Category: T.C. Boyle

Links: Good Enough for Government Work

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Adam Haslett, Cormac McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, T.C. Boyle, Tobias Wolff

I recently finished Adam Haslett‘s novel on financial malfeasance and the definition of good citizenship, Union Atlantic. More soon, but for now suffice to say it’s a rare case of a novel I wished were longer. Turns out Haslett cut out plenty.

Parents of students at a high school in Santa Rosa, California, recently attempted to pull T.C. Boyle‘s The Tortilla Curtain from its reading list. Boyle’s response: “I do take it as a badge of honor…. It’s preposterous. Look at what kids are exposed to daily in the pure crap on TV or at the movies or rock and roll—it’s a free country. This is art. How many rape scenes do you suppose the average child has seen watching TV in his life?”

A Harvard Crimson columnist reads the first section of Philip Roth‘s American Pastoral and detects a “heavy fog of exhausted and demoralized irony,” whatever that is. Failing to complete the novel doesn’t prevent the writer from drawing comparisons to The Road. Now, committing acts of comparative literature can be great fun, but it works a lot better when you’ve actually finished both books. I had assumed this was taught at Harvard.

Joyce Carol Oates recalls growing up in Lockport, New York—a hometown that, she notes, she shares with Timothy McVeigh. Her interest in creepy violence in both fiction and nonfiction being well-documented, it makes a certain sense that she’d be tapped as a source for a story on Amy Bishop.

Tobias Wolff inspires a tattoo.

Ole Miss is trying to come up with a new mascot. Why not William Faulkner?

A documentary on David Goodis is now available on DVD. The trailer:

Links: New Deal

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Aleksandar Hemon, Bret Easton Ellis, Claire Messud, Elliott Holt, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Goddard Jones, John Updike, Myla Goldberg, Porochista Khakpour, T.C. Boyle

Guest editor Claire Messud dedicates the new issue of Guernica to women writers, including Holly Goddard Jones, Porochista Khakpour, and Elliott Holt. In her introductory essay, Messud writes: “Here’s the deal: men, without thinking, will almost without fail select men. And women, without thinking, will too often select men…. Our cultural prejudices are so deeply engrained that we aren’t even aware of them: arguably, it’s not that we think men are better, it’s that we don’t think of women at all.”

Aleksandar Hemon (also in Guernica): “I think the short story has been revived by these so-called immigrant writers; they do not know what the common lore is so they don’t care about it.”

John Updike never reviewed T.C. Boyle‘s books, and don’t think Boyle didn’t notice. But that that doesn’t mean Updike did him no favors.

This Side of Paradise will be a musical.

So will American Psycho.

Daniel Green has assembled an impressive list of major author interviews (i.e., non newspaper-phoners) that are available online. HTMLGiant wants suggestions for worthy additions to it. (I have one!)

Myla Goldberg: “Writing—it’s sort of the opposite of blogging and tweeting because I’m trying to conceal. I don’t want you to see me.”

Links: The “Intergalactically Challenging Jacket” and More

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Jennifer Weiner, Joseph O'Neill, Kaye Gibbons, Paul Theroux, T.C. Boyle, Toni Morrison

The summer issue of Lapham’s Quarterly is dedicated to travel, excerpting Paul Theroux‘s Dark Star Safari, Marilynne Robinson‘s Gilead, Tobias Wolff‘s This Boy’s Life, and Jack Kerouac‘s On the Road, among many other writers around the world and throughout history. The journal’s Web site features James Franco reading that Kerouac excerpt in an appropriately slackerish way. The most entertaining piece, though, not online, is a 1935 article from Pravda describing the despairing life of American cities, which are sad and largely empty of people. Contrary to popular belief in the Soviet Union, the authors write, in New York and Chicago “brokers don’t run down the sidewalks knocking over American citizens; they simmer, invisible to the public, in their stock exchanges, making all kinds of shady deals in those monumental buildings.” The West Coast is no better: It’s home to the “American film industry, which releases around a thousand well-made but egregiously tasteless and idiotically stupid films per year.”

Speaking of Theroux, he recalls hanging out at Michael Jackson‘s Neverland, and talking with the late pop star on the phone in the wee hours about, among other things, his reading habits: “‘Somerset Maugham,’ he said quickly, and then, pausing at each name: ‘Whitman. Hemingway. Twain.'”

Jennifer Weiner on studying under Toni Morrison: “Toni Morrison used to read her students’ work out loud, and hearing her read it made me believe that it was good (of course, Toni Morrison being Toni Morrison, she could have been reading my grocery list and I would have thought, ‘Genius!’ She’s one of the world’s all-time great readers).”

Edgar Allan Poe, supernatural detective.

The sad, long struggle of Kaye Gibbons.

Ernest Hemingway‘s grandson has reworked Papa’s posthumous memoir, A Moveable Feast, in a way that “attempts to give the impression of a work which is not completed but which is nevertheless readable.”

The second issue of Wag’s Revue is now online, with an interview with T.C. Boyle as its centerpiece. Excerpt: “I do not reveal much of myself, either publicly or in the work. I may have no problem wearing an intergalactically challenging jacket on TV and cracking jokes with the best of them or investing everything I have in a performance of a story, either live or recorded, but all of that is simply a way of rubbing up against the public world while all the while keeping the private world private.”

Joseph O’Neill ponders the president reading Netherland: “I suppose you flatter yourself that the story is the history of the United States. That’s the weird, disorienting feeling you get.”

And, apropos of nothing in particular except that anybody who follows the Washington Nationals badly needs a laugh, this is great.

Red Room–What Is This Thing, Again?

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ishmael Reed, T.C. Boyle

I wrote a few weeks back about the launch of Red Room, a San Francisco-based Web site that intends to be a destination for readers who want to know more about their favorite authors. At the time I voiced some skepticism about the usefulness of the site–why do I need a portal to find an author when I have Google?–but with a new story about the site in the San Jose Mercury News (via), I gave it another look.

The story attempts to make some noise about Barack Obama being a new member on the site, but what’s on his page? His “blog” has one entry, and it’s the transcript of a month-old speech. There’s nothing else there–videos, book links, reviews–that I couldn’t find just as easily elsewhere. Ishmael Reed, the story tells me, with some excitement, has a page at Red Room. His blog? It’s got one entry, three months old, and it’s a quote he gave to a newspaper. The Salman Rushdie page getting the big push on the homepage hasn’t been updated since December. Which author pages have been recently added on the site? At a glance, I can’t tell.

This is silly, and more silliness is encapsulated in this sentence in the story:

“Readers can also join but they do not get pages.”

If this is some new frontier in social networking for book types, it’s flailing. There’s no reason why any self-respecting writer who wants to connect with readers can’t start their own blog or Web site, and while I understand that Red Room has an interest in making it clear who the writers are and who the readers are, I can’t even make pals with other readers. Does T.C. Boyle have fans? You bet he does. Can I connect with them through Boyle’s Red Room page? No, I cannot.