T.C. Boyle: Always a teacher, writer, performer
Published 11:53 am Friday, February 5, 2010
T.C. Boyle taught me a lesson.
Thirty years ago, Boyle was my supportive writing teacher at the University of Southern California. About 16 years later, while he was signing books in St. Louis, he recognized me in the autograph line and called out my name.
Boyle may be a literary legend, but he’s still a teacher at heart. He has taught writing at USC since 1978, which means a few thousand alumni think of him as a beloved mentor.
Among them are Jason Reitman, the Oscar-nominated writer- director of “Up in the Air,” whom Boyle described in a recent phone interview as “a great, wonderful person I dearly love.”
Boyle retains copies of his ex-students’ submitted schoolwork in an 8-foot-by-4-foot bookcase in his office.
Yet, T.C. Boyle at age 61 isn’t some doddering Mr. Chips. He’s as slender as the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and he still wears the same ear cuff and Van Dyke beard that he sported in the punk era.
Boyle is a rock star among novelists. He packs venues worldwide. Boyle calls his appearances “performances,” not “readings.”
“A reading connotes some boring classroom with the lights buzzing and intellectual duty,” he said. “I want to do my part to let people know that we love literature. It’s not just something you get in the classroom.”
Officially, Boyle is promoting “Wild Child,” his latest collection of short stories. But he has another release, the paperback edition of “The Women,” a novel based on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed the house where Boyle lives near Santa Barbara.
His first novel after graduating from the famed writing workshop at the University of Iowa, where Boyle’s mentors included John Irving, Raymond Carver and John Cheever, was the historical adventure “Water Music.”
His subsequent novels included the award-winning “World’s End,” a multigenerational saga set in Boyle’s native upstate New York, and “The Road to Wellville,” the health-faddist farce that is the only one of Boyle’s books to be turned into a movie.
Boyle says that his stolen- identity story “Talk Talk” has been optioned by a studio and that his short story “The Lie” will soon become a movie by director Joshua Leonard. But although Boyle toils in the orbit of Hollywood, he pays little attention to it.
“I have to devote all my energy to one thing, which is writing fiction,” he said. “The most competitive thing I do is walking deep in the woods by myself, muttering.”
Yet he’s not unaware of his place in the pantheon of literature.
“John Updike is one of my heroes,” he said. “Recently, I learned something about Updike that was touching to me. He was a brilliant book critic for the New Yorker but, as far as I knew, he never reviewed any of my books or even mentioned me.
“But it turns out that’s not the case. When I was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters last year, it was Updike who conducted a vigorous letter-writing campaign on my behalf. He knew who I was.”
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
