Thoughts on T. C. Boyle

      What a relief to see that bright yellow jacket. When T. C. Boyle walked onto the stage clad in a shell of neon-bright faux-leather (or real leather?), all of his accolades melted away and I saw just an ordinary guy from Los Angeles (albeit with a strange taste in clothing). It was a relief:

he started what seemed like a stand-up routine with a couple jokes about the airplane industry, followed by a short recount of his interest in story-telling; he remembered his 8th grade teacher, who would read stories like an actor and would captivate his audience of middle-schoolers in order to keep the class calm. Whether or not this is the attitude Boyle had adopted for the purpose of his reading, his performance worked wonders. In fact, Boyle was so captivating in his performance that I have to wonder if I would have even enjoyed the story if I'd simply read it on my own.

       His short story was dedicated to anyone who's woken up dreading going to work. The narrator of his story is tired of video editing at the company where he works, and he figures he could use just one last day off (he's already used up his late days). He needs an excuse instead, so he looks to the easiest scapegoat, his infant child. The story follows the narrator's successive lies as he puts off work for yet another day, just one more day to surf, go the movies, or just do nothing. First his apparently child is sick, then his child dies, then the funeral, etc. When his wife finds the bag of cash his coworkers had given him in condolences, the successive lies have met their end. There's nothing left for him to do but to walk out into the night and leave it all behind him, at least for a little longer.

       I think I was most impressed by some of the techniques Boyle used for shaping time within the narrative. Whenever the story blended into the day-to-day (i.e. the routines him and his wife were accustomed to: taking care of the baby, preparing dinner, grocery shopping), time speeds up, and in some instances, it's completely skipped. I remember specifically one transition from the moment his wife walks into the door in the evening to the next morning. Boyle used an abrupt transition, something like "and then it was morning again." Another transition occurred after the narrator explains to his boss that his child has died: the narrative jumps to the his movie outing later that night. The abruptness of these transitions, and the juxtapositions, highlighted the absurdity of his accomplishment - all these dirty lies for some time at the movies.

       I was especially impressed by Boyle's shift in focalization toward the end of the story. As the repercussions of the narrator's lies start to build onto one another and begin to weigh down his conscience, the story starts to pick out details from the surrounding environment that would otherwise be neglected in favor of plot. I remember one example in particular: "the sinking sun was pasted into the sunset." As his conscience starts to weigh him down and the severity of his actions is slowly revealed, time seems to drag on longer than usual as the sun lingers in the sky during sunset. This detail and others begin to gather as the story moves closer to the end, and I could sense the end even clearer just by this shift in focalization, as if the shift represented the shift in the narrator's mind as the presence of his lies grows larger each second. Time seems to slow down, and it permits a greater attention to vivid detail.