazy and provoke people. So I’m very happy that “Tortilla” gets chosen a lot.
NW: In a lot of your books, especially in “Talk Talk” and “The Tortilla Curtain,” the characters spend a lot of time in their cars. Do you have to spend a lot of time in your car?
TCB: I used to. You might know that I moved from L.A. fourteen years ago. I’m living in a part of Santa Barbara, which is a village in itself, and I go through many many days without even starting the car. I walk everywhere. This is my dream and my joy. I walk to the bank and the grocery store, to the bars and restaurants, to the post office. I left L.A. because of the population crush and because of the fact that you had to go everywhere in your car. The last few years in L.A. my wife and I weren’t doing anything any more because it was such a hassle. It’s the problem with big, commuter car-oriented cities. The very reason for being in a city, that is to have culture, is eliminated by the fact that you can’t access it.
NW: And you don’t miss it at all?
TCB: [Laughs.] I’m looking out the window right now, and all I see is greenery and mountains. And when I get off the phone with you I’m going to take a walk.
NW: I read that the current book you’re working on is about Frank Lloyd Wright.
TCB: Yes. Frank Lloyd Wright designed this house that I’m living in. So for many years, I’ve thought about writing about him, not only because I wanted to learn more, but also because he fits in so well with some of the other historical characters I’ve taken on, for instance Alfred Kinsey and John Kellogg of “The Road to Wellville.” I call them the great egomaniacs of the twentieth century. They’re narcissistic personalities, like my bad guy Peck in “Talk Talk.” This kind of personality appeals to me, someone who sees only his own agenda, and for whom other people really don’t have any valence or being except as they fit into that agenda. It’s something that novelists are guilty of. And I guess I write about these characters as a cautionary tale for myself, reminding myself not to be a guru and not to go that far, and if I am a guru to be a very kind, gentle, and persuasive one, who persuades you only to enjoy art rather than to join some crazy enterprise. Paul Slovak, my editor, has even said one we get this out, and we come out with the paperback, maybe we can do a boxed set of your egomaniacs of the century.
NW: On the cover of each book you should have each menacing face, like in Communist poster art.
TCB: I like it. We’ve got to sign you up for the art department.
NW: Do you feel like you’ve gotten to know Frank Lloyd Wright from living in a house that he designed?
TCB: Well, it’s so strange, since I’ve written so many books here, and since it is my house—we’re only the fourth owner, and we’ve restored it. It needed some major work. It’s a prairie style house. It was so early that people didn’t know much about him, and it was shipped to the first owner way earlier, before those other California houses. So yes, I have a much greater appreciation for him now. I never go through a day here without being kind of amazed by the living space and by its surroundings, even in my most depressed state or most stressed out state. It’s still always a thing of beauty. I thought that I would have a greater attachment to him in writing the book, but not really. It’s called “The Women,” and it’s about the women in his life. It mainly focuses in them and on his personal life, but also of course it’s an overview of everything and gives a lot about the architecture and so on. He’s become a character of mine, so I’ve forgotten that he really existed. I think that’s what happens whenever you use real historical characters in fiction. You’re creating a story and a persona for them, and yes it accords with what we know of his persona, which was very injurious and self-congratulatory, but really it’s fiction and he’s mine now in some strange way. So I’m not really drawing closer to him although I have a much greater knowledge of his work and a much greater appreciation of this house.
NW: He’s known for making beautiful houses that don’t function well or fall apart. Is that true of your house?
TCB: There are many wonderful stories about him. He was a sensational character. You know, the stories about the flat roofs, the house he built for his brother Richard with the mitered glass corners and so on. It leaked, of course. Richard called up and said, “There’s water dripping on the piano,” and Frank said, “Well, move the piano.” I went to La Miniatura in Pasadena, one of the four textile block houses he made in the twenties. The roof leaked the year he made it and he personally came and fixed it for Mrs. Millard, and still it leaked. We’re a little bit luckier here in that it’s a prairie style house. I did replace the roof, which leaked but just because of old age.
NW: Since you started publishing novels in 1982, you’ve never gone more than three years without publishing one, in addition to your short story collections. How do you keep up that pace?
TCB: Wow, good math. Well, it’s a kind of obsession and a joy. Once you find what you want to do in life, you do it. I’m very single minded, more so than many of my colleagues. I’m not distracted by anything else. I’ve never had any interest in writing, for instance, films, even of my own work, because it’s outside my purview of what I want to do in life. I’ve always just focused on my agenda—very like Frank Lloyd Wright and the rest of them. What I want is to pursue this art. Each story is a miracle for me personally. I don’t know what it will be or where it will go, and when it comes together I feel tremendous satisfaction and so I want to continue to capture that because I want to see what comes next. I’m not the sort of writer who will go back his old books and say, “Oh, maybe I should redo this.” When I did the collected stories in 1998, I didn’t change anything, I just organized them. They exist already, and I want to move forward and see what comes next.
NW: Do you feel like you have more ideas than you can realize?
TCB: Because I am the sort of writer who will write about any subject in any mode without restrictions, I guess ideas are pretty much infinite. I hope to finish “The Women” sometime in the middle of the summer and deliver it. That means it should come out a year later, but there is I understand there is an election coming up. We really got burned with “The Inner Circle” in 2004. We came out in September with the book, we got a few weeks of publicity and then everything was the election. So to avoid that, it’s looking as if Paul wants to publish “The Women” early in 2009. So that would be a lag, if you count from last year’s “Talk Talk,” that would be a lag of two and a half years.
NW: You seem to be in a good position where you’re prolific but not so prolific that you get the Joyce Carol Oates jokes.
TCB: Well, I do get some of that, and I’m proud and pleased to be able to do this work. It’s what I live for.
NW: I read that your daughter attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
TCB: Yes, she got her MFA in fiction.
NW: Does she come to you for writing critiques?
TCB: No, we do play our work off of each other, sure. But she’s a totally different sort of writer. She’s writing really beautiful kind of imagistic stories, very dense and language-obsessed, and less plot-oriented. She has different mentors. We try to discourage her as much as possible by saying that writing is bankrupt and all writers are the most despicable people on earth, but that’s her life.
NW: How does the outlook for the publishing industry look different for her starting out now in 2007 than it did when you started publishing novels 25 years ago?
TCB: Well for one thing, there were more readers then, percentage-wise and probably in real numbers too. There was TV of course, which was the beginning of the death of literature, but now there are many other distractions such as the Net and video games. So reading seems to me these days to be confined to people who are obsessed with it, like us. I think for some people, the only novel that they’ll ever read will be one that they were forced to read in school. And since it’s codified and it’s work, maybe they don’t see it as a subversive pleasure, and don’t get the habit of that.
Further, the society is so crazy and busy that very few people have contemplative time anymore, and you need contemplative time in order to read a good novel or a poem or just to stare into the fire. My own life too, we’re all so crazy running around all the time we kind of lose sight of the fact that there are better ways to reconnect to your self, and that can come through great literature. So I think that the publishing industry is looking to the future with a wary eye. What we see more and more of is getting young writers—particularly ones that might look good in photos—dressed up for public in ways that the music industry used to do to see what will happen. Some are hits, some are misses. I just wonder if it would be possible to start a career as many writers such as myself have done, over a good long time. So many of the publishing houses are run by big conglomerates who only look at what the bottom line has done over this year and this quarter, and I wonder if they will make a long-term investment in a writer as Viking has done in me. It pays off for them, but it pays off over a long period of time, so that all my books are in print, they never have to spend a nickel on them and they sell and everybody’s happy. But will that happen with writers who publish their first novel today? I hope so.
NW: I read about something called “Authorgeddon,” which according to Wikipedia refers to “the hypothetical date when the number of books
published in a given year will exceed the number of people who have read even one book during the same year.”
TCB: How depressing.
NW: It’s projected to happen in 2052.
TCB: Well, the entire world will be gone by then. It’s hard to foresee though. I have to give some optimism here. It’s hard to foresee how technology changes us. For instance, we’re still typing on our computers. And when the telephone came in at the turn of the last century, people said, “here goes letter writing,” and so it did, but then who could foresee that we would email each other, which is a form of letter writing to supersede even talking on the telephone.
NW: It seems like people will always want to consume stories, in some form or another.
TCB: We need stories desperately. Again, we got them from TV, we’re getting them from video games, and we’re getting them in the movie theater. And you know, technology is driving people more and more away from public arenas for entertainment. People can get movies right on the Internet. So we’re more and more invested in being at home and being entertained at home, so books might play a part in that. Who knows?
The Evil Companions Literary Award ceremony is an annual Denver event held in honor of a writer who “embodies the spirit of the West.” According to the Denver Public Library’s website, “The award pays homage to a group of Denver writers who met in the 1950s and 60s to drink and discuss writing, and dubbed themselves the Evil Companions.” Past recipients have included Sandra Cisneros, Annie Proulx, Tom McGuane, and Jim Harrison. I recently spoke to this year’s honoree, T.C. Boyle, for the Rocky Mountain News over the phone from his home near Santa Barbara. The paper didn’t have room to print all of Boyle’s intelligent musings about art, life as a Westerner, and mountain lion encounters, so I decided to share the extended conversation with NewWest readers.
Do you consider yourself a Westerner now, or do you still feel like a transplanted New Yorker?
T.C. Boyle: Choice B. What is hilarious about the idea of regional writing or Western writing is that it no longer applies because we are such a peripatetic society—everybody lives everywhere. It might have been true even fifty years ago when most writers lived in New York City because that’s where the industry is, and everything else was considered the hinterlands. But in my generation and on down, writers live anywhere they like. We have different ways of communicating than we did back then, and it’s unnecessary to be centralized, so writers are everywhere. And you’ll find that people who seem like regional writers might be regional writers by adoption. For instance, Annie Proulx writes these brilliant Wyoming stories, and you’d think that she was like William Faulkner and that her family had lived there for generations, but it’s not true.
Anyway, within a year of my having moved to L.A., the New York Times Book Review was asking me to review Western writers. So I guess I am a Westerner. I will have a unique perspective on things because I always feel a little out of place. On the other hand, I’ve been here a long time. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Sierras, in a tiny little place in Sequoia National Forest, and I don’t think it gets much more Western than that. I spend a lot of time in the forest by myself. I’ve been nose-to-nose with the mountain lion twice now.
NW: And you lived to tell the tale. How close did you get?
TCB: The first time was when I was writing “Drop City,” probably 2001 or 2002. It was a relatively warm day in the mountains, and I was deep in the woods by this waterfall that I know, and I think she was probably asleep under the ledges there, so the noise of the waterfall masked the noise of my coming. And I snapped a twig and she snapped a twig and she was running away from me. I was probably about fifty feet away and I was glad that she was running. One thing you’re not supposed to do is crouch down and be small. Ten minutes later I was on the same watercourse, way far away, nobody had been there for a long time, and I was fishing for golden trout, to see them and then let them go. I was crouching by a big dense bush right in the stream, and I heard a noise. When I looked around to see what it was, five feet away was the track of the mountain lion filling in with water slowly in the sand just like in the movies. That made me think that she was very curious about me. When I got back, I called my wife who was down here in Santa Barbara and I told her and she said, “Will you please stop harassing that poor animal.”
NW: Was this before or after you wrote the story about the man who wins the wildcat at the bar?
TCB: Oh, “Tooth and Claw.” This was well before “Tooth and Claw,” which I also wrote up on the mountain after I had finished “The Inner Circle.” That was a different cat, but I still am so fascinated with nature. I don’t know if this qualifies me as a Western writer or not, outside from the fact that I live in the West. But I suppose that wherever I wound up I would have been equally fascinated by nature and writing about it. It’s one of my chief subjects, and how we are animals living in nature and how we try to deny that, etcetera. And of course environmental stuff, which I’ve always been very keen to write about, as in “A Friend of the Earth.”
NW: You said that regionalism isn’t as important to writers anymore, but what about to readers? For example, “The Tortilla Curtain” has been selected for many community reading programs in the West, and there are other books that are often selected, such as Kent Haruf’s “Plainsong,” and Sandra Cisneros’s “House on Mango Street” even though it’s set in Chicago, not the West. Because these books are chosen time and again, do you think there is a desire among readers for books written about the west that is not always met by the publishing industry?
TCB: “Plainsong” is a great book by the way. I love that book. You may be on to something there, but on the other hand, I suspect that many literary writers like me write about whatever motivates me at the time, and that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with regional writing. I am lucky to have come out to California as a stranger because it opened up new territory for me, and as I said earlier, I’ll always feel just slightly out of place. Nothing is pedestrian for me here. Maybe my eyes are slightly keener than the eyes of someone who had been born and raised here.
NW: It seems like “The Tortilla Curtain” is your book that has been most often picked for community reading programs.
TCB: Yeah, that’s true.
NW: It was just picked for “Silicon Valley Reads,” and at the University of Alaska for a semester reading program.
TCB: I’ve been very lucky. Many universities and cities have chosen “The Tortilla Curtain” for citywide reads, and I go as often as I can. And, by the way, all over the country, not simply the West. I go as often as I can because I want to promote the idea of it, and of course it’s self-serving, I want them to read my book. I want to promote the idea of the community read—it’s fascinating to me because one of the things that I want to do is promote what I love, and that is the reading and writing of books. It’s so rare when we all have a book in common. I mean, you go to a party and people talk about a movie or a TV show or whatever. But not books so much, because if people are reading books, they’re reading different books. We don’t have the phenomenon where a literary book comes out and it jumps on the bestseller list and everybody reads and talks about it. It’s unusual. So with a community read, everybody you see can have an opinion of something, whether they like it or hate it. “Tortilla” is popular with such groups I think because it’s so provocative. It doesn’t offer any solutions, it’s not pat, it’s just kind of outrageous and in your face, and most people appreciate that.
NW: Well that’s interesting, because in Denver they’ve avoided choosing even “Plainsong” because of a sex scene in it, so it seems like “The Tortilla Curtain” is being picked by more adventurous communities.
TCB: One of the problems with the community read is who is picking it, and what does the community think. Obviously if you ask each person, each person will have a different idea, and often these ideas get very politicized. I read that New York City wanted to do a community read for the whole city, and the book chosen–I’m sorry, I forget the title or the author–but it was a book of nonfiction about a Korean immigrant who had come to the U.S. and made his way. But immediately everybody went crazy. They said, “Well, why a Korean? Why not a Jamaican? Why not me?” And so they had to cancel the program.
NW: What was the response like in the Silicon Valley read?
TCB: Well, there were two communities. The first time I went up was in January and it was in the more wealthy part of town, and the second time it was in the Mexican heritage museum in a less-wealthy part of town. The crowds were huge and enthusiastic for both reads. There had been some controversy in Silicon Valley over the choice of this book, on the absurd grounds that a white guy has written this book from the point of view of Mexicans and how can that possibly be and we’re outraged. I just came back from Laguna Beach where the book was read too, and there a woman who is prominent among the Minute Men had been quoted in the front page of the paper saying she would disrupt the reading and she hated it because “it would be a lefty love-fest.”
NW: So she probably hadn’t read the book.
TCB: Well, they asked her and she hadn’t. You know, I think it’s great when people choose something controversial, rather than something so safe and ordinary. Isn’t that what literature is supposed to be? It’s supposed to be subversive and crazy and provoke people. So I’m very happy that “Tortilla” gets chosen a lot.
NW: In a lot of your books, especially in “Talk Talk” and “The Tortilla Curtain,” the characters spend a lot of time in their cars. Do you have to spend a lot of time in your car?
TCB: I used to. You might know that I moved from L.A. fourteen years ago. I’m living in a part of Santa Barbara, which is a village in itself, and I go through many many days without even starting the car. I walk everywhere. This is my dream and my joy. I walk to the bank and the grocery store, to the bars and restaurants, to the post office. I left L.A. because of the population crush and because of the fact that you had to go everywhere in your car. The last few years in L.A. my wife and I weren’t doing anything any more because it was such a hassle. It’s the problem with big, commuter car-oriented cities. The very reason for being in a city, that is to have culture, is eliminated by the fact that you can’t access it.
NW: And you don’t miss it at all?
TCB: [Laughs.] I’m looking out the window right now, and all I see is greenery and mountains. And when I get off the phone with you I’m going to take a walk.
NW: I read that the current book you’re working on is about Frank Lloyd Wright.
TCB: Yes. Frank Lloyd Wright designed this house that I’m living in. So for many years, I’ve thought about writing about him, not only because I wanted to learn more, but also because he fits in so well with some of the other historical characters I’ve taken on, for instance Alfred Kinsey and John Kellogg of “The Road to Wellville.” I call them the great egomaniacs of the twentieth century. They’re narcissistic personalities, like my bad guy Peck in “Talk Talk.” This kind of personality appeals to me, someone who sees only his own agenda, and for whom other people really don’t have any valence or being except as they fit into that agenda. It’s something that novelists are guilty of. And I guess I write about these characters as a cautionary tale for myself, reminding myself not to be a guru and not to go that far, and if I am a guru to be a very kind, gentle, and persuasive one, who persuades you only to enjoy art rather than to join some crazy enterprise. Paul Slovak, my editor, has even said one we get this out, and we come out with the paperback, maybe we can do a boxed set of your egomaniacs of the century.
NW: On the cover of each book you should have each menacing face, like in Communist poster art.
TCB: I like it. We’ve got to sign you up for the art department.
NW: Do you feel like you’ve gotten to know Frank Lloyd Wright from living in a house that he designed?
TCB: Well, it’s so strange, since I’ve written so many books here, and since it is my house—we’re only the fourth owner, and we’ve restored it. It needed some major work. It’s a prairie style house. It was so early that people didn’t know much about him, and it was shipped to the first owner way earlier, before those other California houses. So yes, I have a much greater appreciation for him now. I never go through a day here without being kind of amazed by the living space and by its surroundings, even in my most depressed state or most stressed out state. It’s still always a thing of beauty. I thought that I would have a greater attachment to him in writing the book, but not really. It’s called “The Women,” and it’s about the women in his life. It mainly focuses in them and on his personal life, but also of course it’s an overview of everything and gives a lot about the architecture and so on. He’s become a character of mine, so I’ve forgotten that he really existed. I think that’s what happens whenever you use real historical characters in fiction. You’re creating a story and a persona for them, and yes it accords with what we know of his persona, which was very injurious and self-congratulatory, but really it’s fiction and he’s mine now in some strange way. So I’m not really drawing closer to him although I have a much greater knowledge of his work and a much greater appreciation of this house.
NW: He’s known for making beautiful houses that don’t function well or fall apart. Is that true of your house?
TCB: There are many wonderful stories about him. He was a sensational character. You know, the stories about the flat roofs, the house he built for his brother Richard with the mitered glass corners and so on. It leaked, of course. Richard called up and said, “There’s water dripping on the piano,” and Frank said, “Well, move the piano.” I went to La Miniatura in Pasadena, one of the four textile block houses he made in the twenties. The roof leaked the year he made it and he personally came and fixed it for Mrs. Millard, and still it leaked. We’re a little bit luckier here in that it’s a prairie style house. I did replace the roof, which leaked but just because of old age.
NW: Since you started publishing novels in 1982, you’ve never gone more than three years without publishing one, in addition to your short story collections. How do you keep up that pace?
TCB: Wow, good math. Well, it’s a kind of obsession and a joy. Once you find what you want to do in life, you do it. I’m very single minded, more so than many of my colleagues. I’m not distracted by anything else. I’ve never had any interest in writing, for instance, films, even of my own work, because it’s outside my purview of what I want to do in life. I’ve always just focused on my agenda—very like Frank Lloyd Wright and the rest of them. What I want is to pursue this art. Each story is a miracle for me personally. I don’t know what it will be or where it will go, and when it comes together I feel tremendous satisfaction and so I want to continue to capture that because I want to see what comes next. I’m not the sort of writer who will go back his old books and say, “Oh, maybe I should redo this.” When I did the collected stories in 1998, I didn’t change anything, I just organized them. They exist already, and I want to move forward and see what comes next.
NW: Do you feel like you have more ideas than you can realize?
TCB: Because I am the sort of writer who will write about any subject in any mode without restrictions, I guess ideas are pretty much infinite. I hope to finish “The Women” sometime in the middle of the summer and deliver it. That means it should come out a year later, but there is I understand there is an election coming up. We really got burned with “The Inner Circle” in 2004. We came out in September with the book, we got a few weeks of publicity and then everything was the election. So to avoid that, it’s looking as if Paul wants to publish “The Women” early in 2009. So that would be a lag, if you count from last year’s “Talk Talk,” that would be a lag of two and a half years.
NW: You seem to be in a good position where you’re prolific but not so prolific that you get the Joyce Carol Oates jokes.
TCB: Well, I do get some of that, and I’m proud and pleased to be able to do this work. It’s what I live for.
NW: I read that your daughter attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
TCB: Yes, she got her MFA in fiction.
NW: Does she come to you for writing critiques?
TCB: No, we do play our work off of each other, sure. But she’s a totally different sort of writer. She’s writing really beautiful kind of imagistic stories, very dense and language-obsessed, and less plot-oriented. She has different mentors. We try to discourage her as much as possible by saying that writing is bankrupt and all writers are the most despicable people on earth, but that’s her life.
NW: How does the outlook for the publishing industry look different for her starting out now in 2007 than it did when you started publishing novels 25 years ago?
TCB: Well for one thing, there were more readers then, percentage-wise and probably in real numbers too. There was TV of course, which was the beginning of the death of literature, but now there are many other distractions such as the Net and video games. So reading seems to me these days to be confined to people who are obsessed with it, like us. I think for some people, the only novel that they’ll ever read will be one that they were forced to read in school. And since it’s codified and it’s work, maybe they don’t see it as a subversive pleasure, and don’t get the habit of that.
Further, the society is so crazy and busy that very few people have contemplative time anymore, and you need contemplative time in order to read a good novel or a poem or just to stare into the fire. My own life too, we’re all so crazy running around all the time we kind of lose sight of the fact that there are better ways to reconnect to your self, and that can come through great literature. So I think that the publishing industry is looking to the future with a wary eye. What we see more and more of is getting young writers—particularly ones that might look good in photos—dressed up for public in ways that the music industry used to do to see what will happen. Some are hits, some are misses. I just wonder if it would be possible to start a career as many writers such as myself have done, over a good long time. So many of the publishing houses are run by big conglomerates who only look at what the bottom line has done over this year and this quarter, and I wonder if they will make a long-term investment in a writer as Viking has done in me. It pays off for them, but it pays off over a long period of time, so that all my books are in print, they never have to spend a nickel on them and they sell and everybody’s happy. But will that happen with writers who publish their first novel today? I hope so.
NW: I read about something called “Authorgeddon,” which according to Wikipedia refers to “the hypothetical date when the number of books
published in a given year will exceed the number of people who have read even one book during the same year.”
TCB: How depressing.
NW: It’s projected to happen in 2052.
TCB: Well, the entire world will be gone by then. It’s hard to foresee though. I have to give some optimism here. It’s hard to foresee how technology changes us. For instance, we’re still typing on our computers. And when the telephone came in at the turn of the last century, people said, “here goes letter writing,” and so it did, but then who could foresee that we would email each other, which is a form of letter writing to supersede even talking on the telephone.
NW: It seems like people will always want to consume stories, in some form or another.
TCB: We need stories desperately. Again, we got them from TV, we’re getting them from video games, and we’re getting them in the movie theater. And you know, technology is driving people more and more away from public arenas for entertainment. People can get movies right on the Internet. So we’re more and more invested in being at home and being entertained at home, so books might play a part in that. Who knows?
This book has interesting themes of consumerism and hypocrisy, and starts off giving a heart-wrenching look at the vulnerability of illegal immigrants in America. These themes are quickly drowned out by misery porn, un-sympathetic characters and a lack of character growth. The white people are too hypocritical - and by the end of the book, completely unbelievable as characters - to care about. They spend their days fighting for animal rights and the environment, to the point that the man seems to care only for animals and not for people at all. Throughout the book, nothing good happens to the Mexican immigrants, and no hope is ever found. The book ends abruptly, leaving very few questions answered, in a vague and forced reconciliation between characters that hardly interacted and who had no cause throughout the book to have grown enough to be able to reconcile. On top of this, the use of domestic violence and sexual assault is sensational and unrealistic, which I found to be offensive.
I had such high hopes for this book, and that was my first mistake. I was probably ten pages in when I realized the author must have been a privileged white guy attempting fiction in a world he knew nothing about. I turned to the About the Author, and what do ya know! I'm offended by the stereotypical assumptions (and google translate Spanish) that Boyle probably thought he was in the know about. With the writing like an episode of Lost, Boyle's attempts to vilify the stuck up white neighbors are noble, but he fails to understand that their opinions and often actions are the majority and not the evil exception. And we can't ignore the thinly veiled connection between the coyote and the Mexicans, like it's supposed to be some profound realization. Delaney and Boyle have a clear disdain for both; their over population and consumption of resources, their theft and remorselessness. "The coyotes keep coming, breeding up to fill in the gaps, moving in where the living is easy. They are cunning, versatile, hungry and unstoppable" (pg. 215). And Boyle couldn't come up with any other synonym for laugh other than "snigger." He just wanted to get away with putting the n word in print multiple times. I would say spoiler alert, but who cares! What the hell at the end? They lose everything, but it's cool, they saved the white guy! Don't hate the poor Mexicans...see they're nice, even when we try to kill them. Aw...
alright let’s get into this SO THIS BOOK WAS A ROLLERCOASTER i keep surprising myself when i find books that i have to read for school actually enjoyable and i am still surprised here
this book covers a lot of serious topics and themes with illegal immigration, racism (specifically against hispanics), the american dream, anger and bigotry, nature and symbols within nature. there’s just so much to unpack so it definitely felt like reading a school book because of that, but also because of that ending BC WHAT i just kinda sat there for a couple minutes because to be honest i didn’t really know what happened but after time thinking about it i came to somewhat of a conclusion for the ending of this book and the whole message of it.
while i found myself sympathizing with cándido and américa basically thoughout the entire novel, and sometimes siding with delaney. i think this book was meant to give you an overall overview of the consequences of illegal immigration and a look into what it means for the two groups (the actual immigrants and then the people who are supposedly supposed to be affected by them coming here). cándido’s whole entire experience in the us has been bad luck quite literally until the very last page, yet despite all of that the book ends with him saving delaney. delaney’s character development goes in the opposite direction, he starts off as this liberal nature writer who seems set on his beliefs and has many instances where he questions his morals and realizes his racism. but as he gets more consumed into this white supremacist, capitalist, bigoted neighborhood he seems to fall into the same categories of the same men he called out in the beginning as he goes on an entire venture to threaten one mexican man. the book ends just as cándido reaches down to save delaney from this flash flood/mudslide that really topped off cándido’s entire bad luck trope and despite being really surprised and confused while reading that, i think it was the best way to end off this book.
it’s up to the reader’s interpretation to decide what should, or would happen after this. what would happen to cándido and américa as they just lost everything including their new born. what would delaney do with this new information about the mexican he saw as a threat. i mean throughout the entire book i was expecting delaney and kyra to have a change of heart and work towards not having a racist mindset but the complete opposite happens and i even predict that despite everything. sometimes there just isn’t a happy ending.
this book covers a lot of serious topics and themes with illegal immigration, racism (specifically against hispanics), the american dream, anger and bigotry, nature and symbols within nature. there’s just so much to unpack so it definitely felt like reading a school book because of that, but also because of that ending BC WHAT i just kinda sat there for a couple minutes because to be honest i didn’t really know what happened but after time thinking about it i came to somewhat of a conclusion for the ending of this book and the whole message of it.
while i found myself sympathizing with cándido and américa basically thoughout the entire novel, and sometimes siding with delaney. i think this book was meant to give you an overall overview of the consequences of illegal immigration and a look into what it means for the two groups (the actual immigrants and then the people who are supposedly supposed to be affected by them coming here). cándido’s whole entire experience in the us has been bad luck quite literally until the very last page, yet despite all of that the book ends with him saving delaney. delaney’s character development goes in the opposite direction, he starts off as this liberal nature writer who seems set on his beliefs and has many instances where he questions his morals and realizes his racism. but as he gets more consumed into this white supremacist, capitalist, bigoted neighborhood he seems to fall into the same categories of the same men he called out in the beginning as he goes on an entire venture to threaten one mexican man. the book ends just as cándido reaches down to save delaney from this flash flood/mudslide that really topped off cándido’s entire bad luck trope and despite being really surprised and confused while reading that, i think it was the best way to end off this book.
it’s up to the reader’s interpretation to decide what should, or would happen after this. what would happen to cándido and américa as they just lost everything including their new born. what would delaney do with this new information about the mexican he saw as a threat. i mean throughout the entire book i was expecting delaney and kyra to have a change of heart and work towards not having a racist mindset but the complete opposite happens and i even predict that despite everything. sometimes there just isn’t a happy ending.