Literary Event: TC Boyle

I went into TC Boyle's reading without any knowledge of his work.  Before I walked over to Cemex, I Google Image searched him to get an idea of what he looked like, because a) clearly that way I'd learn more about him than by actually reading one of his stories, and b) it wasn't like I'd be seeing him anyway in twenty minutes or something like that.  I thought he looked like some famous actor, but couldn't put my finger on who.  My roommate agreed, yes he certainly does look like someone from a blockbuster, but she couldn't offer any name either.   He looked vaguely piratey I thought, but it could have just been the earring.

Boyle's appearance presaged his performance a little in the way one hears the entirety of a familiar melody release in the mind, briefly and prophetically, when the first chord strikes.  He wore a yellow suit jacket.  He looked like a banana.  But his voice -- metrically crisp, sonically clear, resonant, commanding -- contrasted the comedy but did not belie it; rather, introduced the confluence of two understandings, the light and the meaningful, the diverting and the enduring, which remained fixtures through the story he read.  The Lie, a short story which took Boyle thirty minutes to read aloud -- including pauses containing both dramatic effect and moments of release for audience laughter -- actually, and with no exaggeration, kept me leaning forward in my seat the entire time.

The Lie is not a unique story, but it was told individually and distinctively well.  More than anything else, it particularized the kinds of feelings and experiences we experience generally, experience in part, or experience with an intent to forget.  The story focalized around a man who doesn't want to go to work, calls sick, goes to the movies, and repeats.  The catch is that he must offer taller and taller lies to his boss and coworkers in order to keep up his absences, ultimately lying over the "death" of his infant daughter.  Perhaps the most stomach-twisting part of the narrative is when his coworkers force him to accept a grocery bag full of cash as an offer of condolences.  What does he do with it?  He shoves it under the kitchen sink -- and when his wife gets a sympathy call and finds the cash, it's game over.

While Boyle's story certainly made me think of the lies we tell in our lives -- their potential for enormity, the anxiety -- it also made me think of the place of lies in fiction.  Fiction as an act and study appeals to me, in part, because of the way it makes useful three of my least useful abilities: lying, exaggeration, and daydreaming.  Boyle's story compels us to consider not only the lies we find in stories, but the stories we find in lies, and the narrative propulsion that's found in our swift ability to distort reality.  If you tell a lie often enough, you begin to believe it, and fiction serves the purpose of reifying a fib's proposed reality.

This discussion reminds me of an earlier discussion we had in the course, when we were studying trauma narrative -- what is the nature and place of "truth" in narrative?  What are its limits, and when does the "unreal" represent the truth more accurately than reality?  I am asking this question with Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried particularly in mind; O'Brien often tells "untrue" stories because they hit at "the truth of the matter," the lasting impressions, more effectively than "what really happened."  Boyle's story The Lie exemplified, in a way, not only the gripping potential of a lie, but the gripping potential of storytelling, which does not easily discriminate what is a lie from what is not (or even if it is important.)