Black Humor,
Leaning Toward the Absurd
An interview with author T. Coraghessan Boyle
by Jared Friedland
T.C. Boyle is downright worried. The fifty-six year old author with steel earrings, a diabolical-looking
goatee and pompadour-style hair the color of which most closely
resembles the fiery orange-red of tabasco, is eyeing a handful
of children the way a paranoid Central American dictator might
eye a band of insurgents.
In a Los
Angeles Barnes & Noble to promote
his latest novel, Drop City,
Boyle cracks a wise-guy smile before questioning whether the
dozen or so well-behaved kids a few feet away from us are merely
lulling him into a false sense of security. “They're quiet for now,” Boyle
deadpans, sneaking a mock suspicious glance at the kids as
they turn the pages of the latest Harry Potter. “The
moment I'm scheduled to speak, though...” he trails off
and laughs, leaving unsaid the tantrums and parent-mortifying
hissy fits America's youngest readers may or may not be plotting.
Born Thomas
John Boyle in Peekskill, New York, T.C. was a promising if
lackadaisical student throughout high school, a phase of
life he likens to “penal servitude.” At
seventeen, saxophone and sheet music in hand, he entered the
State University of New York at Potsdam, intending to major
in music, but he flunked one of his first auditions and wound
up switching majors to history.
It was a decision marked by serendipity, but ultimately frustration. Dr. Vincent Knapp, a history professor who had “made
his way up, hand over hand, from the depths of the working
class,” recognized talent in Boyle's writing and tried
to encourage him, but the author wasn't ready to develop his
ability and spurned his mentor's advice. “I hurt him,” Boyle wrote in an essay looking
back on his youth. “He was the second of my fathers,
and I hurt him in the way of Allan Sillitoe's long-distance
runner and his father/mentor. I didn't attend classes. I hung out with the losers.”
Boyle actual father, a school-bus driver with an
eighth-grade education, was a depressive alcoholic. “I
tried to understand him,” Boyle said in an interview
with The New York Times, “but
he was usually extremely morose and insensibly drunk, like
his father before him.” Many of his Boyle's fictions feature
a search for a missing father; one of the author's most affecting
short stories, “If The River Was Whiskey”, is constructed
around Tiller, a young man trying to befriend and understand
his alcoholic father as they fish for pike.
Two years after Dr. Vincent Knapp's history course,
Boyle took his first class in creative writing, under Harvard-educated
Hindu novelist Krishna Vaid. Professor Vaid structured the class like a classic fiction
workshop, assigning students to write original pieces, then
having them read their work in front of the class. When
it was Boyle's time to present, he decided, having recently
been exposed to absurdist French playwright Eugene Ionesco,
to write an one-act play entitled “The Foot.”
A dark comedy
about a couple grieving the loss of their only son to the
jaws of an alligator (all that remains of their boy is his
left foot, which they keep enshrined on the coffee table
like a holiday centerpiece), “The Foot” caused
Professor Vaid and Boyle's classmates to erupt with laughter
and applause, an experience he describes as “one of the
sweet surprises of my life.”
It would be predictable to say that the author's
out-of-the-park homerun on his first attempt at creative writing
emboldened him; that he began writing feverishly and never
looked back, but Boyle in his early twenties was still like
his character Ronnie in Drop City -- disaffected and feckless, his only interests drugs, music and women.
Then something happened. A
friend's fatal overdose “scared the holy sweet literature” out
of him, galvanizing Boyle to write his way out of the mire. It took two years, but Boyle's efforts finally paid off, when
a story published in The North American Review, “The O.D. and Hepatitis Railroad or Bust”,
earned him acceptance into the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop. (“If they'd considered my dismal
academic record,” Boyle confesses, “I'd never have
gotten in.”)
At Iowa,
Boyle began the most intensive reading period of his life,
finding himself drawn to works written “with
a certain black humor, leaning toward the absurd.” He
cites John Barth, Kingsley Amis,
Thomas Pynchon, Flannery O'Conner, Gunter Grass and Robert
Coover as early influences, adding, “Coover had been
doing everything I wanted to accomplish, but didn't yet have
the craft to begin.” Flannery O'Conner's widely-anthologized short story, “A
Good Man Is Hard To Find” and Evelyn Waugh's 1934 novel, “A
Handful Of Dust,” were also educational; each showed
Boyle the profound effect a writer can achieve by inverting
the tone of a piece from comedy to horror. It's a technique the young author quickly assimilated, and
one that has come to characterize much of his fiction, from
short stories like “King Bee” to his 1998 novel, “Riven
Rock.”
“When I discovered writing, I didn't have
a foundation, a classical background,” Boyle says, taking
a long slurp off a can of Diet Coke. “Until
Iowa, I'd mostly read contemporary fiction.” Boyle
credits his graduate school academic mentor, Frederick P. W.
McDowell, with introducing him to, and nourishing his love
of, nineteenth-century British literature.
In addition to McDowell, Boyle had the privilege
of studying with literary greats Vance Bourjaily, John Cheever
and John Irving. In his autobiographical essay on writing, This
Monkey, My Back, Boyle
praises Bourjaily and Irving as having been “exceptionally
generous and supportive”; Cheever, who wore a formal
suit and bow tie to class each day, he likens to “a wind
blowing out of some remote place.”
At the helm of his own creative writing classes
at the University of Southern California, Boyle strives to
introduce his students to as broad a range of authors as possible. “It
may sound obvious, but it's vital to teach creative writing
in conjunction with writing... students cannot learn to write
effectively without simultaneously being exposed to literature.” To
that end, Boyle recently edited a short-fiction anthology entitled Double
Takes, so named because
it's comprised of two stories apiece by thirty different authors. It's Boyle's hope Double Takes transcends his classroom to enrich the curriculum of
high school and college English teachers nationally.
Asked whether
his style of teaching has changed in the two-and-a-half decades
since he arrived at USC, Boyle reflects for a moment before
replying, “I'd have to say
the only way I've probably improved is in drawing my students
out.” Glancing
at a nearby mother reading to her children, Boyle says he tries
to maintain a classroom environment “not unlike an informal
party,” so that even the most reticent students feel
comfortable discussing each other's work.
Boyle makes
it plain one of his foremost priorities is “arousing his students' emotions” -- getting
them passionate about literature, whether that passion is generated
by enthusiasm, resentment, “or even rage.” To an author famous for irony, irreverence
and nothing-sacred satire, the most effective means of stirring
his students up -- of “pollinating” young people
with a love of literature -- is getting them to realize writing
can be as “subversive an act” as a protest or an
angry rock n' roll song.#
