T.C. Boyle’s Talk Talk, Part One
Written byPosted on July 10, 2006
Filed Under Boyle, T.C.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Here begins this week's roundtable discussion of T.C. Boyle's Talk Talk. Our first participant was none other than Dan Wickett, who offers this opening salvo. Part Two can be accessed here. Part Three is here. Part Four is here.]
Talk Talk is T.Coraghessan Boyle’s 11th novel and I believe it maintains some traditional TCB aspects. There is a running theme through Boyle’s work that humans are, like all other animals, part of the food chain – both predators and prey, and Talk Talk, with the storyline of a deaf woman having her identity stolen by an ex-con continues that nicely. There is also the steady, wonderful, description of nearly every meal eaten throughout the story, as the not-so-hidden foodie in Boyle can’t help but leech its way into his writing. We also have our usual need for reading Boyle’s work with a dictionary next to us on the couch as he tosses words previously unfamiliar to me at least, Exopthalmia, autophagic, and others with similar numbers of syllables, throughout the work.
Early in Boyle’s career, Boyle was frequently accused of being a writer more concerned with flash and not with substance. He was often described as a writer with incredible skill, willing to write about anything (as in say his short story, “Heart of a Champion,” where Lassie allows a randy coyote to chew little Timmy’s hand nearly off and then runs away with the coyote, or “The Champ” a story about a round by round heavyweight championship between two eaters) and would do so with every writing pyrotechnic available. This accusation, or complaint, was still being lobbed, unfairly in my opinion, at Boyle in what at this point would be considered the middle of his career (novels such as World’s End through The Road to Wellville and the stories being written at that time).
Ever since The Tortilla Curtain came out though, he’s been given a higher standing in the literary community by national critics (though the earlier World’s End did win the PEN/Faulkner award, it wasn’t until The Tortilla Curtain that the majority of critics didn’t toss in a line or two about Boyle’s writing flamboyancy on a regular basis) – seeing his novel Drop City named as a finalist for the National Book Award and receiving the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.
Even while being considered a more mature writer, Boyle has still usually maintained the inclusion of a fairly significant level of black humor in his work. I thought Talk Talk was different in terms of that from even his most recent prior efforts. The humor throughout seemed more insider humor – the deaf woman, Dana Halter, whose identity is stolen has a boyfriend, Bridger Martin. Bridger works at Digital Dynasty, a CGI company and there are a lot of little inside shots at the industry and those working in it. But the humor, to me, is nowhere near the level of dark, insidious humor Boyle is typically known for.
This led me to wonder if, in suppressing this aspect of his writing, Boyle may have learned towards favoring the darker elemented characters in Talk Talk? What ensues after an incredible opening chapter where Dana Halter is pulled over for a routine traffic citation and goes through an Ed Champion-like experience of being dragged to prison, which leads to she and Bridger finding out her identity had been stolen, is a cross-country chase as they believe the thief is headed to Peterskill, New York (home to previous Boyle works and believed to be a fill-in for the place of his growing up).
Boyle rotates sections of this chase between what is going on with Peck Wilson, the thief, and his family, and scenes of Dana and Bridger traveling. I found myself counting the number of pages remaining in the Dana and Bridger sections, anxiously awaiting getting back to Peck’s story. Could Boyle possibly have subconsciously made the “bad” guy in the story the most interesting character while nearly eliminating black humor?
I’m also curious to hear everybody’s thoughts on Boyle’s meshing of two pretty big topics – identity theft and the idea of language and conversation that he created by having the initial identity theft victim being deaf. Was it a good blend, or were there two stories within that could have been served better tackled in individual efforts? More from me on that later, but I’m looking forward to hearing all of your initial thoughts on Talk Talk.
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
Or send materials to:
315 Flatbush Avenue, #231
Brooklyn, NY 11217
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Kirkus’s starred review of TALK TALK, July 15 Kirkus Reviews, available online only until next week:
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/kirkusreviews/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002464499
After reading TALK TALK it seems a natural fit to juxtapose identity and communication…we are a product of our senses. Our senses identify who we are and how the world around us thinks about us.
[...] many lengthy roundtable discussions of books, running during the week of pub date, including T.C. Boyle’s Talk Talk, Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker, and Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke. (Powers and Baker [...]