Here’s this quarter’s book feature for Ojai Quarterly, an allusive interview with the delightful-if-doomy T.C. Boyle. (Think that’s part of Boyle’s brilliance: he embeds an awareness of the end of his characters’ lives into the storytelling — so often we see characters up against their uniquely-driven fates. Worse, they know it — which makes us aware of our end, too.)
Boyle’s latest, “Blue Skies,” his nineteenth novel, charges headlong into our future and our perilously rapidly warming climate, which increasingly looks like our earthly fate. I am reminded of what Thoreau said about the arrival of the train to his town of Concord, which he recounted from his little house on Walden Pond.
“To do things “railroad fashion” is now the byword; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track. There is no stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this case. We have constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside.” (“Sounds,” Walden)
Thoreau saw further than he knew: that train was built by coal power, and coal was the first of the fossil fuels destined to change our climate. In “Blue Skies,” the change is underway, it’s the characters who have to struggle to realize it.
Because I think it’s a little easier to read in copy form, here is the traditional version of the story, with an aside and an image or two. Thanks for reading…
Nature’s Revenge: the Wildness of T.C. Boyle
T.C. Boyle’s latest novel, Blue Skies, released this July, opens with a young woman named Cat, just arrived in Florida, and dreaming — we soon learn — of becoming an Instagram influencer. On a walk near the beach, she sees a sleek black snake in a tank in the window of a store.
Mesmerized, she imagines how it might look on her. Boyle writes:
They were like jewelry, living jewelry, and she could see herself wearing one wrapped around her shoulders to Bobo’s or the Cornerstone and sitting at a sidewalk table while people strolled by and pretended not to notice. It would make a statement, that was for sure.
Cat turns into the reptile store, called Herps, and soon finds herself chatting with the amateur herpetologist and owner, who quickly agrees to sell her the little black Burmese python she likes the look of, and for only $300. He does warn her — as does a trusted friend at her favorite bar — that Burmese pythons grow quite large, as long as nineteen feet. They can be dangerous. She pays no attention. She’s confident that her fiance Todd — who doesn’t want to hear any talk of babies — will go along with her when she shows it off to him at home. How could he refuse her?
And so the Chekhovian gun is taken down from the wall and placed on the table and the story begins. The Burmese Python — soon to be known as Willie — goes on to quietly play his biological role to perfection, ruthlessly claiming its rightful place in Boyle’s pantheon of creatures, wild or confined, which quite often turn a Hobbesian red in tooth and claw.
“Do you like it in your stories when nature turns on mankind?” I asked Boyle in an interview. “It’s been suggested by reviewers that that’s what “Blue Skies” is about — the revenge of nature.”
“I avoid interpretive questions because my answer, taken as definitive, will destroy readers’ own interpretations,” Boyle answered. “That said, I do like this line of thought. If you go back to the novel to which this is the companion piece, 2000’s A Friend of the Earth, you will see that a certain rock star living on a ranch in Santa Ynez meets a grisly (and grimly hilarious) fate beneath the claws and incisors of one of his pet lions.”
It’s true, and it’s a fact that T.C. — aka Tom — Boyle has been fascinated with animal-human drama from the start of his career. (His first published story in the 1970’s was a comic reimagining of the Lassie myth, called Heart of a Champion.) And although he doesn’t always side with humanity, his stories consistently surprise. Again and again his stories pit animals against humans, and again and again they overturn the expectations of the humans who think they have the creatures controlled, extirpated, or even just plain understood.
Sometimes the animal surprise turns out to be a good one. Predictability is anathema for Boyle.
In Hopes Rise, a story published in 1991, a middle-aged man is in love with a herpetologist preoccupied with the fate of the earth. He’s desperate for a little affection from her, but because she’s obsessed with the end of nature, she’s uninterested. He goes with her to a scientific convention focused on snakes and frogs. A lecturer warns of an amphibian apocalypse. For years this lecturer has been searching for a certain California toad. It’s gone extinct, he says, and the speaker knows just what that means.
“…everywhere you look the frogs and toads are disappearing, extinction like a plague, the planet a poorer and shabbier place. And what is it? What have we done? Acid rain? The ozone layer? Some poison we haven’t yet named? Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the frogs today and tomorrow the biologists…before we know it the malls will stand empty, the freeways deserted, the creeks and ponds and marshes forever silent. We’re committing suicide! We’re doomed, can’t you see that?”
Our hero’s hopes are momentarily crushed, but desperate to act — for his libido as much as for the frogs — he soon takes his anxious girlfriend out into the wild world, determined to confront the facts together, whatever they may be. And for his determination they are rewarded — sexually. Surprisingly.
In Big Game, another animal-themed story from 1990’s, a teenage cynic goes with her rich father and second wife to a shabby big game hunting preserve in the San Bernardino area, where her parents will go on a game-hunting safari. Besides gazelles and a couple of flea-bitten lions, the biggest star of the tacky “African Game Ranch” is an old elephant named Bessie Bee. The rich father pays $16,500 to shoot her, intending to have her stuffed and mounted as a trophy in his business lobby. Boyle describes the climactic scene from Bessie’s point of view:
For her part, Bessie Bee was more than a little suspicious. Though her eyes were poor, the Jeep was something she could see, and she could smell the hominids half a mile away. She should have been matriarch of a fine wild herd of elephants at Amboseli or Tsavo or the great Bahi swamp, but she’s lived all her fifty-two years on this strange and unnatural continent, amid the stink and confusion of man. She’d been goaded, beaten, tethered, taught to dance and stand on one leg….and then there was this, a place that stank of the oily secrets of the earth, and another tether and more men. She heard the thunder of the guns and she smelled the blood in the air and she knew they were killing. She knew, too, that the Jeep was there for her.
But although Boyle enjoys seeing the tables turned, and is quite certain humanity is doomed — it’s just a matter of a little time, he says — he’s unsentimental about animals themselves. They may be exploited, abused, and even massacred (as are the feral pigs on Santa Cruz Island in After the Killing’s Done, a satirical reimagining of the recent history of Santa Cruz Island) but they’re nothing like the soft pillowy creatures of a Disney cartoon.
An example: this spring along the Central Coast, seals and sea lions in distress from poisoning by domoic acid from bacterial “red tides” often beached themselves on the sand, and even turned aggressive. Surfers waiting in the water for a wave reported being attacked, and even sometimes bitten. When Boyle heard this story, he asked: “Why shouldn’t the seal take the surfboard from these interlopers in the ocean and catch a wave himself?” But in the next breath, he admitted that he too is an interloper in the ocean, and has good reason for fear.
“Some years ago I was bodysurfing alone near San Francisco in some mighty frigid water and noticed that a seal was bodysurfing along with me,” Boyle commented. “I asked myself, what do Great Whites eat and then immediately got out of the water.”
For Boyle, it’s simple.
“If the story is compelling, you follow it,” he said. “As for Cat and her selfish and whimsical purchase, know that the invasive Burmese python decimating mammalian life in the Everglades got there precisely through actions such as hers.”
In 2015, Boyle’s publisher opened a Twitter account for him, and ever since Boyle has used it to post stories and news about book tours and readings — as he continues to write and publish an unending stream of short stories, somehow, astonishingly, even while publishing no less than nineteen novels. But mostly he uses his account (@tcboyle) to post pictures from his life as a working writer, including early morning shots from his foggy street in Montecito, afternoon pictures from his walks to the beach with his Puli dog, and plenty of amusing one-line reactions to comments from fans.
From close-ups of the rats and mice Boyle catches in humane cages (to be later released in the hills, far from his elegant home), to coyote lairs, to seals and sea lions on the beach, to crows and seagulls watching from above, Boyle’s fascination with other species stands out. And he readily admits to enjoying their untamed and unruly ways. No matter what happens to the people who try to control them. .
“As for the convention of good prevailing over evil, I want that to be so but at the same time want to avoid making a catechism of it,” Boyle said. “Take a look, for example, at what happens to the villain in my previous novel, Talk to Me. When Sam, the prevailed-upon chimp in Moncrief’s experiments turned the tables, my heart soared. I created that world and as God and creator I can tip the scales any way I want.”
In the ironically-titled “Blue Skies,” Boyle throws one environmental disaster after another at a Santa Barbara family led by the idealistic mom Ottitle, a blunt father named Frank, and two very different grown siblings: Cat, a pretty young woman with little direction and a bit of a drinking problem, engaged to a liquor promoter, and Cooper, her brother, a frustrated entomologist. As the seas rise, threatening to swamp the condo Todd inherited on the beach in Florida, Cooper in Santa Barbara is bitten by a tiny tick, and the resulting infection — caught too late — costs him an arm. This embitters him all the more. Then at his sister’s wedding, an ex-girlfriend takes him aside and tries to seduce him..
“So what are you saying — you’re turned on by cripples?” he asks her, a little shocked, in the midst of making out.
“Oh, stop it,” the ex-girlfriend says. “You know I’ve always had a thing for you.”
He’s surprised — and put off. We know Boyle’s characters through their flaws. Although not without courage — the mother in “Blue Skies” risks her life to race across the country to her pregnant daughter’s side amidst an incoming hurricane — more often in Boyle’s stories we see unimproved and struggling people. The shallowness in Cat, the bitterness in Cooper, the frustrated helplessness of Ottile, trying to do the right thing in a world that seems not to care — through their limits we understand these characters. As individuals, not heroes.
For Boyle, this can’t be helped. This, in fact, is the way it should be.
“I let my characters find their own way,” he said. “It’s all in the tone, of course, so that the most unworldly characters can be the most compelling (think of the title character of Nabokov’s hilarious and heartbreaking Pnin, for example). Oblivious Cat, hectoring Cooper, and their environmentally-conscious, do-gooder mother, are all part of each of us.”
Climate chaos rules “Blue skies”: with rising seas, a hurricane, a heat wave, a Bug Apocalypse, unexpected squalls that rip apart Cat’s wedding in California, a fire — even a rogue billionaire’s attempt to cool the planet by spreading sulfur dust in the upper atmosphere. Which seems to work, at first. Boyle likes exploring the consequences of climate change in fiction, but fervently refuses any hint of a “message.”
“At least from my point of view, art is not polemical, but rather it is a seduction, so that beginning with an axe to grind is inimical to it,” he said. “I would like to think that my art has wide appeal, but then the people who value that art and the ideas it conveys are the ones who least need convincing about the state we’re in, unlike, for instance, right-wing demagogues and their mindless followers.”
“Blue Skies” has found wide appeal: Boyle said to date it’s the second most popular of his books, behind his modern classic “Tortilla Curtain.” For Boyle, it’s just plain fun. He likes people, he says, and he likes exploring their kinks and quirks in fiction — just as he likes interacting with fans on Twitter and at readings.
“From the beginning on Twitter, I have always posted photos, with comments,” he said. “What am I seeing at this moment? What world is this? Where am I now? People from around the globe respond and that is thrilling. We have built a respectful, joyful, and self-regulating community there. I have never viewed or posted on Twitter otherwise. What fun, huh? What thrilling and hilarious and insuperable fun.”
Kit Stolz 