Tag / t.c. boyle

by Edward Champion

Death Comes for the Archbishop (Modern Library #61)

In addition to being a largely humorless and incredibly overrated writer, Willa Cather was a supercilious white supremacist reveling in racist stereotypes and a corn-pone practitioner of the worst kind. There is no way that I can defend her work in 2024.

(This is the fortieth entry in The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: From Here to Eternity.)

Most of the largely sexist pigs who came up with the Modern Library canon were ancient men more fond of oinking and logrolling rather than upholding literary standards. (There was only one woman among these judges: to evoke a recent Marc Maron bit, “It was a different time”).

Most of these judges are now dead. Just as the regressive viewpoints they tapped within their 20th century hearts are now mostly pushing up the daisies. (Thank you, #metoo movement!) Oddball Christopher Cerf is the only judge still alive and I invite him to verbal pistols at dawn (or perhaps, more accurately, a feisty reckoning over a cup of morning tea) if he wants to respond to the list’s hideous gender imbalance. The remaining judiciary corpses include Gore Vidal (dead, past his prime in ’98), Daniel J. Boorstin (dead, past his prime in ’98), Shelby Foote (dead, covert Confederacy apologist, we’ll be getting to him in a few years, past his prime in ’98), Vartan Gregorian (dead, but, from all reports, a decent dude), A.S. Byatt (GOAT, literally just died in November, should have pushed back harder against these testosterone-charged fossils, being a Willa Cather fan seems to be her only fault), Edmund Morris (dead, past his prime in ’98 and about to destroy his career with Dutch), John Richardson (dead, past his prime in ’98), Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (dead, past his prime in ’98), and William Styron (dead, perilously close to being done in ’98, but dammit he at least gave us Darkness Visible, which was rightly included on the Modern Library nonfiction list).

Anyway, it says a great deal about the casual misogyny of these then doddering judges that a hopeless and unremarkable square like Willa Cather (the kind of teeming bore that other teeming bores genuflect to) somehow secured a much higher slot than such indisputable virtuosos as Iris Murdoch, Jean Rhys, and Muriel Spark. It says a great deal that Willa “Cream Corn” Cather — a plodding rustic rube without a soupçon of edge who wrote sentences so loathsome that, only ten minutes after reading an especially awful exemplar, I sprout wings from my back, descend with my fangs upon innocents in Manhattan, and destroy random chevron-studded façades and angelic statuary mounted on art deco skyscrapers hundreds of feet above the streets (if you Google around, you’ll find TikToks out there depicting my frightening transmutation; it is a display that is not for the faint of heart) — is apparently more worthy of commendation than Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Flannery O’Connor, Octavia Butler, Angela Carter, Zora Neale Hurston, Jane Bowles, Ursula K. Le Guin, or Harper Lee, who were all denied a single spot on the list.

In 1998, did the Modern Library Judges fear what was then called an “outspoken” woman? Did they wish to consign “innovation” solely to men? Were they unsettled by the many waves of feminism? Did they try to argue that an insufferable reactionary goody little two-shoes like Cather was a feminist because she exposed spousal discontent through only the barest minimum amount of effort (see Alexandra in My Ántonia; if you think that’s a “radical” depiction of what women had to go through, I’ve got a bridge I can sell you here in Brooklyn) and because she was a closeted lesbian (even as she was tearing down other women of letters privately and publicly)?

At this point, we’ll probably never know. The likeliest scenario is that Cerf will stay mum and take the problematic history of these internal discussions to the grave. And let’s face the facts: the dude wouldn’t meet me for tea even if I whipped up a fun electro cover of one of his two hundred plus compositions for Sesame Street. (Yo, Chris, I’ve got terabytes of samples on my desktop! If a goofy emo punk version of “Monster in the Mirror” whipped up on my synth over the weekend will get you to cough up about this regrettable state of affairs, then I’ll do it! Seriously, that “wubba wubba wubba wubba woo woo woo” just begs to be rasped out in the manner similar to the late Can singer Damo Suzuki.)

The wondrous Dame Hermione Lee, who remains one of our greatest living literary scholars, has written a solid and truly admirable bio advocating for Cather. And while I appreciated Lee’s volume in much the same way that I will always stump for Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love, which reckons with the question on why so many people love Celine Dion, make no mistake: I consider anyone willing to go to the mat for Willa Cather to be some terminally unhip rooster without a shred of literary taste, the kind of unadventurous sod who would invite suicidal thoughts if you got cornered by him at a cocktail party. Lee gets special dispensation from me because she’s awesome — in large part because she wrote an invaluable Edith Wharton book (and I am, of course, crazy about Wharton). In fact, in quoting a passage from One of Ours that described junk, Lee identified a possible class-based literary divide between people like me who detest Cather and certain frou-frou bourgie types who think that she’s the cat’s pajamas (Christian Lander, you were so asleep at the wheel on the Cather front when you ran your excellent satirical blog!):

There is a hint that junk, once it starts ageing into antiques, might be seductive (an American writer with more entropic tendencies, like Nathanael West or Thomas Pynchon, would have loved that cellar) but, more often, junk is just pitiful, like the debris of Claude’s marital house: ‘How inherently mournful and ugly such objects were, when the feeling that had made them precious no longer existed!’ [OOO, p. 223] When Claude comes to the ‘dump-heap’ of the French battlefields, he has already been living in a civilization (Cather suggests) which has not needed a war to turn itself into rubbish.

You have to love that “Cather suggests” parenthetical that Lee drops into this cogent analysis. (Don’t worry, Hermione! We cool! I have Quincy Jones’s wonderful Sanford and Son theme playing in the back as I write this paragraph!) I guess you could say that I’m one of those readers who is more drawn to authors with “entropic tendencies.” I believe you can find beauty in damned near anything. Including junk. But Cather, despite stumping for the heartland, is more of a rebuking prude who never earned the right to be a snob. She’d rather throw out the junk and align herself with the sanitarium/cornflakes crowd: you know, the alternative medicine quacks sent up decades later in T.C. Boyle’s The Road to Wellville. I know you whipper-snappers are keeping up with me in our age of conspiracy theories, rampant cognitive decline, and unfounded character assassination on social media. Or at least I hope you are!

There’s also the question of whether Cather’s “literary sensibilities” can be entirely trusted. Of The Awakening, Cather had the audacity to write, “I shall not attempt to say why Miss Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive, well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme.” One might say the same of a hopeless stiff like Cather herself, though she does not possess anything especially exquisite in her early works beyond country bumpkin exclamation marks. She condemned Mark Twain — arguably the greatest wit that American letters has ever produced — as a man of “limited mentality” and “neither a scholar, a reader or a man of letters and very little of a gentleman.”

Yes, I realize that all this was written in the nineteenth century and it is incredibly absurd to pick a fight with somebody who has been dead for nearly eight decades. But I’m telling you. After reading far more Cather than I needed to for this essay, I had actual nightmares about Cather strangling me while laughing in a menacing high-pitched titter. These dreams were so terrifying that I would not even wish them on my worst enemy. And if I have to write about this mediocre and humorless nitwit from Nebraska because she’s on this goddamned Modern Library list, well, in the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, them’s fighting words.

Let’s take a look at some of the trite and treacly bullshit that Cather was banging out when she rolled out the howitzers against these legends.

From “Paul’s Case”:

The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in the Mediterranean, kept in touch with all the details of the business, arranging his office hours on his yacht just as though he were home, and “knocking off work enough to keep two stenographers busy.”

Note the redundancies here (“cruising in the Mediterranean” and “arranging his office hours on his yacht”). Even an oft prolix mofo like me recognizes this sentence as interminably long, presumably extended to cash in on the word rate.

Or how about this overwritten nonsense from “The Sculptor’s Funeral”?

The grating sound made by the casket, as it was drawn from the hearse, was answered by a scream from the house; the front door was wrenched open, and a tall, corpulent woman rushed out bareheaded into the snow and flung herself upon the coffin, shrieking: “My boy, my boy! And this is how you’ve come home to me!”

I’m very forgiving of melodrama in fiction, but this is unpardonable corn pudding with an objectively disagreeable sweetness that would be rightly laughed out of any MFA workshop today. The sequence of events here is all wrong. “Drawn from the hearse”? Well, where else would the casket come from? Some giant descending from the heavens? The attempt here to create poignant emotion falls flat with this overwrought dialogue. “My boy” was enough. But we get two in a row, followed by the kind of awful expository dialogue I go out of my way to avoid as a radio dramatist.

And then I read the soul-destroying novels. O Pioneers! was a vicious slog. The Song of the Lark — with its hideous reactionary parochialism and its incessant reliance upon gossip — will have you howling at the ceiling over how stiff and superficial it is. And My Ántonia? You’d honestly be better off spending your time listening to The Knack’s “My Sharona” on repeat for six hours.

Which finally brings us to Death Come for the Archbishop after a lot of throat-clearing. (Look, I’m trying to have fun here. My Cather deep dive was a deeply unpleasant reading experience!)

The common narrative propped up by Cather’s fusty and foolish boosters is that, much like Robert Johnson meeting the Devil, Cather went down to the Southwest (particularly Santa Fe) in the summer of 1925 and came back “reborn” with a renewed “sensitivity” for other cultures. But this, of course, is a lie. And it certainly doesn’t explain why Cather, much like a hopped up Zionist airhead denying Israel’s genocidal complicity, didn’t glom onto the indigenous people who lived in the region, but chose to fixate on the Christian authorities who longed to convert them.

I can see the Cather acolytes arriving at this point in my essay, suggesting that I have deliberately misread Death, which is oh so “sympathetic” to the indigenous people of New Mexico. But at what cost? Depicting Mexicans as noble savages? Emily of It Was Evening All Afternoon arrived at a similar conclusion in 2009. So did Kali Fajardo-Anstine over at LitHub. But why not just go straight to the text to see how docile and obliging the locals are?

When this strange yellow boy played it, there was softness and languor in the wire strings—but there was also a kind of madness; the recklessness, the call of wild countries which all these men had felt and followed in one way or another. Through clouds of cigar smoke, the scout and the soldiers, the Mexican rancheros and the priests, sat silently watching the bent head and crouching shoulders of the banjo player, and his seesawing yellow hand, which sometimes lost all form and became a mere whirl of matter in motion, like a patch of sand-storm.

A strong argument can be made that Cather was a white supremacist, particularly given her treatment of non-white characters in her odious final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, which features hideous Black caricatures in the form of Bluebell and Lizzie. In an October 14, 1940 letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher available at the online Willa Cather Archive (I am greatly indebted to Hermione Lee for her endnote), Cather wrote:

I loved especially playing with the darkey speech, which was deep down in my mind exactly like phonograph records. I could remember exactly what they said and the quality of the voice. Just wait till our wise young reviewers, such as Clifton and Louis, sadly call attention to the inconsistency in Till’s and Nancy’s speech,- never knowing that all well trained house servants spoke two languages: one with white people and one with their fellow negroes.

I hope this blatant racism and this boorish boasting helps you to understand why I have felt morally obliged to ratchet up the rage.

When Cather was at work on Death, a Cleveland Press reporter asked her what it was about. She replied, “America works on my mind like light on a photographic plate.” Jesus Christ, could you be any more pretentious? (Hermione Lee informs us that Cather, when making a trip to a writer’s colony as Death squeaked out of her precious mind, was “not remembered for her conviviality.” Which is a gentle way of telling us that Cather was completely fucking insufferable.)

To give Willa the Imperialist Prig some credit, I will say that Death Comes for the Archbishop is slightly better than the early turgid works, although that’s a bit like saying that the Limburger with the least amount of mold that you pick up from the charcuterie plate — you know, that stinky piece you nibble at out of politeness at a party simply because the poor host is blind and she had no idea that she was paring pieces from ancient heads that had been sitting in the fridge since the Clinton Administration — is the bomb.

Death opens with three cardinals and a bishop “talking business” about establishing a new vicarite in New Mexico, which Cather with full colonialist glee tells us is “a part of America recently annexed to the United States.” Bishop Ferrand, the missionary who headed out to the Old West, is ancient and weather-beaten and describes the desolate and fissure-ridden landscape for which these vaguely sinister religious mobsters hope to open up a franchise.

Jean Marie Latour, a thirty-five-year-old naif from Lake Ontario, is enlisted to be the point man converting all the Mexcians and the indigenous people who live in the region. And after these men of the cloth scoff over Latour’s intelligence (or lack thereof), Cather cuts to 1851, where Latour is on his way to Santa Fe. Cather does a decent job describing the limitless “uniform red hills” that Latour takes in on his journey. And there is a modicum of grit in this early chapter that, while a far cry from the satisfying description of Cormac McCarthy at his best, I largely enjoyed.

Unfortunately, after this promising start, my interest waned significantly when Latour began whining about not packing enough water for his journey and losing all of his possessions other than his books. It’s safe that Latour is a far cry from Chaucer’s many priests, G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, or even Father John from M*A*S*H. He reveals himself quite rapidly to be an insufferable little shit and I started feeling sorry for Father Joseph Vaillant, Latour’s boyhood friend who accompanies him on the journey to Santa Fe. On the other hand, if you’re friends with a pompous windbag like Latour, then you probably deserve your shared misfortune.

As Father Latour is taken in by some locals, he finds a strange peace in the “bareness and simplicity” of the settlement. He quickly occupies space in a quietly domineering way and listens to the “simple” life stories of these people. I couldn’t help but wonder why a religious man like Latour was so ungrateful, but then I remembered how Cather herself hadn’t exactly been gracious to the many writers who tried to help her. Maybe the fact that Death can be read as a critique of religious imperialism is largely an accident.

Latour starts bragging about how great Americans are. You know, those white people who swooped in and destroyed the Mexican churches and stripped these good people of their religion? Those colonial assholes? They’re great, aren’t they? And, of course, Cather, by way of close narration through Latour, cannot feel any empathy for such debasement.

At this point, I began to loathe Latour with all my heart because of his cluelessness and his insensitivity. And I very much hoped that Cather would deliver on the promise of her title well before I was halfway through the book. Latour is very particular about a meal, telling some indigent to serve him a portion without chili because, as a Frenchman, he does “not like high seasoning.”

Not long after this, Latour is setting up his vicarite. And, of course, it’s Vaillant who is assigned to do all the cooking so that Latour can write endless letters in French. The bishop then takes the opportunity to bitch about the soup. Some friend this motherfucker is.

And even though condemning white privilege with this setup is easier than shooting monkeys in a barrel, I’ll give Cather some points for acknowledging hardscrabble reality:

The wiry little priest whose life was to be a succession of mountain ranges, pathless deserts, yawning canyons and swollen rivers, who was to carry the Cross into territories yet unknown and unnamed, who would wear down mules and horses and scouts and stage-drivers, tonight looked apprehensively at his superior and repeated, “No more , Jean. That is far enough.”

I suppose that Cather defenders will defend her belittling of Mexicans by pointing out how Vaillant is described as ugly. Maybe they’ll point to the way that Vaillant and Latour save an old Mexican slave named Sada. But their “help” involves this woman “obeying” the Padre and being ordered to go to church and pray. Sada really doesn’t have any agency other than wanting to return to her religion. And this, quite frankly, is nothing less than an insulting scene of religious tyranny and white privilege. As for the sinister murderer Buck Scales, it says quite a bit about Cather’s dormant xenophobia that his evil is defined equally in terms of interracial marriage: “All white men knew him for a dog and a degenerate—but to Mexican girls, marriage with an American meant coming up in the world. She had married him six years ago, and had been living with him ever since in that wretched house on the Mora trail.”

If you thought Jeanine Cummins was bad, try taking Willa Cather out for a spin. There’s no way I can defend Willa Cather and her repugnant insouciance in 2024. Her prose simply isn’t good enough for me to align myself with Hermione Lee. And I am pleased as punch that I will never have to read this mean and hideous writer ever again.

Next Up: Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer!

by Edward Champion

The Content Trap

Every artist repeats himself. But when is creative repetition accessible? At what point do artists fall into the “content trap,” the creative moment in which originality and innovation are abdicated in favor of corporate whoredom, filthy lucre, and formualic mediocrity?

Every artist repeats himself, often without being cognizant of it: stylistic tropes, character archetypes, peculiar metaphors, and distinct storytelling moves. The more prolific the artist, the more likely the artist will repeat himself. I think of how Joyce Carol Oates — herself astonishingly voluminous — mentions the soothing comforts of vacuuming in the aftermath of grief in her memoir, A Widow’s Story, while drawing a similar comparison between death and vacuum cleaning in her short story “Cumberland Breakdown” (contained in I Am No One You Know).

So given that repetition is a creative inevitability, how do you avoid it? And when is repetition acceptable? These are vital questions to consider in an age of franchise fatigue, in a time in which an audience is now asked to devote its entire life to consuming endless reboots, remakes, and spinoffs that offer little in the way of originality.

Speaking for myself, the only way that you could get me to watch another bloated three hour Marvel Cinematic Universe movie (Three hours? Come on! You’re not Tarkovsky!) — whereby the now tedious destruction of New York is now an annoyingly guaranteed and yawn-inducing cliche — is if you locked me in a hotel room with a group of sinuous, supple, and wildly inventive lovers. And even then, my attentions would be more fixated on the far more rewarding existential variations of tendering affection and satisfaction to each and every sybarite who drops by for a mutually beneficial afternoon delight rather than the bullshit spectacle of Manhattan once again — for fuck’s sake, not again! — being reduced to rubble.

It is not that I am against genre. (I have always loved genre passionately!) But artists who work in genre tend to be the worst transgressors of the problem I am addressing here. Furthermore, I am strongly opposed to being bored out of my fucking mind. MCU movies bore me. As do the endless iterations of Star Wars rehashes and retreads, which now fills in every goddamned ambiguity that initially captured my imagination with an indefatigable series of cheap narrative disappointments. (Did we really need to see Boba Fett escape from the Sarlacc Pit? No, we didn’t. Boba Fett was a marvelous invention, the perfect side character who said very little and, before Disney+ turned this bloated and ever propagating franchise into a bland carpet rolling endlessly down a Poltergeist-style hallway of limitless length, Boba Fett’s laconic presence invited you to speculate about just why he became a bounty hunter. I’ve been told that Andor actually breaks out of the formula, but I am frankly too fatigued by all the George Lucas wankfests to dive in.) I could not give two fucks about The Walking Dead, even though I enjoyed the flagship show in its early seasons. Characters move from one location to another, kill zombies, fend off some villain of the season (such as Negan or The Governor). Lather, rinse, repeat. Same shit, different day, different television spinoff.

But Fringe? Farscape? Twin Peaks? Issa Rae’s great series Insecure? They ended at just the right time. No problems there! For that matter, Better Call Saul struck a heartbreaking note of artistic perfection while also neatly aligning itself with its cousin, Breaking Bad. Twin masterpieces! Both shows in the Alberquerque universe arguably represent some of the best television of the last twenty years. Because the writers knew when their time was up. They knew the precise point when they were about to repeat themselves. I have great hope for For All Mankind, which possesses enough of an imaginative arsenal to run for multiple seasons without becoming dowdy, largely because of the innovative way in which the show jumps forward a decade each season with its “What if?” premise.

Brian K. Vaughan is one of the best living comic book writers working today. Why? Well, it’s largely because he knew when to wrap up Paper Girls. When Saga hit a heartstopping cliffhanger in Issue #60, Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples took a four year hiatus and didn’t return until last year. And Saga has sustained its high artistic quality because this dynamic duo knew that they couldn’t repeat themselves and that they needed a long break to get it right. But Dave Sim? Jesus Christ, what a tragic fall from grace. The man who changed the possibilities of what independent comic books could be succumbed to distasteful misogynistic incel rants. All because he was so singularly obsessed with hitting Cerebus #300. Imagine a world in which Cerberus stopped at Issue #150. Dave Sim would be a hero rather than a well-deserved pariah.

At 75, Stephen King may be the best example of pop fiction staying power that we have. While there are undeniable King tropes (the dangerous religious zealot, the endearing simple-minded sidekick seen with Wolf in The Talisman and Tom Cullen in The Stand, and an empathy for blue-collar types that has rightly caused his books to be revered by many), the man is still successfully working in other non-horror genres such as crime (Billy Summers) and dark fantasy (Fairy Tale). And while he has been self-effacing about declaring himself the “literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries,” his capacity to grow as a writer in his seventies and still win us over would suggest very strongly that he’s a lot more than this.

The excellent audio drama Wolf 359 knew when to quit. As did Wooden Overcoats. The Amelia Project? Nicht so viel. It is now a stale and uninventive retread that no amount of new characters or talented actors can salvage.

Trevor Noah knew when to leave The Daily Show. As did Jon Stewart. At least initially. But after taking a few years off to write and direct films, his ego became seduced by the fame, attention, and money that emerges from churning out more of the same. He returned to the airwaves with the same schtick, vastly eclipsed by the far more thoughtful and more hilarious approach of John Oliver on Last Week Tonight. (I truly hope that Oliver knows the precise moment to quit. Because it would be a pity to see him transmute into a disinterested has-been hack.)

The Who and Led Zeppelin both ended at nearly the right time (although the less said about everything after Who Are You, the better; opinions vary on whether or not Zeppelin’s final album, In Through the Out Door, was entirely necessary). Had Keith Moon and John Bonham lived longer, I think it’s likely that they would have turned into 1980s corporate rock sellouts that Gen X punks like me would have justifiably ridiculed with formidable sneers. And while John Lennon’s assassination by Mark David Chapman was truly terrible, imagine (har har!) what kind of hideous reactionary Lennon would have transformed into in the 1980s. Or Kurt Cobain. Or Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix. This fun but unsettling speculative game — which I personally guarantee will enliven a dull party — is what Billy Joel (who quit writing songs long after his talent was tapped, but who at least had the decency to spare us further River of Dreams drivel) was referring to when he sang about “the stained-glass curtain you’re hiding behind.”

In other words, every artist has a finite amount of talent and imagination. Sometimes it extends within a given project or a stylistic approach. Sometimes it’s represented in an entire career. I used to love T.C. Boyle’s work, but now I find him insufferably repetitive. Why? Because Boyle hasn’t changed his formula much in the last ten years. It is highly doubtful that we will get another novel on the level of World’s End or The Tortilla Curtain from him. And that’s a damned pity. At some point around 2014, Boyle stopped caring about whether he was evolving as an artist and started to phone it in.

Lost? Battlestar Galactica? Both shows lasted at least one season too long. They were both wildly popular and didn’t seem to understand that the creative well had run dry. Imagine if they had ended at the right time.

The artists who didn’t know when to stop or change things up fell into what I’m calling “the content trap.” The content trap is what happens when something distinct and original becomes wildly successful, but corporate greed or an artist’s narcissistic need for chronic adulation gets in the way of knowing when the jig is up. Ego prevents an artist from knowing when it’s time to end things. And what we usually get are inferior repeats of the same stories that initially captured our imagination. Let’s be honest. If Douglas Adams had actually confined his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series to the trilogy format, what would be so bad about that? I think Adams knew that So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish was never going to live up to the three books that preceded it. He was so impaired by the need to write content for the fourth book that publisher Sonny Mehta had to move in with Adams to make sure that he finished the novel. Douglas Adams — for all of his wit and radio drama innovation — fell into the content trap. On Community, Dan Harmon had a running joke in which characters suggested that the show had “six seasons and a movie” of material. And had Community been renewed for a seventh season, there is no way that its formidable writers could have summoned anything as brilliant as “Remedial Chaos Theory.” Dan Harmon didn’t fall into the content trap.

John Cleese — a genius whom I worshipped as a teen — hasn’t been funny in years. His best days are far behind him. Why? Because he fell into the content trap. He’s bringing back Fawlty Towers decades later and it’s completely unnecessary. On the other hand, I had thought that Star Trek: Picard was a dead retread incapable of further innovations, but the third season has somehow found new life under showrunner Terry Matalas. Here was a show that fell into the content trap, but that somehow clawed its way back, even resolving an Ensign Ro storyline from decades before. In other words, it’s not impossible for a content trap victim to reverse course and find a vital reason for creating new art. (Witness the surprising endurance of Doctor Who over more than fifty years — although its recent partnership with Disney+ does have me greatly worried — or Philip Roth’s multiple periods of resurgence. Or how about Tina Turner’s Private Dancer (after four dismal solo albums)? I’ve lost track of the number of comebacks that Miley Cyrus has had, but you’d be hard-pressed not to groove to Endless Summer Vacation.)

Most artists find it difficult to escape the content trap once they fall into it. But here’s the good news: everyone loves a comeback. And if we start demanding higher standards of the work we love and that goes on on and ever ever on rather than accepting bullshit like some hopelessly compromised head-bobbing fanboy who settles for, well, anything, then even once beloved artists have a shot at surprising us with the imagination and talent that is buried somewhere within them. That is, if they can successfully resist the large bags of money that corporate overlords continue to wheelbarrow into their palatial estates so long as they continue to offer us more of the same.

(Special thanks to my friend Tom Working, whose insightful comments partially inspired this essay.)

by Edward Champion

T.C. Boyle (The Bat Segundo Show)

In this one hour interview, we talk with TC Boyle about the Channel Islands, what his legacy as an author will be, the morality of burning love letters, and his latest novel San Miguel.

T.C. Boyle is most recently the author of San Miguel.

Listen: Play in new window | Download

Since Mr. Boyle has appeared four previous times on this program (Show #10, Show #70, Show #273, Show #385), we felt that it was essential to include him in Bat Segundo’s last stretch. This is the fifth and final conversation with T.C. Boyle.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Remembering his disastrous Diana-themed wedding ceremony to Doris.

Author: T.C. Boyle

Subjects Discussed: On being alive, the “Swiss Family Lester” article in Life, the advantages of working with scant details, not wishing to violate historical rules, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, the quest for quotidian atmosphere on an island, constant description of the wind, imagining what it’s like to live away from everyone as a fantasy, visits to the Channel Islands, rough seas, Boyle’s ineptitude as a sailor, the mysterious rangers who live on San Miguel Island, people who camp on the Channel Islands, why anyone would want to lay down $10,000 on a questionable capitalistic venture, comparisons between East is East and San Miguel, underplayed racial tension in San Miguel, Japanese fishermen who visited the Channel Islands, muting the irony, working within deliberate limitations, writing about a location that is starved of art and culture, staying original and avoiding the tendency to repeat, “Birnam Wood,” writing realistic stories without irony, Boyle’s tendency to use women as characters despite his efforts to write about men, carryover from Talk Talk and When the Killing’s Done into San Miguel, using character more as a writer, how Boyle’s stories have changed in the last fifteen years, the forthcoming Stories Volume II, John Updike, refusing to make adjustments to stories, “This Monkey, My Back,” the Ransom archives, academic methods of cleaning the house, the difficulties of giving up elements of the past, letters that Boyle didn’t give to Ransom, the morality of burning love letters, hiding financial disclosure, seeing writers of the past on TV and radio, George Bernard Shaw, Boyle’s insistence that society won’t exist in 100 years, Jack Kerouac’s disastrous appearance on Firing Line, whether author appearances and legacy even matters, the desire for literary gossip, literary biography, Carol Sklenicka’s biography of Raymond Carver, Blake Bailey, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child, San Miguel as the obverse experience from Boyle typically playing joyful god towards characters, keeping San Miguel confined to the island, human efforts to control nature, despair, being a nature boy, having a sense of isolation, Thoreau living in nature, Alcatraz and Angel Island, writing fiction in isolation on a mountain, using the Internet with iron discipline, fiction which emerges from America in a glum economic and political state, Brian Francis Slattery’s Lost Everything, having a more muted view in advanced age, maintaining a clean conscience, the amniotic fluid of civilization, the addictiveness of handheld devices, the usefulness of smartphones, Occupy Wall Street, whether the experience of nature is lost on most people, biologists who have praised When the Killing’s Done, the recent shutdown of California parks, simulation as a way to confront reality, the 1935 film version of Mutiny on the Bounty shot at San Miguel, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Lord of the Flies, Francophilia, language and civilization as a coping mechanism, spinsters, the surprising hope near the end of San Miguel, Boyle’s next novel about violence, deviation during a novel, how newspaper paragraphs turn into stories, and fiction vs. journalism.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I found this [handing over printout] — this “Pictures to the Editor” article from Life. I thought that you were just making this up, this whole “Swiss Family Lester” thing. But lo and behold, I found this. And I’m sure you found this before you had the Life reporter show up in your book. And this leads me to wonder. Because I was surprised by how skimpy this article was. I mean, I look at these photos and there’s plenty of information there for a writer of your sort to draw and infer and so forth. So this leads me to wonder. How much research do you need for something along these lines? Is it helpful to not have as many details? Or to just have a picture like this?

Boyle: Yeah, I wonder. That’s a great question, Ed. The first section of the book about the Waters family allowed me a little more freedom to invent. Because the diary from which I was working was fifty pages or less. Very fragmentary and only took up a six month period. With the Lesters, since they were very well known and were featured in Life Magazine and on radio shows all across the country, it was a little more difficult. Because I didn’t want to violate the actual events of history. But I think the two stories, in my mind anyway, blended fairly well.

Correspondent: So if you have to go ahead and abide by the rules of history, as a fiction writer you have to invent. I mean, does this get in the way?

Boyle: Yes. Well, this is a question with any of the historical novels. And I’ve written many, many historical novels and stories too. You don’t have to abide. You can do, for instance, what Philip Roth did in The Plot Against America. You can change anything. There are no rules whatsoever. You can have aliens come in in the middle of a realistic story. But usually when I’m giving historical elements, I love the true story so much that I want to give it to you. And usually it’s so bizarre. Like for instance, Stanley McCormick from Riven Rock or Alfred Kinsey or even Frank Lloyd Wright. The people I’ve written about. In this case though, I was trying, as you know, for something totally different and, as a companion piece to When the Killing’s Done, to give more of an atmospheric, moody, quotidian kind of approach to what it might have been like to be someone living on this island solely.

Correspondent: But then you have situations like constant descriptions of the wind. There’s a lot of wind in this book. This leads me to ask, well, what do you do to keep that original? I know that you are devoted to original prose, original description, and not wanting to repeat yourself. What do you do to keep that fresh?

Boyle: Aw shucks, Ed. I’m just flying by the seat of my pants. Everything works organically. And if it’s windy, it’s windy. You know, the book begins — for those who don’t know — with a series of very short chapters. This is a naturalistic book about people living on an island. And each one introduces a new element. And one of those elements is the fog, for instance. One is the wind. Many of them describe elements of the house: arriving at the house, the kitchen, the bedroom. It’s a way of my going deep inside these characters to imagine what it would have been like to live apart from everyone. I mean, this is a fantasy that so many of us have. Why the Lesters were famous in their day. Simply for living apart from the entire world on this island, in sole possession of it, during the Depression. When everybody else was lined up on the streets looking for a job.

Correspondent: Did you make any visits to San Miguel? I know you did that for Anacapa for the last book. Did you take in the terrain to know how to write about it? Especially when there are really no remnants of the homes, the domiciles, or even the sheep that actually appeared over there.

Boyle: Indeed yes, Ed. I made a single trip to San Miguel. Now I’ve made many, many trips, of course, to Santa Cruz and Anacapa, which were the setting of the previous book. As you know from having read San Miguel, this island is the farthest out and the most buffeted by the weather because of the currents. It’s not protected by Point Conception. It’s right off of it. So it’s getting everything coming down from the northern current from San Francisco, rumbling with the southern current coming up from Los Angeles and San Diego and spinning around in the Santa Barbara Channel. So it’s very, very rough seas. I’m told that I write very well about the seas, particularly in When the Killing’s Done, which opens with a shipwreck, as you remember. But I’m not a good sailor and my stomach doesn’t like being at sea. Especially in rough seas. Now it’s an hour and a half across to Santa Cruz in rough seas. But it’s four hours to San Miguel. And once you get there, you must stay in a campground for several days before the boat will come back to pick you up. I used a very, very simple stratagem to avoid this. I flew out. I flew out with the ranger, who is the sole person who lives there in the sole building on the island.

Correspondent: Well, that’s not exactly cricket if you want to mimic the experience.

Boyle: Well, of course, I have had the experience of going across the Channel many, many times.

Correspondent: Those extra hours, Tom.

Boyle: It’s true. It’s true. I never actually hung my head over and vomited. But I’ve been close on several occasions. I should say too, when I went to visit the ranger, I brought my son with me. I brought Marla Daily, the local historian who turned me onto all of this and published these diaries. And it was wonderful. Because the ranger himself is a historian of the place. And so is she. So I got to spend a full day with them looking at the rafters that were left in the ground of the old Lester house. There’s just a few remnants left. A little midden of cans and stuff. And just really get a sense of all of these places I had read about. And distances. And to walk all the trails. But what most intrigued me was that as you fly in, the beaches there — you’ve seen it probably on Walt Disney and the Discovery Channel — it’s a huge breeding ground for the elephant seal. And you see them, hundreds of them, lying below you like giant inflated sausages. And as soon as I got off the plane, I said to Ian, “Look, maybe I should be talking to Fish and Game instead of you. But is it a violation if I mate with one of the sea elephants?” And he didn’t miss a beat. He said, “You know, that’s a violation on every possible grounds.”

Correspondent: How long did the ranger live there? I mean, did you get to know him fairly well to get a sense…

Boyle: Well, I spent a day with him. A day and a night with him. He has to retire. He’s only like fifty or something. But they rotate them out. And I think he has to retire soon. But he’s been there for some years. And he’s not there permanently. I mean, he has relief. Because even people who like solitude might go a little nuts out there.

Correspondent: Well, as you depict in your book.

Boyle: A further statistic. In Santa Cruz Island — the big one, four times bigger than Manhattan, right across from Santa Barbara, you can see it right there — there is a public campground. And you can take this boat out and you can camp there. And I was told by the ranger there that some days, like a July 4th weekend, there might be as many as 300 people camping in that campground. On San Miguel, there are 300 campers per year. So it’s pretty remote.

Correspondent: It is a park, I understand.

Boyle: It’s part of the National Park. Yeah. All the Channel Islands are, with the exception of Catalina.

Correspondent: So if the ranger gets rotated out, and if you are only relying upon a fifty page diary or scraps or, in the case of the third part, considerable media attention — although that’s accentuated by the fact that suddenly they have electricity, suddenly they have radio and so forth — what do you do to mimic that experience of being trapped on an island? Do you go ahead and spend a week eating nothing but lamb? How does this work?

Boyle: I’m just using my imagination, of course. Again, in this one as a companion piece for When the Killing’s Done, which is so vibrant and wild and deals with a current ethical concern about how we treat animals and who has the right to do it and who owns the turf, here I wanted something much more muted, to give a kind of experience of what it must have been like. Because this is a fantasy of everybody. One of the memoirs — the one by Elise, Elizabeth Lester — is called The King of San Miguel. Herbie was the king. Who else is the king? It’s just him, his wife, and two kids.

Correspondent: Who wants to be the king?

Boyle: That’s another question. Who wants to be the king? And I think what intrigued me about the first diary, Marantha, and then the Lester book is that there were these tremendous correspondences between the two families, who were in sole possession of this. One in the 1880s and the other in the 1930s. Here are men who have a vision and really don’t take into consideration the costs on their wives. I think this is particularly true in the first one: Marantha’s story. Here was a woman. Upper middle class. Living in an apartment in San Francisco. Convinced by her husband to buy into this ship ranch. To buy essentially this island and live there and, of course, they make their living in the most essential way. They shear the sheep and sell the wool. What could be simpler? A life in nature. But everyone isn’t suited for that.

(Image: Teri Carter)

The Bat Segundo Show #492: T.C. Boyle (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: TC Boyle IV

In this 45 minute radio alternative, novelist TC Boyle returns a fourth time to discuss When the Killing’s Done and offer gleefully pessimistic pronouncements about the world.

TC Boyle appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #385. He is most recently the author of When the Killing’s Done. This is his fourth appearance on the program. He has previously appeared on The Bat Segundo #273, The Bat Segundo Show #70, and The Bat Segundo Show #10.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Considering a savage swim to the Channel Islands.

Author: T. Coraghessan Boyle

Subjects Discussed: Whether one can look dapper while being under the weather, Boyle’s powerful immune system, connections between Wild Child‘s stories and When the Killing’s Done, fishing expeditions gone awry, early subconscious efforts to hone the narrative framework, the short story “Anacapa,” “Question 62,” who has the ethical result to control all creatures, details on the next novel San Miguel, the Channel Islands, the bleak winds of San Miguel, straightforward historical narrative vs. exuberant adventure, Boyle’s prodigious description of hair, folk singers and massive hair, writing about women, Ruth Dershowitz in East is East and Dana in Talk Talk, basing When the Killing’s Done on news accounts without meeting anybody involved, Dave LaJoy and megalomaniacs, readers who take hard sides in response to the book, whether the portrayal of an exuberant megalomaniac causes an unintended ideological tilt, sympathizing with an animal rights activist, not being able to look at the PETA slaughterhouse videos, Diane Johnson’s essay in the New York Review of Books, whether Boyle’s sense of the ridiculous overcomes moments of gravity, the role of literature within Killing, Madame Bovary “in the Jean Renoir original,” Island of the Blue Dolphins, Boyle’s pessimism, being thrust into the lap of the existentialists, Jeffrey Dahmer, the comforts of irrelevance, Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” spirituality, feeling the pulse of nature and being humbled by it, Boyle’s pilgrimages, blocking out terrible news, the role of art in a nihilistic viewpoint, the geography of Santa Cruz and Anacapa, Boyle’s mother-in-law, the degree of geographical exploration required for Drop City and When the Killing’s Done, the Judas pig, Tom Wolfe’s journalistic approach to novel writing, passages written by “Boyle the historian,” being in the clear when using real people for fiction, when fiction is more real than reality, riffing on history, Home Depot as “the loneliest place in the world,” not having material goods, and escaping to the mountain.

EXCERPTS FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to remark upon a recent essay by Diane Johnson in The New York Review of Books. I’m sure you’ve probably seen it by now.

Boyle: Yes, I have.

Correspondent: She wrote something that I happen to agree with. “Because his sense of the ridiculous usually overcomes his moments of gravity, he rarely departs from a comic mode that precludes tears even in the most tragic circumstances.” I think that this is a fair point, especially in this book. But if your book is informed with this sense of the ridiculousness, I’m wondering if this is going to impede upon writing in more serious or greater turf.

Boyle: It might. Which is precisely why I’m doing a non-comic straightforward historical narrative right now. Just to see how that might be and what might happen. Don’t forget. I’m the guy who wrote Water Music as my first novel, which turned the historical novel on its head and subverted and pulled the rug out and nudged you constantly about the unreliability of fiction and of history too. Now I am trying to write something without any irony or any comedy. Straightforward drama. Straightforward realism. Just because I’ve never done it before. I’ve done it in short stories. But I’ve never done it at length. And I found this wonderful story, a historical story, which I’m telling as best I can. We shall see what the results are. In fact, if we’re very lucky, you and I will be sitting here in three years discussing that one. And we’ll find out. (laughs)

Correspondent: Well, maybe we will. But I want to see if we can get to When the Killing’s Done and this problem of adopting the comic exuberant tone. I think this book does really present some very important issues, which we were getting to earlier, about how does humanity play god in the animal kingdom. I mean, this is a very serious topic. And the comedy is almost a mask over something which is — well, if you think about it from either side — really depressing. So I’m wondering if, in not permitting us to share tears (as Diane Johnson believes), it almost trivializes the issue to some degree. Does it present a problem? Or is your strategy more laying a few comic exuberant bombs to blow up in the reader’s head in about a week or so?

Boyle: Wow. Neither of the above. I’ll go for Choice C. I don’t see this as necessarily a comic novel. Certainly there are many varieties of comedy, of course. And I’ve used every possible mode I can think of. This has its moments, of course. And I think it allows the reader to stand back at times and view the characters with some kind of ironic detachment perhaps. But I don’t see this as essentially a comic novel. I see this as a dramatic novel. And further — and we’ve talked about this in the past — I often find that using the comic mode can be more emotionally wrenching then writing a straightforward drama. Because it subverts your expectations. And in this one. Well, look at the ending to this book. It should punch you right in the heart. I hope it does.

Correspondent: But I don’t know. From my standpoint, it read very much like a comic novel. To me. Particularly every time LaJoy came up. I mean, this guy is such a hilarious…

Boyle: Because he’s exaggerated to a degree. And yet, and yet, he’s also real. And I wouldn’t want to say, as I said earlier, that he represents a large part of me. But certainly that part is there. And certainly, Ed, we are both of us pretty much perfect and beautifully emotionally adjusted. But a lot of people out there are not. There are a lot of people out thee who make LaJoy look calm.

* * *

Correspondent: Do you have anything that you feel optimistic or joyful about?

Boyle: No.

Correspondent: No? Nothing optimistic?

Boyle: No. Since I discovered death at a very young age, it has obsessed me. And the whole purpose of our endeavors obsesses me. And in a larger scale, of course, our human endeavors on the planet, which will of course be burned to a cinder in there and a half billion years anyway. So what does anything matter? Etcetera. As I probably have said to you before, you know, I went from a Roman Catholic boy with god and his heaven and Santa Claus at the age of eleven or twelve or whatever, realizing that it’s all completely phony and it’s just some myth that we’ve been fed to prevent us from committing suicide at a young age. And within three or four years of that, I was thrust into the lap of the existentialists. And I’ve never come back.

Correspondent: Then is work really the only way, the only reason to stay alive?

Boyle: All work is irrelevant. Everything is irrelevant. Our conversation is irrelevant. Literature is irrelevant. Films, love, everything is utterly irrelevant in the face of utter meaninglessness and death. That’s what we live with. Everybody lives with every minute of every day. On the other hand, if you’re not going to shoot yourself tonight, do what satisfies you. What satisfies me is making literature and then sitting here with you talking about it. And also I have honor. I really believe in the power of literature and I like to promote it. I’ve never cheated anybody or hurt anybody — you know, that sort of thing. And that’s simply because that’s my own code. It doesn’t make me any worse than Jeffrey Dahmer, for instance.

Correspondent: Who’s dead.

Boyle: It’s just my point of existence.

(Image: Mark Coggins)

The Bat Segundo Show #385: TC Boyle IV (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: T.C. Boyle III

T.C. Boyle appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #273.

T.C. Boyle is most recently the author of The Women. To listen to our previous interviews with Mr. Boyle, check out The Bat Segundo Show #70 and The Bat Segundo Show #10.

segundo273

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Pondering new author taxonomies.

Author: T.C. Boyle

Subjects Discussed: How to conquer jet lag, Ellen Key’s The Woman Movement, the individual vs. the spirit of the time, feminism and Frank Lloyd Wright, notions of education, Miriam’s presence and hypercaffeinated prose, balancing the women in The Women, the ABAB narrative of the first section and Talk Talk, representing Wright through his women, novelizing a fictive novelist’s biography, Blake Bailey, the burdens of chronological order, parallels between Wright and Boyle, the question of what anybody really knows about history from hearsay, seeing the details through an ever-shifting prism, the novel as a suspect medium, Riven Rock, dashes, sentences, and parenthetical information, annotations and “the rest is commentary,” art standing above morality, balancing empathy and the satirical impulse, rejecting reader expectations, reputation and renown vs. not knowing, why cruelty is necessary, reevaluation, empathy and narcissism, and understanding an artist.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

boyleBoyle: I try to get it both ways. I try to involve you in something in a satiric way. And yet it should also move you. And of course, in this book, I had to do that because of the tragedy of Mamah, which will conclude the book. So you have to set the reader up for that throughout. And I think there is tragedy throughout the book. Tadashi’s life is incredibly tragic in many, many regards. So again, I’m playing one element against the other throughout. And there is commentary upon commentary upon commentary. And, for me, it opened up the structure and it made it fun. It made it invigorating. A lot of the footnotes exist to give you information that I would like you to know about Frank Lloyd Wright and his buildings and where he was at any given time. But a lot of them also, I just express surprise on the part of Tadashi. And I find the hilarious.

Correspondent: Well, the question is: Okay, the reader wants to know about the artist. And essentially you believe — your own particular view is — that the art should stand above any morality. This is interesting because we don’t know about the artists. And simultaneously, well, you do have many details about Taliesin, as well as the skies and the views and all that. But I’m curious if this almost runs counter to the impulse if you’re playing with the reader’s expectations. So that they will never know about the artist, even though this is, in fact, why they read your books. Whether that’s entirely fair to the reader.

Boyle: Well, don’t forget that when I am creating art, I don’t mean to be fair to the reader or unfair to the reader. Those questions lie right outside the parameters of what I’m doing. I’m dreaming something. I’m creating something for my own purposes. I deliberate to you. And I hope that you interact with it in some way. And obviously you do and other readers do. Sophisticated art, to my mind, doesn’t provide answers and doesn’t have an agenda other than art itself. So I think a book like this one, of all my books, is probably the one in which the reader will be most engaged to try and unravel the truth of what it is in its own right. And don’t forget. I’m not writing about an unknown figure here. Kinsey, as you know, was recognizable second only to the President in this country in his time. But by the time I wrote about him, everyone had completely forgotten who he is. No one knows who he is. And Kellogg too was lost to the mists of history. But again, Frank Lloyd Wright, there’s been a thousand books. There’s a cult. People are lined up in Chicago today, freezing, to get in and go on the tour. So this is someone who has been written about eternally and is very well-known. My interest is: How do I get a new angle on this?

Correspondent: So by him being more well known than Kinsey or Kellogg, you can then justify this notion of not knowing Frank Lloyd Wright. That’s what you’re saying. Of the reader not knowing.

Boyle: If this is your interpretation, I would say yes. But again, I think you do know him. You do see him from his point of view a few times. But I didn’t want to represent his point of view a great deal. Because then you know his motivation and you know what he’s thinking. I would rather have it — that’s why I called it The Women. I’d rather have him viewed from other perspectives so that you can make your own determination. And, yes, I think part of that determination is that he was incredibly narcissistic. Maybe one of the most narcissistic people who ever lived. And yet narcissism, as we talked about with regard to Peck Wilson in Talk Talk, can be very damaging to everybody around you. I like to hope and think that I am sympathetic to people whom I meet and with people who are close to me. And that far from damaging them, I might even be aiding them in some way. A narcissist like Frank Lloyd Wright though, or Kinsey or Kellogg, doesn’t view the world in that way. Everybody else is simply valuable, only as they fit into his regime. So I think that any reader, even the least sophisticated reader of this book, will have a portrait of Frank Lloyd Wright that may be more true than what you get from a biography.

(Photo credit: Christopher Felver)

BSS #273: T.C. Boyle III (Download MP3)

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