The Writing Life Too

"Bullies, Bastards and Bitches...with sub-plots" re: the fiction of T.C. Boyle (guest entry by W. Dale Sturdavant
There's a light that fills you up when you're writing; there's a magic...It's a miracle and it's a rush...It's so utterly thrilling to me, it's all I want to do...T. Caraghessan Boyle

Apologies to Jessica for borrowing the title of her newest book, but Boyle creates some of the most loathsome bad guys in the fictional universe. These are sinister fellows; sociopaths with hearts of stone, brains blazing with evil. Boyle fleshes out their nefarious traits in sub-plots. The bullies creep and slither through the pages, tormenting, raping, pillaging. Boyle's abused protagonists, meanwhile, push ahead, vulnerable, but resilient, fighting back with wit, courage and spunk. Sometimes they even win. Regardless of the outcome, the battles always entertain.
Boyle opens his most recent novel, Talk, Talk (2006), with a hearing-impaired young woman panicked at discovering an identity thief has turned her life upside down: checking and savings accounts drained, credit cards run up to their limits, herself perceived as villain by a legal system not yet adapted to computer crime. Her plight unfolds in increments, each new twist compounding her disaster. She could crumple, reach for the Valium, wallow in victim hood; but Boyle makes her a fighter, a pit bull on two legs and steroids.
We turn the page and enter an underworld inhabited by our reprehensible villain. He's a narcissistic, ex-con, con man with expensive tastes--and a "material girl" fiance (the "bitch" of Jessica's pantheon of antagonists)who pesters him with ever more lavish demands. Keeping his woman plush with goodies, his own body be-jeweled like a pimp's, our thief cruises from coast to coast in his new Cadillac (leased with another man's credit), feeling like a Man, smugly superior to the working fools who unwittingly fill his coffers. Providing for his "family" (fiance has a young son) becomes the bastard's rationale for increasingly grandiose schemes to plunder other people's money. He partner's up with an old prison buddy and learns to use black-market software. With a little research and a few clicks of the mouse, he upgrades his victims pool and garnishes their wealth in larger and larger chunks.
Informed with extensive research, a quality evident in all his novels, Boyle leads us through the shady world of financial terrorism. Tension builds between plot and sub-plot and sparks begin to fly. Our implacable heroine, having lost her teaching job at a school for the deaf, quickly realizes the system isn't on her side. She sets out to track down the thief who's made such a shambles of her life.
Boyle tosses a cascade of obstacles into the paths of both heroine and villain. Plot and sub-plot twist, churn, bump against each other and finally intersect.
"Talk, Talk" ( a phrase the hearing impaired use to describe what the rest of us do)shook me up, left me feeling almost vulnerable, a mere mouse click from financial ruin. And not nearly as clever and courageous as the heroine. I loved the suspense, the writing, the realistic foray into a mind frozen in cold-blooded greed. So did Universal Pictures, which purchased the rights to Talk, Talk and is currently producing a film version.