Fine Music Indeed In the only photograph I have seen of him, T. C. Boyle is in half-light, looking from behind a shroud of wild hair straight at the camera through piercing eyes that must be ice-cold blue. The same picture is used in both his first book, a collection of stories called "The Descent of Man" (1979), and his first novel, "Water Music." Perhaps it's the overall darkness of the photo or the fact that it's a hard facial view that places the author in no context, but the untelling picture and the scant biographical information lead me to believe Boyle wishes to remain at a remove from the reader. In the photo he looks somewhat forbidding, not at all like the author of a novel as lively and expansive as "Water Music." Boyle has something of a following among readers of the small literary magazines. His stories have been published in popular magazines as well. According to the biographical blurb in the 1979 book, which won the St. Lawrence Award for Short Fiction, he was then a contributing fiction editor of the Iowa Review. He also, it said, was teaching creative writing at the University of Southern California and living with his wife, Karen, in Tujunga. The dust jacket of "Water Music" tells us only that "T. Coraghessan Boyle lives in Los Angeles." All of which, I guess, has nothing necessarily to do with "Water Music." The work, as others have liked so to emphasize, should be enough, and "Water Music" is good work indeed. But the writer must know that no one should read a book such as this and not wonder at its creator. Boyle's imagination is soaring. He enjoys the language immensely and uses it with tremendous skill, if not always with restraint. He is not an obscurantist. He is accessible. He is wonderfully, sometimes demonically funny. He favors a pun and is not averse to playing with the words, but not with the reader. No, he takes the readers seriously and gives good return for the dollar. "Water Music" is a tale of parallels. On the one hand, there is Mungo Park, a real Scots explorer who lived from 1771 to 1806 and whose abiding passion is being the first white man to chart the course of the Niger River. On the other hand there is Ned Rise, ill-starred reprobate and denizen of London's lowest society. For most of this galloping 437page odyssey, Park and Rise lead separate lives of desperation. Park, having survived one African expedition, is consumed with making a return, against his wife's strong will. Rise, a scoundrel who inhabits a most unlovable London, is concerned mainly with staying alive. Eventually, Park, the authorized hero, and Rise, whose only mark of success is that he has survived, find themselves struggling against all manner of obstacles—not the least of which are hordes of murderous Moors—to end Park's second expedition with their body parts attached. For a writer whose previously published work has all been short stories, Boyle has moved into a long novel with abundant grace. The pace never falters. He is in complete control of the sort of work that will be described with words such as sprawling, rambunctious, bawdy and boisterous. I guess what I find most laudable about "Water Music" is that Boyle, unlike so many of his peers (he looks to be in his 30s), has passed over existential autobiography and instead given us a vast invention of the mind with astounding success. In the future, I ask only that certain excretory functions occupy him a bit less.
|