Welcome to the bizarre -- and humane -- world of T.C. Boyle

T.C. Boyle's latest work, "A Friend of the Earth," is a darkly funny novel set partly in the year 2025 when most of the major mammalian species have become extinct

In this story: Like Roald Dahl and Carl Hiassen combined 'Naturally caffeinated' 'Full of beans' Writing rituals RELATED SITES

NEW YORK (AP) -- Between sips of English breakfast tea, author T.C. Boyle is describing the life cycle of a certain African parasite.

"The Guinea worm you ingest through drinking water and the worm begins to develop -- almost always in your lower leg -- and it's long, a couple of feet long, like an intestinal parasite and it's all wound around inside your leg," he says.

"And you know you have it because your leg hurts and the head of it begins to come out right at your kneecap. But you have to have restraint, because if you pull it out, it breaks off and it rots in your leg and you get gangrene and die."

Pause.

"So you have to take it out with a little stick and twist a piece of it around the stick every day until it all comes out."

Boyle sits back and chortles loudly, gleefully.

"Wow! Imagine the restraint!"

This nugget of information is quintessential Boyle. Like many of his short stories, it's morbidly compelling in much the same way as road kill or reality TV.

Author, professor, eco-conscious resident of California and former heroin junkie, Thomas Coraghessan Boyle -- Tom, to friends -- has gathered a large following over the years. His short fiction is wildly imaginative, a series of savagely funny and bizarre tales that read like Roald Dahl and Carl Hiaasen combined. His eight novels span subjects from cereal king John Harvey Kellogg to hippies and marijuana to immigration in California. His latest book, released in September, is a bleak but wry take on the future of our planet.

"A Friend of the Earth" is a darkly funny novel set partly in the year 2025 when most of the major mammalian species, birds and fish are extinct. The main character, Tyrone Tierwater, is a former eco-terrorist who now manages a pop star's menagerie of some of the last surviving animals. The book echoes the pessimistic view Boyle holds about the fate of the planet and the self-destructive path on which mankind has embarked.

"There's no solution. No matter what we do, it's over," he says. "The only concern of the human race at this point as far as I can see is the environment. And so I projected into the future trends that are happening now. It's a kind of grim comedy about what would happen if the biosphere collapses, what will happen when we have destroyed what allows us to live on the Earth.

"I'm just very horrified and amused by our society," says Boyle, who is breakfasting at his slick midtown Manhattan hotel, across the street from the Algonquin Hotel. "And whenever I really hate or really love or am really disturbed about something, I want to examine it and I don't really know how I feel about something unless I write about it to discover it."

Boyle's thoughts seem to move at about 100 mph -- "I'm naturally caffeinated," he proclaims -- but he doesn't appear frenetic. If anything, he comes across as remarkably centered with a touch of the same sort of glam punk that startled the 1980s.

Boyle's novel, "The Road to Wellville," was made into a 1994 movie starring Matthew Broderick

His reedy 6-foot-3, 160-pound frame is topped with ginger-red Brillo frizz and a neatly trimmed goatee. He is clad in black jeans and a shimmery shirt the color of burnt persimmon. He has silver earrings and a matching ear cuff and a beaded necklace. Wrapped around his wrist is about a week's worth of whitish raffia -- the twine he recycles from the newspapers delivered to his home.

Born Thomas John Boyle in Peekskill, New York, he adopted his unpronounceable middle name (think core-RAG-a-suhn) from a distant relative. His father was a bus driver with an 8th grade education and his mother's family was too poor to send her to college. Both died from alcohol abuse.

"It wasn't an intellectual environment. ... I had no sense of literature or how magical it is until I went to college at 17 and just was kind of transformed by it," Boyle, 53, says.

But his years at the State University of New York at Potsdam ended up being a frustrating, unfulfilling stab at a music career. (Up to a few years ago, he played saxophone in a band called the Ventilators.) When he graduated, he applied for a teaching deferment instead of signing up for Vietnam and ended up finding a job in a school in a sketchy neighborhood of Peekskill. He also began to write in earnest -- an effort that paid off when he was accepted to the prestigious Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he honed his skills under craftsmen like John Cheever and John Irving while earning a masters of fine arts in fiction. He also received his doctorate in British literature from the university.

"I was a wild and crazy and degenerate kid until I went to graduate school at the age of 25," Boyle says. "It was close. But I think to be a junkie, you have to want to be a junkie -- that is to have no hope or faith. And I did."

The accolades began rolling in. Besides fellowships and grants, Boyle also won the PEN/Faulkner award for his novel, "World's End," several O. Henry Awards for his short stories, the Prix Medicis Etranger award in Paris for best foreign novel for "The Tortilla Curtain," and the Bernard Malamud Prize for Short Fiction for "T.C. Boyle Stories," a 693-page tome that spans more than 25 years.

"His writing is very plotty, energetic, funny," says Alice K. Turner, fiction editor of Playboy magazine. "There are a lot of writers out there who write with rather careful, flat realism. Tom doesn't to that. His writing is full of beans."

His next book, another collection of short stories called "After the Plague," is due out next fall.

"I am an entertaining writer who also works -- I hope and think -- at the highest intellectual level and the highest artistic level," Boyle says. "And also a very subversive writer so that a lot of the comedy comes from inversion, things you wouldn't expect or when the normal facade of things is turned over and you can see the belly of it. That for me provides a lot of the comedy."

Boyle has never been shy about self-promotion, but he bristles when people take that as arrogance.

"Arrogance to me means that you're kind of heartless and single-minded in adoring yourself and looking down on everybody. I don't think that describes me at all. I guess self-confidence is more like it.

"A lot of it is bravado, too, especially when I was younger, or especially when you're on a book tour. You're trying to convince yourself that you're good and that it's going to happen and so maybe you inflate yourself in order to keep yourself from worrying about the other side."

He lives in Santa Barbara, California, with his wife and three children, and divides his time between writing and teaching creative writing at the University of Southern California.

Somewhat of a technophobe, Boyle has only recently graduated to computers from the portable Olivetti typewriter his mother gave him when he was a teen. His 17-year-old son, Milo, has even set up a Web site, complete with a fan message board which Boyle responds to on a regular basis.

His writing ritual?

"There's a lot of voodoo involved in creative writing anyway and what I'll do each morning is go out to the hen house, get a chicken, bleed it into a pan and put my bare feet in it and when the chicken blood is cool, I stop writing for the day," he says, deadpan.

Seriously: "I work three, four hours a day and when I can't stand it anymore or it's very, very flat, then I just forget about it and go do some physical activity. I couldn't imagine sitting there trying to work all day long because you're just wracked with misery then.

"And this is why, by the way, I keep a loaded gun on my desk so I can commit suicide at any moment." Another joke.

"Every year or so there's some writer discovered who's 27 and he's written some massive novel and nobody's ever heard of him and he makes a trillion dollars and gets 16 movie sales and everybody's grinding their teeth and every writer thinks: 'Why not me?'

"Then it could happen the way its happened with me: each book I get more readers, each book everything accumulates. I win prizes, I travel the world, everything is great. It just kind of snuck up on me. I got everything I was trying to get in the beginning anyway."

Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

TCBoyle.com
Viking Press (Penguin Putnam)

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