T.C. Boyle’s photo courtesy of Literary Hub. An interview with T.C. Boyle by Mia Funk and Cary Trott for The Creative Process, republished on The Dreaming Machine, can be found in this link
T. C. Boyle, the American fiction writer known for his exuberant prose style and sharply satiric portrayals of American life, has published 19 novels and 12 collections of short stories since his first novel “Water Music” appeared some 40 years ago. As a critic and a devoted fan of his fiction, I was slightly disappointed to learn from his agent that his next novel, a first draft of which Boyle announced on his blog last summer and which I’d hoped to review this year, would not appear until next April. On reflection, my expectations for Boyle’s had grown unreasonable. Like all artists, Boyle needs and deserves time and space to work at his own rate, and three years to write and edit a novel is hardly excessive.
In this essay, I want to briefly describe some of the distinctive virtues that have made me a fan of Boyle’s work. I also want to briefly discuss the natural tension that exists between Boyle’s satiric impulses and his ability to create fully individualized characters. As I’ve acknowledged, I’m a committed fan. So, you’ve been warned.
One can’t write about Boyle without first acknowledging his stylistic virtuosity. Boyle can write astonishing, often dazzlingly inventive prose; prose that stops you in your tracks, that makes you stop and re-read a sentence in wonder, admiration, or horror.
Boyle’s style has been described as “tactile,” but it’s more accurate to say that it’s a style rooted in the human body as a whole. Here’s Boyle describing a moment of light-headedness for the septuagenarian Ottilie as she hikes with her son Cooper in the hot, dry chaparral of Southern California from his climate-change novel “Blue Skies” (2023):
“The climb wasn’t especially difficult, but halfway up the ridge she began to feel things drifting on her, the rocks and bushes reshaping themselves like images on a screen. … An image flickered through her brain – a face, her mother’s face, rising up before her as if it were painted on a helium balloon and sailing away, higher and higher into the pale nullity of the sky, …”
If there’s a knock against Boyle, it’s that his characters aren’t fully individualized, that they are one-dimensional. In her 1994 review of one of Boyle’s short story collections, the novelist Lorrie Moore comments that Boyle “is not psychological. He’s all demography and zeitgeist.” Michiko Kakutani, in his NY Times review of Boyle’s 1998 novel “Riven Rock,” remarked that Boyle had thus far “been unable to create a sympathetic, three-dimensional character” in his longer fiction. The critic Bill Seligman has written about Boyle as follows:
“[…] he can write and he can imagine with more energy than any of his contemporaries. But energy isn’t enough; there’s only so far you can go on sheer technique. And until he goes further, he’ll remain a satirist cut off from the oxygen of morality.”
Those criticisms were directed at Boyle early in his career – before he’d written his most psychological novel with which I’m familiar, “San Miguel” (2012). They also reflect the tendency of western literary critics to view psychological realism as the highest and ultimate expression of literary art – a tendency noted by Ursula LeGuin in her defense of the fantasy and science fiction genres.
That said, the complaint that Boyle’s characters lack psychological depth is, even now, not without some validity. Any writer with a strong satirical bent will be challenged to create fully individualized characters with real psychological depth. And Boyle, like any writer, is subject to the limits imposed on him by his choices.
With several notable exceptions, his characters do represent certain sociological/historical “types” – from Sara Hovarty Jennings, the conspiracy-minded believer in “sovereign citizen” ideology (a real-life fringe movement in the U.S.) who cannot accept that the any government has a right to make her wear a seatbelt in “The Harder They Fall” (2015) to Delaney Mossbacher, the prim, self-satisfied nature writer, outraged by the presence of several desperate undocumented Mexican immigrants camping near his favorite hiking trail in “Tortilla Curtain” (1995).
Even Boyle’s more “schematized” characters are at least enlivened by the physicality of his prose. Here is Boyle, narrating from the perspective of Cooper Cullen, a mid-30’s entomologist tormented by his awareness of his own role in climate change in “Blue Skies.” Cooper is driving through the Southern California chapparal on a brutally hot day after an unsuccessful field trip:
“The sandwich was in his lap, and the radio cranked. He squirted wine down the back of his throat with one hand, steered with the other, … The switchbacks sprang up and ducked away, gusts rattled the windows, windblown debris crunched beneath the tires. He’d sweated though his shirt, his throat was thick with phlegm and his nose running from some sort of allergic reaction kicked into gear by all the dust he’d breathed in, and what he was picturing was something cold and celebratory – rum and Coke, plenty of ice, served up in a plastic cup, though he thought he might have a beer just for the immediate slaking action of it, even if it too would be delivered in plastic …”
Boyle is always careful to make sure that we, as readers, experience the action of his novels from inside his characters’ bodies and that we witness the role their bodies play in their decisions. In this case, we experience Cooper’s heat, thirst, and other discomforts as he careens toward another choice – in this case, not a very fateful one – that is in conflict with his own environmental ethics.
One aspect of the physicality of Boyle’s narrative technique is his ability to portray, in agonizing and convincing detail, the experience of illness or injury, of exactly what it is like to suffer terrible physical ailments. Many of Boyle’s characters endure calamitous physical suffering, and he spares us none of it. While this doesn’t always make for pleasant reading, readers are well advised to treat it as part of the price of admission. In fact, you could consider Boyle one the great chroniclers of the body and its many frailties.
Here’s the opening of “San Miguel” (2012), where Boyle describes, in horrifyingly precise detail, the tuberculosis symptoms of Marantha, the wife of an aspiring sheep rancher, when she arrives on windswept San Miguel Island off the California coast:
“She was coughing, always coughing, and sometimes she coughed up blood. The blood came in a fine spray, plucked from the fibers of her lungs and pumped full of air as if it were perfume in an atomizer. Or it rose in her mouth like a hot metallic syrup, burning with the heat inside her …”
Boyle’s meticulous rendering of bodily suffering is so characteristic of his work that it becomes a kind of leitmotif.
The arguments of Boyle’s early detractors about the absence of fully individualized characters in his fiction are hard to refute entirely. Perhaps, the new novel – whenever it arrives – will help Boyle satisfy critics looking for more psychological depth from his characters.
Yet, I can’t help feeling that there’s something slightly misguided about those criticisms. Boyle is less interested in individual characters and their psychological reality than in the way they interact with their culture and with history. And he portrays those interactions with enormous verve and considerable verisimilitude. I’d call that a feature, not a bug.
Clark Bouwman is an essayist and poet who lives in Richmond, California. His work has appeared previously in The Dreaming Machine, The Antonym, Gargoyle, Minimus, The Tacoma Voice, and in the collection Music Gigs Gone Wrong, Paycock Press (2022). He maintains a blog which includes many of his essays at https://from-where-i-stand.com/
