Friday Fiction: T. C. Boyle

--by Hanje Richards

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T.C. Boyle, also known as T. Coraghessan Boyle, earned a B.A. in English and history from the State University of New York at Potsdam in 1968. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1974 and his Ph.D. in 19th century British literature in 1977. He has been a member of the English Department at the University of Southern California since 1978.

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Many of Boyle’s novels and short stories explore the Baby Boom generation — its appetites, joys, and addictions. His fiction also explores the ruthlessness and unpredictability of nature and the toll human society unwittingly takes on the environment.
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The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle - T.C. Boyle's first four volumes of short stories in one big book (as well as seven additional stories, two of which had never been printed before), this collection runs the gamut from hilarious to heartbreakingly real.

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Drop City - It is 1970, and a down-at-the-heels California commune devoted to peace, free love, and the simple life has decided to relocate to the last frontier — the unforgiving landscape of interior Alaska — in the ultimate expression of going back to the land. Armed with the spirit of adventure and naïve optimism, the inhabitants of Drop City arrive in the wilderness of Alaska only to find their utopia already populated by other young homesteaders. When the two communities collide, unexpected friendships and dangerous enmities are born as everyone struggles with the bare essentials of life: love, nourishment, and a roof over one’s head.
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East is East - A young Japanese seaman jumps ship off the coast of Georgia and washes ashore on a barrier island inhabited by a strange mix of rednecks, descendants of slaves, genteel retired people, and a colony of artists. The result is a sexy, savagely hilarious tragicomedy of thwarted expectations, mistaken identity, love, jealousy and betrayal.
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A Friend of the Earth - T.C. Boyle blends idealism and satire in a story that addresses the universal questions of human love and the survival of the species. In the year 2025, global warming is a reality, the biosphere has collapsed, and 75-year-old environmentalist Ty Tierwater is eking out a living as care-taker of a pop star's private zoo when his second ex-wife re-enters his life.
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The Inner Circle - This novel makes use of Alfred Kinsey’s controversial studies on human sexuality — and the fascinating details of Kinsey’s life and those of the men who worked for him — to create an irresistible tale about the interaction between our human and animal natures. While The Inner Circle gives full play to this erotically charged material, it is at heart a moving and compassionate look at sex, marriage, and infidelity that will have readers everywhere nodding in recognition.

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Riven Rock - It is the dawn of the twentieth century when the beautiful, budding feminist Katherine Dexter falls in love with Stanley McCormick, son of a millionaire inventor. The two wed, but before the marriage is consummated, Stanley experiences a nervous breakdown and is diagnosed as a schizophrenic sex maniac. Locked up for the rest of his life at Riven Rock, the family's California mansion, Stanley is treated by a series of confident doctors determined to cure him. But his true salvation lies with Katherine who, throughout her career as a scientist and suffragette, continues a patient vigil from beyond the walls of Riven Rock, never losing hope that one day Stanley will be healed.
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The Road to Wellville - A snobbish wife and her henpecked husband travel to Dr. Kellogg's spa in turn-of-the-century Battle Creek, where the youth-crazed affluent succumb to quackery. Boyle takes on the national obsession with health and nutritional fads. Battle Creek, Michigan, 1907 — breakfast-food capital of the US. C.W. Post (Grape-Nuts) and the Kellogg brothers have already made their fortunes, but there's still a gold rush atmosphere in town. The inventor of the corn flake, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, now devotes himself to his Sanitarium ("luxury hotel, hospital, and spa all rolled into one''), where he denounces meat-eating, enforces a five-enema-a-day regimen, and keeps his wealthy patients busy with such wacky treatments as the sinusoidal bath.

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Talk, Talk - A tightly scripted page turner about the trials of Dana Halter, a 33-year-old deaf woman whose identity has been stolen, this novel is both a suspenseful chase across America and a moving story about language, love, and identity.


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Tooth and Claw and Other Stories - Among the fourteen tales in this short story collection are the comic yet lyrical title story, in which a young man wins a vicious African cat in a bar bet; "Dogology," about a suburban woman losing her identity to a pack of strays; and "The Kind Assassin," which explores the consequences of a radio shock jock’s quest to set a world record for sleeplessness. Muscular, provocative, and blurring the boundaries between humans and nature, the funny and the shocking.
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The Tortilla Curtain - This novel examines America's guerrilla war between the haves and have-nots. While leading their lives in their gated hilltop community in Los Angeles, Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher accidentally meet Mexican illegals, and their encounter brings them together in a relationship of error and misunderstanding. A harrowing, even horrific, tale of an immigrant couple's venture into California, and the shockingly brutal reception they receive. A remarkable feat of imaginative empathy.

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Without a Hero: Stories - This collection of short stories brings together fifteen darkly comic tales about human frailty, including the title story about an ill-fated romance. In "Filthy with Things," a yuppie couple is forced to seek professional help for an "aggregation disorder" that has turned their suburban home into a warehouse of antiques and collectibles. The narrator of "Beat" recalls drinking Mogen David wine and listening to Bing Crosby records with Kerouac and Memere one Christmas in the 1950s.

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World’s End - This multi-generational novel ranges over the history of the Hudson River Valley from the late 17th century to the late 1960s with low humor, high seriousness, and magical, almost hallucinatory, prose. It follows the interwoven destinies of families of Indians, lordly Dutch patrons, and yeomen. (Winner, PEN/Faulkner Award, 1988)