Where to Start With: T.C. Boyle

The Tortilla Curtain (1995)
According to Boyle, this provocative novel is his book most often selected for citywide and university reads. Perhaps that’s because its themes remain as relevant today as they were 20 years ago: the fate of Mexican migrants and what happens when they come into conflict with well-heeled Americans, the degradation of the environment, and the tendency for drought-stricken California to flare up in wildfires. Or maybe the book is selected for community read-ins because it’s a humdinger of a story.

T.C. Boyle Stories (1998)
T.C. Boyle’s early novels earned plenty of accolades, including a Pen/Faulkner Award for 1987’s World’s End, but I tend to prefer his more recent novels, since Boyle has since refined his storytelling skills to virtuoso levels. On the other hand, I love his raw, surprising early short stories, collected in this 1998 volume, especially my all-time favorite, “Stones in My Passway, Hellhound on My Trail,” a harrowing, quick-as-a-flash tale about blues musician Robert Johnson.

The Inner Circle (2004)
When I interviewed Boyle in 2007, he was at work on The Women, a novel inspired by the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, and a book he described as being part of his “great egomaniacs of the 20th century” series, which also includes 1993’s The Road to Wellville, about John Harvey Kellogg. If forced to choose just one of Boyle’s egomaniac books, I’d pick The Inner Circle, because Boyle and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey are a match made in literary heaven. Told from the perspective of Kinsey’s fictional assistant John Milk, this novel is full of humor, conflict, and sex, of course.

Drop City (2003)
This novel, a finalist for the National Book Award, concerns a group of hippies living in the Drop City commune in Sonoma, California, in 1970. Government officials seek to oust them because “nobody wanted a free-form community in their midst, because free-form meant anarchy, it meant a cordillera of trash a mile high and human shit in the woods.” They relocate to Boynton, Alaska, to the consternation of the native population, and living off the land becomes a lot more intense for the acid-laced hippies.

The Harder They Come (2015)
Boyle doesn’t make despicable characters likeable, but he always manages to render them at least compelling and human, and that gift has perhaps never been stronger than in his most recent novel. The book, inspired by recent events, is told from three perspectives—that of a 70-year-old Vietnam veteran who kills a would-be robber in Costa Rica with his bare hands; that man’s mentally disturbed son Adam, who heads into the California wilderness and lives there as an outlaw, breaking into cabins and growing poppies for opium; and Adam’s lover, an anti-government woman whose relationship with Adam culminates in a crime spree. It’s volatile material, and in Boyle’s sure hands, it’s riveting.