Talk Talk - T.C Boyle

Impersonation/Identity theft are themes that have been mostly used in crime/spy fiction. The reason could be that in earlier days it happened only when serious crime and a lot of planning was involved and hence it was something that seemed to happen only in novels and very rarely did we get to hear about it happening in real life to someone we knew. So we never got to know the actual ramifications of the identity theft other than that the affected person caught the perpetrator and brought him before justice. The only related point to this in 'general' fiction has been the concept of identity/doppelganger used for philosophical musings as in for instance 'The Double' or 'The White Castle'. But in our digital age, identity theft is not something that is so difficult to do. Just leave your credit card unattended for some time and some one can take up your identity at least for the duration of a single transaction. T.C Boyle takes up this concept and has tried to give us an insight on the people affected and the  perpetrator of the Identify theft, traversing a different path from the thriller genre, a path that is relevant for our age.

'Dana' a 30 something hearing impaired woman leaps a signal and is stopped by the police. And this is where her life turns completely around and becomes a never ending nightmare. A routine check on her reveals crimes like non-payment of days, jumping of bail etc and she is jailed. She manages to prove that it's a case of identity theft and is released but her problems are just beginning with creditors showing up everywhere. The rest of the novel is about Dana and 'Bridger' her boyfriend trying to find the person behind this identity theft.

The first portion of the novel is the best part of the book. The impact that the sudden collapse of one's carefully constructed world has on a person is brought out in a frightening manner. Have you ever faced a situation where you have faced unforeseen trouble or any other situation which is completely unexpected? How do we react or handle it. First the incredulity that that something like it can happen to us, the refusal of the mind to believe what has happened, then the optimism that things will soon be alright, then the sneaking suspicion that the issue may not be solved as soon as we initially thought and finally getting to a state where we are almost numb and end up accepting what has happened. Dana goes through all these emotions when she is jailed. Being jailed on a Friday afternoon, she has to spend the weekend too at the Jail without bail till Monday. It may not be something out of 'The Trial', but Dana's internment is also horrific. Dana is not even then sure why she has been jailed and with communication problems, the general apathy of the police to convey what exactly has happened or to even listen to Dana complicates matters and it's 2 days of hell for her in the jail.

Dana is a feisty, spunky character and Boyle has made sure that she is neither someone who needs others help for everything nor some kind of superwoman  who can take on the world on her own. She lives life on her terms yes, (even teaching at a non-hearing impaired school which she has wanted all her life), but she is not beneath calling Bridges to help her out. The details of her everyday life may seem a bit extraneous, but give us an idea of how challenging is their everyday life and how they take head on things that we take for granted. For e.g. the light that goes on in her room when someone rings the door bell, the answering machine which gets cut off automatically after the recorded voice of Dana asks the person calling to send an email instead of leaving a message. These little things build up a fleshed out picture of Dana which in turn makes the reader relate to her better.

The relationship between Dana and  Bridger too is handled well. Yes, they seem to love each other, but it doesn't mean that they are all lovey-dovey always. There is also a bit of practicality involved in it. When Bridger first goes to the police station after learning about Dana's imprisonment, he has to wait there for a long time without anyone telling him what's going on (the 'State' seems to behave the same way in all countries doesn't it). During the whole time, a part of his mind is on his office and the work he has left hanging, thinking how he can convince his boss. Later he tries to get a lawyer and when learns of the cost involved, he doesn't proceed further as he cannot afford it and decides to wait till Monday. No selling of whatever he has for the beloved like a 'true' lover should do. The friction in their relationship due to this is actually the main thread of this novel, even supplanting their search for the person behind the identity theft. The first hints of the friction comes when Dana rants and even kind of assaults Bridger at his office, where she has come after knowing that she has been terminated from her dream job. So what does Bridger do? Is he the concerned lover understanding what Dana is going through, consoling her and taking her losing her cool in his stride. No, he too snaps at her and calls her crazy. So when the two set of on a road trip to find the person behind all this, you are actually thing whether their relationship would survive at the end of all this instead of thinking about whether they will achieve what they are setting out for.

Boyle now shifts his focus to 'Peck Wilson' the man who has stolen Dana's identity. It's interesting for a bit to see Wilson, as we try to understand his motives, the person behind the facade Wilson is showing to the world. There are some genuinely thrilling moments when Wilson becomes aware that Dana/Bridger have come to know about him and he starts taking counter measures. At this points, you are fully rooting for Dana/Bridger and hoping that whatever Wilson is attempting now ends up as a failure.  But unfortunately, the novel starts going downhill from this point on. Wilson ends as some kind of borderline psychopath, not the kind that would go around killing people, but a kind where the person is at war with the whole world, a person who thinks that the world owes him everything and when things go wrong starting blaming everything and everyone else except himself. Now, it's not bad if you have a villain who is the embodiment of all evil as in crime fiction. But Wilson ends up being neither an arch villain nor a well formed character. As I said above the only thing we can take from the novel about him is that he seems a bit psychotic. The to and fro moves between Dana/Bridger and Wilson too end up not amounting to much. I didn't expect highly thought out actions by the characters, as in a crime fiction (indeed I would have been disappointed if it had been like that) as the clash is between 2 normal people and a person who though is a con man is clearly not in the league of the professional criminals. So you wouldn't/shouldn't expect a page turner kind of intensity in this chase, but even considering that Dana and Bridger's road trip seem to be a journey to nowhere and you just want it to end. The end just before the epilogue was too cheesy. It's like Boyle wanted Dana to have a epiphanic moment where she confronts her own fears and put it in the ending. It is so unlike Boyle to cater to such soppy moments, but maybe he wanted to give the readers a boost at the end. I think the moment may actually be liked by many and I am be a minority in not liking it, but it left me cold.

Boyle is back to form though, immediately in the epilogue. As a contrast to the event before it, I think the epilogue may actually be hated by many, but I dug it. It's typical Boyle and long time readers would relate to this more. One can talk a lot about selfishness, self-preservation, ingratitude, but that's the way life works out a lot of times and anyway one cannot judge another, without going through what the other has and even then every one reacts differently isn't it?

Life all Boyle novels, this too left me in two minds, neither liking it very much nor hating it. One thing however is sure. You can rant about his works, hate them, but one can never accuse Boyle of repeating himself. Every book of his is a different journey, a canvas which you have not seen in his earlier works. he can just about take you anywhere. Now you may hate the journey, never even reach the end or could love the whole thing, but the freshness of it all cannot be denied. I guess that's what keeps me going back to Boyle's works, especially his novels which I haven't like as much as his short stories.

Drop City - T.C Boyle - A glimpse of a lost generation

Hippie - The word brings to mind a lot of images, many of them not flattering. In India too the word has mostly a negative meaning, even though India was one of the major points of the East meets West scenario that was happening in those days (for e.g. Beatles interacting with Ravishankar, their spiritual journeys through India etc). I daresay, R.D. Burman's excellent 'Dum Maro Dum' and it's picturization has had a great impact on the general mindset. The common opinion one has of this culture is of free love, promiscuity, drugs, some new age spiritual mumbo-jumbo, in short a bunch of layabouts doing nothing except enjoying themselves. On the other side, the hippies  saw themselves as some kind of counter revolutionaries, rebelling against the oppressive/consumerist society and the wars that were raging during that period. What is the truth actually? As in all cases, it would like somewhere in between. This hippie period and it's culture is the focus of T.C Boyle's novel 'Drop City'.

The story revolves mostly around the inhabitants of  Hippie commune 'Drop City' in California. They try to keep themselves out of the 'straight' society as they call those who are integrated into the normal social fabric, but are forced to leave the commune as the Government takes over it. Meanwhile parallel to this narrative is another one where a young woman wanting to live as close to nature as possible marries a person in remote Alaska who himself is living in the mountains. In a way both the hippies and the young couple are similar in that both shun the modern life and want to back to their roots as it were. The head of the commune has inherited a land in Alaska (close to where the couple live) from his uncle and so the commune heads off to Alaska to make a new start. The rest of the novel is about happens there, their integration in a new place and the disruption it causes.

Boyle has made sure that the hippies are not caricatures and gives a balanced view of things. Yes, there are deadbeats, bums who just want to get high and be stoned always. But what were they before that? Boyle shows just a glimpse here through 'Star', a (so-called)normal middle class person, a teacher no less, living with her parents, whom one just cannot associate with the hippies, but one who was actually bottling up her feeling to such an extent that it had burst out one day and she gave up everything. In a few strokes, Boyle passes on to us the claustrophobia that a lot of us feel in our daily lives, just that most don't act on it, but some like Star do. The following paragraph shows us how Star felt hemmed in her home.

"When she got home at night she balled up her pantyhose in her own petite-sized pantsuits, flung them on the floor in her room and lay stretched out on the floor with a speaker pressed to each ear, staring at the flecks and whorls of the thrice-painted ceiling while Janis Joplin flapped and soared over the thunderous changes of 'Ball and China' "

Boyle has always been great in capturing the 'everyman' a person who is neither well integrated into society and nor given it up fully, always caught between the pull of the social normal and of the dangerous but more exciting counter culture. Sadly though, this strokes of characterization are few (which I will come to a bit later). Another thing to be noted here is that while the characters may be slackers for working in the society, they are ready to contribute their bit to the commune, whether it is cooking food,  getting stashes of pot, building cabins etc. 

Free love is one of the most quoted aspects of this culture, but Boyle shows that even here women were the ones who were victimized. In the guise of free love, men took advantage of women wherein a man could cohabit with multiple women, even forcing them sometimes for sex, in the name of love, making sure that he got what he wanted irrespective of the woman's choice. There is even a hint of jealousy (in Ronnie's character) when the woman he hooked up with, goes with another man. But again as in the case of characterization, this done in an almost off hand manner, somewhat diluting the impact it could have had.

This is event driven novel than a character driven one. The prose has a kind of somnambulistic quality to it which one could boring at times, but which is perfect when you think of the fact that most of the characters are stoned out of their minds most of the time and you are viewing the events through their eyes, in a glazed manner mostly in slow motion. Boyle has got the tone of the narrative pitch perfect. You always have a sense of foreboding while reading, a disaster just waiting to happen, a darkness hanging over the entire novel, whether it be for the inhabitants of the commune or the young couple at Alaska. In case of the commune it's a feeling that they will self-destruct, whereas in the case of the young couple it is a feeling that nature will finally get the better of them. That's another thing to be mentioned, the prose of the narrative arc of the couple is more clear without none of the hazy feeling. This is again in tune with their living in the wilderness where they have to be up on their toes always and cannot afford to lounge around hazily. Boyle works have always been environmentally conscious  and here also this shows through in the loving way he describes the wilderness, the beauty and treachery it hides and the eternal fight of man to survive in it.

For all the things going for it, the novel ultimately remains an engaging one and does not take the next step where it consumes the reader. I am not saying that it's a bad thing to be only engaging, but there seems to be a lot of potential wasted or rather ignored here. For instance the part of the young couple is hanging outside the main core of the novel. Now, I try to follow Updike's tenet where he said the one should not criticize what the author didn't attempt at all, but only what he has done, but here I think I am justified in doing so. When a narrative arc takes up 30% of the novel and finally does not mesh with the overall structure you get the feeling that it's a wasted part of the novel. When the commune finally makes it way to Alaska, you expect a clash of cultures/ideals between the couple and the commune, one working hard to make a living, the other just wanting to take it easy. Because one thinks that was the point of having the 2 different narrative arcs. But beyond a few sporadic interactions (with an eye on plugging in the novel's end logically) it doesn't happen. You could have taken the part about the couple out and got a separate novella. The part about the hippies alone could have been enough, but I think Boyle wanted a counterpoint to their ideals in the form of the hard working couple, but somehow didn't go through it fully. 

Another peeve I have about the novel is the characterization and I am going to play devil's advocate here. I do not feel that well rounded characters or coherent narratives are an absolute must for great fiction. Great fiction can have well defined plots/characters driving or it can be a narrative tour de force, heck it can just about be anything, how can one quantify it, I can just say what I felt was lacking here. One can read an entire Pynchon novel, come out of it not fully understanding what novel was about and still be consumed by it, one can read 1000 pages of 'Infinite Jest' on just ennui and happiness, with innumerable characters and burn in it's fever. Let's take 2666. Is it a complete novel, can't we treat the 5 parts as separate novellas, doesn't it just have a very thin thread(Archimboldi) running it's entire length and nothing much to link it. But can one come out of 'The part about crimes' without wanting to puke, your senses numbed by the violence after a descent through hell. How does that happen, can we just say that violence in that part was gratuitous and somehow it affected. Noway, this is where the narrative strength plays a part in either totally embracing the reader or just end up giving a hug (as in the case of 'Drop City'). The narrative hums along nicely, but never seems to reach the destination of total gratification. We enjoy the journey but at the end are left a bit dissatisfied. The major outcome of the lack of characterization is that the novel at 440 odd pages seems long at times and becomes sluggish. Because when you do not know about the characters and it's nearly 250 odd pages before the commune starts to Alaska you start to feel the length of the novel. There are not even small hints about the characters (like the para about 'Star' I have given earlier in the post) which the reader can fill in with his imagination. Its not like Boyle can't do it, but I think he has not wanted to do it. There is a 2-3 page portion when the commune is on their road trip to Alaska, where all the women are having a chat. In those pages, Boyle shows a side of them that was not revealed earlier and makes see them in a different light. Alas, this too is too short to make a lasting impact and that's what kills me about the novel. It promises much at several points but always ends up short. So what happens is whatever is mentioned about the characters, is too hazy for the reader to fill up and after a point he just gives up. When 'Pamela' the young lady who chose a husband to live in the wilderness says she is pregnant, you don't fell like 'how is she going to survive in this condition, how will this affect the dynamics of the couple's relationships, will she go back to her place leaving her husband' etc. It just doesn't hit you at all. 

The lack of clarity on the characters does not have a totally negative impact, but indeed has a rather curious one. When certain events happen one does not think about why a character did that, his motives and how another character will be affected by it. Rather we think about it in generic terms. For example if X commits adultery, we do not think about why X did it or how Y is affected by it, rather our thoughts go to the general idea of adultery, it's prevalence in society, the reasons for it etc. This is not a bad thing at all, but in the context of the novel it doesn't help much, especially when your narrative is not strong enough to overcome the lack of characterization. Somehow this has been the case with the works of Boyle that I have read so far in the past 3-4 years. I have enjoyed all his works, but that's it, I have not been driven to read the next Boyle book after completing one. Whenever I come across a Boyle book I pick it up, but there has been no urgency from my end to read his works. Yes, it's a subjective opinion but the peeves I have put forth about this novel may be the reason for it.

Do not be put off by my cribbing about this novel. At the end it made me think of a couple of things. Once was about the hippies in general. Most of them would be in their mid 60's by now. So what happened to them after the party got over in the 70's, did they get assimilated into the 'straight' society that they hated so much, did they get jobs, got married and are now leading a leisurely pensioner's life. Or couldn't they let go of it and remained on the edges of society, a mostly forgotten lot now. Another thought was trying to place the hippie culture in current times in relation to our current lifestyle. The hippie culture being reactionary to wars, pressure of modern life etc would fit in perfectly with our times where in addition to wars, we have 'genocides'(several in the last decade itself) the pressure of modern life has increased manifold from the 60's, but why is there no revival of the movement or any other major counter culture movement.  Maybe the hippies were misguided, slackers but they seem to have some vague concept of peace and love, however misplaced it may have been. But a generation later we seem to be beyond all that, the corporate gurus/swamis of today are playing a major here emphasising on the individual being happy, not feeling bad about whatever happens outside, just remove all traces of guilt about what you do. So people today still use drugs, but do it in the weekend rave party, have fun and on Monday get ready for another round of corporate warfare. The gurus do not solve anything, they just put off the bursting point for some more time but for now all are happy. And if any movement does start, the corporate-media coalition makes sure to block it out, like the 'Occupy' movements. Any book that gives you food for thought and raises uncomfortable questions about yourself is not to be ignored. So if you come across this book give it a try.