Clad in a sleek Italianate jacket and a T-shirt over flared black pants and clunky, red-and-black shoes reminiscent of Elton John, T. Coraghessan Boyle strode onto the stage of the auditorium at the Harold Washington Library Center one evening recently.
With his frizzed-up ginger hair, goatee and silver earring shining under the spotlights, he looked as if he could have strapped on an electric guitar, but instead he hefted his latest book, “T.C. Boyle Stories” (Viking), a corpulent collection of all his previously published short stories as well as seven new ones.
“I can read some of my favorite old stories,” he said to the youngish crowd. “Funny ones. And I’d appreciate a lot of laughter. This one is called `Modern Love.’ I wrote it in 1987 in Ireland where I spent 3 1/2 months. Why? Ireland is the antithesis of Los Angeles.”
Then Boyle read the first line:
“There was no exchange of body fluids on the first date, and that suited both of us just fine.”
He need not have admonished the audience to laugh. There were plenty of chuckles during his reading of 8 1/2 pages about love and dating in the age of infection (The woman brings disposable sanitary sheets to public theaters and protects herself with a full-body condom during romantic encounters).
Boyle read exuberantly, the words flowing smoothly from his tongue. He loves to ham it up, but that, of course, may seem like overkill when considering his oeuvre.
His stories and novels are wildly inventive. His prose is often pyrotechnic. And his fictional worlds are darkly comic places that reflect the absurdities of contemporary American life and tap into the primal fears that surface in our dreams.
Pessimistic, satiric and preoccupied with impending apocalypse, Boyle writes of a lone female forest ranger in a look-out tower being stalked; survivalists; a professional organizer; a Hollywood flack; twisted suburbanites; psychos, such as a bee-obsessed son who sends death threats to his adoptive parents; and a politician with a part-time astrologer for an adviser.
Oh, and the animals! Whales, elephants, frogs, squirrels. In one story, a scientist leaves her man for a chimpanzee whose linguistic skills enable him to translate Nietzsche into Yerkish, an experimental language designed for communicating with apes.
In another, a chimpanzee overpowers a pilot in a small plane over the Atlantic Ocean. In a story about Lassie, the saintly canine abandons Timmy for a coyote.
Boyle’s collected stories begin with an epigraph — “Reflexes had the better of me” — from the late Bob Marley’s immortal “I Shot the Sheriff.”
That line seemed appropriate, Boyle said in an interview, because “it’s a good statement of how I write stories. It’s a reflex. It’s a part of my life. That’s how I relate to the world in which we live.
“Anything that occurs to me can be a story — anything that I learn, anything that someone may tell me, things that I read in the newspaper. I’ll just jot down a single line or a subject.
“Usually it’s a subject, and I think about what that scenario would be and pretty soon if it’s going to be a viable story, a first line will occur to me.”
Boyle does not shy away from the heavy promotional duties now required of authors. He loves doing interviews and readings, and even relishes visits to call-in radio shows. He once performed with rocker Patti Smith in Central Park and has told jokes on “Late Night With David Letterman.”
He acknowledged that the publicity he gets and the pronouncements he makes irritate “a lot of people,” but he does it anyway.
“I resent the fact that many writers today are performing amazing feats of literature and no one knows or cares, because literature has lost ground to much more accessible and easier modes of entertainment — movies, TV, computer games, CDs,” he said.
“I’m trying to remind people that literature is an entertainment, that it is fun, that it is good, that it is something you can’t get from any other form of entertainment.”
Some other writers, he said, “like to see literature as some holy thing that exists only in the universities. I don’t agree with that. . . . You have to appeal to everybody and that doesn’t mean you compromise your work in any way. But once (the work) is done I have no problem going out to the public and entertaining them.”
Boyle’s stories began appearing in the mid-1970s in a variety of periodicals, including Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper’s and Penthouse.
His first short-story collection, “Descent of Man,” was published in 1979 and won the 1980 St. Lawrence Award for short fiction. Its 17 stories exemplify many of Boyle’s recurring concerns, including the similarity of humans and animals, bodily functions, paranoia and violence.
Starting out as a writer, Boyle was hugely ambitious, telling journalists he wanted to achieve the flashy success that Kurt Vonnegut experienced in the 1960s.
Boyle, who is 50, grew up in Peerskill, N.Y., on the Hudson River. He entered the State University of New York at Potsdam when he was 17.
“I was disaffected and rebellious, and I didn’t really do what I was supposed to do,” he said.
“Still, being at college in hippie times, I began to hang out with people who were intellectuals. And they read books, turned me on to books, and I never looked back.”
As a junior, he took a creative writing course, in which he realized that writing was “something that (he) could do and wanted to do.”
“Then came my apprenticeship, (consisting) of pinning people to the back walls of dark bars for about three years and raving to them about how I was going to write and be a great writer.”
Boyle, who also sang in some rock bands, soaked up the work of all the writers who were very current in his youth, including the Absurdist playwrights, Gunter Grass, Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Flannery O’Connor and Italo Calvino — “all the writers who had an extra real sense of things, often in a humorous way,” he said.
As a teenager, Boyle replaced his given name, Thomas John Boyle, the same as that of his bus-driver father, with the more memorable if unpronounceable T. Coraghessan Boyle, borrowing the middle name from a distant relative on his mother’s side.
The jackets on his most recent books read “T.C. Boyle,” he said, because the art director said the type could be larger if he shortened his name.
After college graduation, Boyle taught high school English to avoid the Vietnam draft and honed his craft. His first published story, “The OD & Hepatitis RR or Bust,” appeared in the North American Review in the fall of 1972, and on the strength of his work, rather than his academic record, Boyle was accepted by the Iowa Writers Workshop.
“It made me mature, all of a sudden,” Boyle said. “I was a great student. I knew exactly what I wanted and was happy to be there, whereas before that I’d been in school since I was 4 years old and hated it.”
Boyle’s teachers were the writers John Cheever, Vance Bourjaily and John Irving. “They were all my mentors and they were very generous and kind to me. I don’t know if they taught me much except by their example and by their work.
“They all really responded to my work and essentially said, `You’ve got it, kid, keep going.’ That’s the most important thing that any teacher can do.”
Boyle himself now teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California, where he started the program. “I don’t have to teach, but I always want to teach because I had great teachers who gave me a lot in undergraduate school too, even though I disappointed them. And I want to give it back.”
Boyle lives with his wife and children in Montecito, Calif., near Santa Barbara, in a 1909 Frank Lloyd Wright house. The area, once populated by industrial tycoons, inspired the subject of his most recent novel, “Riven Rock” (Viking).
The novel unfolds on Riven Rock, the estate built by the McCormick family of Chicago, whose patriarch Cyrus invented the reaper in 1831. A blend of fact and fiction, the story concerns Stanley McCormick, the inventor’s youngest son who suffered a mental breakdown shortly after his marriage to Katherine Dexter. He is locked away by doctors and forbidden the company of women. His wife can only observe him through field binoculars.
Using real-life people as characters in fiction is a favorite Boyle device. He did the same in “The Road to Wellville,” his 1993 novel about health fanatic John Harvey Kellogg that was made into a film directed by Alan Parker.
His third novel, “World’s End,” published in 1987, was named after a dangerous passage on the Hudson River. It encompassed the epic story of 17th Century Dutch settlers and featured a fictional account of a 1949 riot that erupted during a summer concert featuring Paul Robeson.
“World’s End” garnered rave reviews and won the 1988 Pen/Faulkner Award for best American Fiction.
“I’ve always been interested in history,” Boyle said. “People who are interested in my development can look back and see that I wrote about Idi Amin, a dictator. I wrote about Carrie Nation; I wrote about the Norsemen. If you write about history then often you use characters who actually existed. I guess because they’re integral to a given story I want to tell.
“With `The Road to Wellville,’ a friend gave me a book called `The Nuts Among the Berries’ by R.M. Deutsch and said I was going to find material in it for a novel. It’s a funny history of the health-food movement, and every one of them — C.W. Post, Sylvester Graham — is a crackpot.”
In his first novel, “Water Music” (1982), Boyle made fun of explorer Mungo Park, even though, according to Boyle, “he had many admirable qualities.”
But, Boyle cautioned, “a lot of people make a distinction that I don’t like. They say, `He writes serious stories and he writes funny stories.’
“I write comic stories and non-comic stories, but they’re all deadly serious. If they didn’t have some purpose or intent they would be like a humor piece.”
