Boyle, T. Coraghessan 1948–

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Boyle, T. Coraghessan 1948–

(T.C. Boyle, Thomas Coraghessan Boyle)

PERSONAL: Middle name pronounced "kuh- raggissun"; born Thomas John Boyle, December 2, 1948, in Peekskill, NY; changed middle name to Coraghessan when he was seventeen; married Karen Kvashay, 1974; children: Kerrie, Milo, Spencer. Education: State University of New York at Potsdam, B.A., 1968; University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, M.F.A., 1974, Ph.D., 1977.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of English, University of Southern California, THH 430, University Park, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0354. Agent—Georges Borchardt, 136 E. 57th St., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER: Writer. Professor of English, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1977–.

AWARDS, HONORS: Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines Award for fiction, 1977; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1977; St. Lawrence Prize, 1980, for Descent of Man; Aga Khan Prize, Paris Review magazine, 1981, for excerpts from Water Music; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1983, for Water Music; John Train prize, Paris Review, 1984, for humor; Commonwealth Club of California, silver medal for literature, 1986, for Greasy Lake; Editors' Choice, NY Times Book Review 1987; PEN/Faulkner Award, 1988, for World's End; Commonwealth Club of California Club Gold medal, 1988, for World's End; Guggenheim Fellowship, 1988; O. Henry Award, 1988, for "Sinking House," 1989, for "The Ape Lady in Retirement"; PEN Award for short story, PEN American Center, 1990, for If the River Was Whiskey; Prix Passion novel of the year, 1989, for Water Music; PEN Center West Literary prize, 1989; Editors' Choice, New York Times, 1989; Best American prose excellence, D.H.L., State University of New York, 1991; National Academy of Arts and Letters, Howard D. Vursell Memorial Award, 1993; National Academy of Arts and Letters, 1993; Prix Medicis Etranger for best foreign novel published in France, 1997, for The Tortilla Curtain; PEN/Malamud Award for short story, 1999; National Book Award nomination for fiction, National Book Foundation, 2003, for Drop City.

WRITINGS:

The Descent of Man (stories), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1979.

Water Music (novel), Little, Brown (Boson, MA), 1981.

Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (novel), Viking (New York, NY), 1984.

Greasy Lake and Other Stories, Viking (New York, NY), 1985.

World's End (novel), Viking (New York, NY), 1987.

If the River Was Whiskey (stories), Viking (New York, NY), 1990.

East Is East (novel), Viking (New York, NY), 1991.

The Road to Wellville (novel), Viking (New York, NY), 1993.

Without a Hero (stories), Viking (New York, NY), 1994.

The Tortilla Curtain (novel), Viking (New York, NY), 1995.

Riven Rock, Viking (New York, NY), 1998.

T.C. Boyle Stories, Viking (New York, NY), 1998.

A Friend of the Earth, Viking (New York, NY), 2000.

After the Plague (stories), Viking (New York, NY), 2001.

Drop City, Viking (New York, NY), 2003.

The Inner Circle, Viking (New York, NY), 2004.

(Editor, with daughter, Kerrie Kvashay-Boyle) Doubletakes: Pairs of Contemporary Short Stories, Thomson/Wadsworth (Boston, MA), 2004.

Tooth and Claw (stories), Viking (New York, NY), 2005.

(As T.C. Boyle) The Human Fly and Other Stories (young adult), Speak (New York, NY), 2005.

Talk Talk, Viking (New York, NY), 2006.

Books printed in England under name T.C. Boyle. Contributor of short stories to periodicals, including Esquire, Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's. Fiction editor of Iowa Review, c. early 1970s.

ADAPTATIONS: The Road to Wellville, starring Anthony Hopkins, Matthew Broderick, and Bridget Fonda, was directed by Alan Parker and released by Columbia Pictures in 1994; a film version of The Tortilla Curtain, starring Kevin Costner and Meg Ryan, is in production.

SIDELIGHTS: Over the course of the 1980s, T. Coraghessan Boyle, who is also well known as T.C. Boyle, went from being a relatively unknown short-story writer to becoming a best-selling novelist whose works are studied in college classrooms. His wildly imaginative stories filled with quirky characters, lush descriptions, and cynical humor have elicited comparisons to the works of John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Evelyn Waugh. Los Angeles Times Book Review writer Charles Champlin termed Boyle's prose "a presence, a litany, a symphony of words, a chorale of idioms ancient and modern, a treasury of strange and wondrous place names, a glossary of things, good food and horrendous ills." Times Literary Supplement critic Thomas Sutcliffe described the author's style as "punctuated with firecracker metaphors, a showy extravagance with obscurities of language and an easy mediation between hard fact and invention." While Michael Adams, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, 1986, acknowledged Boyle's debt to the masters of absurdist and experimental fiction—Barth, Pynchon, Franz Kafka, James Joyce—he observed: "For all Boyle's similarities to other artists, no Americans … write about the diverse subjects he does in the way he does."

A self-described "pampered punk" of the 1960s, Boyle did not set out to become a writer. A music student at the State University of New York at Potsdam, he began to compose plays and short stories after enrolling in a creative writing course on a whim. He continued to write short fiction after graduation, between his daytime job as a high school teacher (a position he admits he took to avoid serving in Vietnam) and his nightly drug-and-alcohol binges. One of his stories, "The OD and Hepatitis Railroad or Bust," was published in the North American Review, giving Boyle the confidence to apply to the respected University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. "The only one I'd ever heard of was Iowa," he explained to Anthony Decurtis in Rolling Stone, "so I wrote to them, and they accepted me, because they accept you just on the basis of the work. I could never have gotten in on my record."

In 1981, Boyle published his first novel, Water Music. The book tells of two men: Mungo Park, a Scottish explorer who actually existed and led expeditions to Africa in 1795 and 1805, and the fictional Ned Rise, a drunken con-man from the London slums. Much of Water Music is concerned with Park's African excursions, and it offers particularly vivid accounts of his adventures with curious natives; Rise, meanwhile, has been involved in such dubious activities as running a sex show, robbing graves, and peddling fake caviar. Together the two protagonists travel down the Niger on the 1805 expedition, from which the real Park never returned. With Water Music Boyle strengthened his reputation as a prominent American humorist. Champlin characterized the novel as "dark and sprawling, ribald, hilarious, cruel, language-intoxicated, exotic, and original," and hailed Boyle as "an important new writer." Other critics offered similar praise: Sutcliffe deemed Water Music "compendious, funny and compelling" and cited Boyle's "tropically fecund imagination," while Jay Tolson wrote in the Washington Post Book World of Boyle's ability to present "his most implausible inventions with wit, a perfect sense of timing, and … considerable linguistic gifts." Although most reviewers responded enthusiastically to the humor in Water Music, some tempered their praise by questioning the work's flamboyant style. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Alan Friedman decried the novel's prose as "a freewheeling mixture of elegant polysyllabic rhetoric … with current colloquialisms" and claimed that it results in merely "an extended occasion for comic-strip pathos."

Like Water Music, Budding Prospects received both praise as an invigoratingly funny novel and criticism as a superficial work. Michael Gorra of the New York Times Book Review called Budding Prospects an "energetically written and very funny" novel and declared that Boyle's "raw ability to make one laugh" is reminiscent of Kingsley Amis and Thomas Berger. But Gorra also contended that Boyle "stops at the surface too often, settling for one-liners … rather than working toward a more sustained comic display." Similarly, Eva Hoffman wrote in the New York Times that Budding Prospects is "often quite hilarious" but argued that it lacks depth; she accused Boyle of failing to sufficiently differentiate and develop the characters and claimed that he writes as if he were "dancing on the edges of language, afraid that if he slowed down for a minute, he might fall into a vacuum." Despite these objections, however, even Hoffman concluded that "Boyle possesses a rare and redeeming virtue—he can be consistently, effortlessly, intelligently funny."

Boyle continued to garner high praise as a humorist with his 1985 collection Greasy Lake and Other Stories. As with the earlier Descent of Man, Greasy Lake offers bizarre action within seemingly normal settings. Among the many odd tales in the collection are "Ike and Nina," which relates a love affair between President Dwight Eisenhower and the wife of Soviet leader Ni-kita Khrushchev; "The Hector Quesadilla Story," which depicts an aging baseball player in a never-ending game; and "On for the Long Haul," which concerns a surviv-alist who moves his family to Montana only to discover that his new neighbor is an even more paranoid surviv-alist who loathes the newcomer's children and pets. In a New York Times review of Greasy Lake, Michiko Kakutani commended Boyle's "vigorous and alluring … use of language" as well as his ability to move from "the literary to the mundane without the slightest strain." Detroit News reviewer Peter Ross hailed the collection as "a triumphantly funny assembly, incredibly diverse in its inspirations and foundations," and numbered Boyle among "the select cadre of great American humorists."

Boyle first began to achieve widespread fame with the 1987 publication of World's End. Set in the Hudson River Valley area of New York where Boyle himself grew up, World's End describes the intertwining of three families over ten generations. In 1663, the rich, tyrannical Van Warts own the land tended by the oppressed Van Brunts—land once belonging to the Mo-honk family of Indians, until they gave it up to the Van Warts. In 1968, Walter Van Brunt crashes his motorcycle into an historical marker honoring the spot where a group of rebels were hanged, betrayed to the authorities by yet another Van Brunt. Walter's collision is just one instance in which the past and the present meet: as the novel progresses, jumping between past and present, we see dozens of Van Brunts indentured to Van Warts, and we witness the same mistakes made time and time again. Even Walter, in the end, must come to terms with destiny.

Critics hailed World's End as a work finally worthy of Boyle's unique prose and fecund imagination. Despite the novel's prodigious length, John Calvin Batchelor wrote in the Washington Post Book World, the author "displays a talent so effortlessly satirical and fluid that it suggests an image of the author at a crowded inn of wicked wits in a tale-telling fight for best space at the hearth." The New Statesman's Geoff Dyer remarked: "Word for word Boyle has never been a cost-effective writer. Like a fast car he gets through a lot of fuel, guzzling up words in an amphetamine rush of similes. World's End is uneconomic in a very different way. Here he has embarked on such a long haul with such a freight of material that there is no point in hurrying."

The novel is shaped, primarily, by a sense of overwhelming, inescapable predestiny. The history of the Van Warts and Van Brunts was described by John Clute of the Times Literary Supplement as "a crushing machine, which limns a world without exit; nowhere in [the novel] does any moment of hilarity or joy or love do more than strengthen the grip of the past." Several critics found Boyle's inescapable destiny to be problematic. The characters "are not only invaded by the past but flattened by it," wrote Richard Eder in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. "Or rather, they are flattened by the awkwardness of having three centuries of fatality come to a point in them." "Even Walter's tale begins to sound increasingly contrived," commented Kakutani. "Instead of feeling that he's living out some inexorable family destiny, we end up suspecting that he is just another pawn in the author's elaborate chess game."

After the ambitious reach displayed in World's End, a few critics were dissatisfied with If the River Was Whiskey, Boyle's 1990 collection of short stories. Though they found it as quirky and entertaining as his past story collections, some reviewers viewed this new book as the author's way of playing it safe, producing stories filled with his characteristic wit but lacking any real substance. "The writing is evocative, the craft stunning," explained Village Voice critic Sally S. Eckhoff. "But it's all wrapped up too tight to explode into the imagination…. At every story's end, we don't have much to savor but how good Boyle is." Nicholas Del-banco in Tribune Books called the stories at times "simply silly—a five-finger exercise," while Kakutani lamented that Boyle's talents "are used, singly, for showy but shallow effects."

Still, as Delbanco pointed out, "there are worse problems than a prodigality of talent." "What keeps us reading," observed Francine Prose in the Washington Post, "are Boyle's humor, his imagination, his narrative gifts: the pleasure of watching a writer make each story more inventive than the last one." Eckhoff, too, happily conceded that in these stories Boyle "is completely in command…. On all counts, If the River Was Whiskey is impressive."

The critical response to Boyle's 1991 novel East Is East was similar to that of If the River Was Whiskey; Charles Dickinson of Chicago's Tribune Books, for example, called the novel "Boyle Lite. It is better than most fiction being written today, but because of the standard he has set for himself, a disappointment nonetheless." East Is East describes the attempts of Japanese-born Hiro Tanaka to find his long-vanished American father. Envisioning the thriving cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, Hiro takes a job on a Japanese freighter, jumping from its bow as it sails near the eastern coast of the United States. He swims to the closest shore, that of Georgia's Tupelo Island—a soggy, insect- and reptile-infested morass with little to offer in the way of food or shelter. At the far end of the island is a writers' colony full of eccentric and neurotic artists, and it is into their midst that Hiro, attempting to evade agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, arrives.

Dickinson called East Is East "the kind of knowing, cynical farce that Boyle can toss off in his sleep…. The writing is seamless and slick, and in a few instances the equal of anything Boyle has yet produced, but without the power that informs his other novels." Julian Loose, writing in the New Statesman, observed that the book "is at its funniest when portraying the colony's literati doing battle with writer's block and one another," but that the novel as a whole "singularly fails as an al-legory of cultural misunderstanding." "In the final pages Boyle makes a swift and, to me, unconvincing stab at tragedy," observed the Washington Post contributor David Payne, "after the prevailing comic tone, this leaves a preservative aftertaste."

Boyle's short-story collection Without a Hero received high marks from readers and reviewers alike. Critic Ian Sansom, who in his New Statesman review of the collection frequently compared and contrasted Boyle with John Updike, wrote: "While Updike's stories descend with heavenly choirs from the New Yorker, Boyle's crawl up out of Rolling Stone and Wig Wag, yelling prophecies and denunciations…. For all [Boyle's] warnings about the road to excess, he is—like Updike—at his best when writing about life's unexpected failures and inevitable defeats." Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service contributor Sandy Bauers similarly offered glowing words: "Boyle is superbly demented. He's the court jester of modern society, tweaking our icons. These are the sort of stories that the kid who flicked spitballs at the blackboard in grade school would write. Only now the kid has grown up; he has more finesse. Boyle's stories are more than funny, better than wicked. They make you cringe with their clarity…. [Boyle is] the absolute genius of description."

Boyle's most read and perhaps most controversial work, The Tortilla Curtain was described by its publisher as a "Grapes of Wrath for the 1990s." Set in southern California and involving the intersection of white, upper-middle-class Americans with poor, homeless Mexican illegals, the novel examines more than border relations and the corresponding struggle between the "haves" and the "have-nots" of the region. Barbara Kingsolver, writing in the Nation, explained how the novel "addresses what has probably always been the great American political dilemma: In a country that proudly defines itself as a nation of immigrants, who gets to slam the door on whom?" While acknowledging that "Boyle has his finger firmly on the pulse of an American middle class whose fear of the iron curtain has been replaced by an obsession with one made of tortillas," New Statesman reviewer Julie Wheelwright also claimed that "Boyle explores powerful issues through his parallel characters, but they operate just shy of caricature. They are more symbolic figures than real inhabitants of a state wallowing in economic downturn. The Mexicans are naive, but essentially good, while their Anglo counterparts grow increasingly ugly with rage." Despite similar complaints about the novel's characters, Kingsolver concluded: "What Boyle does, and does well, is lay on the line our national cult of hypocrisy. Comically and painfully he details the smug wastefulness of the haves and the vile misery of the have-nots." The Tortilla Curtain received the 1997 Prix Medicis Etranger as the best foreign novel published that year in France.

Set in the early part of the twentieth century in Santa Barbara, California, on an estate called Riven Rock, Boyle's 1998 novel of the same name tells the story of millionaire Stanley McCormick, who suffers from madness and sexual dysfunction. Katherine, his wife, who has not seen him in more than twenty years, remains ever hopeful that he will recover. Michiko Kakutani, writing in the New York Times, called Riven Rock "a long meandering and fluently written book that has some truly affecting moments but that ultimately reduces two of its three main characters to caricatures." Novelist D.M. Thomas, writing in the New York Times Book Review, noted the theme of the dichotomous nature of men's love for women as both madonna and whore, who are conflicted by thoughts of both desire and worship for them. But Thomas, too, concluded that the novel's "promise of intellectual and emotional exploration … is not fulfilled."

Boyle's T.C. Boyle Stories, an impressive release containing all the stories from his four earlier collections, along with seven new stories, enjoyed considerable admiration upon its 1998 publication. Contending that Boyle's stories "concentrate his talents more powerfully than his seven novels," critic John C. Hawley explained in his America review that Boyle "plays with famous stories by Gogol, Kafka, Chekhov and Joyce, and imitates some of the best of his contemporaries—Barthelme, Coover, Lorrie Moore. He is very funny and Dickensian in his clearly drawn characters and in the cornucopia of plots that tumble out into page after fascinating page." Offering similar praise, a Publishers Weekly contributor called Boyle "a premier practitioner of short fiction" and praised the collection for its "narrative outtakes that are invariably amusing and, like Boyle's more serious work, mordant, worldly, and irreverent."

The next satiric novel, A Friend of the Earth, states the youthful premise of its protagonists early on, that "to be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people." Dale Singer in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch introduced the book thus: "Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tier-water is a baby boomer whose family struck it rich in real estate and construction; he becomes an ecoterrorist using any means necessary to stop what he considers the desecration of the land by rampaging development. Take that neat bundle of contradictions, throw in a lot of irony and a heavy dose of fate—at times so heavy it seems contrived—and A Friend of the Earth becomes a haunting if occasionally frustrating tale." The story is set in the near future, 2025, and the earth's system has continued to swing out of balance. Tierwater and his family are members of Earth Forever!, a vigilante group devoted to fighting for the earth in any way they can. Singer quoted from the novel to show what Boyle's imagined northern California surroundings have become: "The smog was like mustard gas, burning in his lungs. There was trash everywhere, scattered up and down the off-ramp like the leavings of a bombed-out civilization, cans, bottles, fast-food wrappers, yellowing diapers and rusting shopping carts, oil filters, Styrofoam cups, cigarette butts. The grass was dead, the oleanders were buried in dust." Boyle told Marilyn Bauer of the Environmental News Network (distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service), "I really feel … no matter what we do it's over…. I've been depressed for years. And even in cases like Yellowstone, even with the best intentions, we've destroyed the ecosystem. When I go on tour, we don't have Q and A's anymore. Now we pass out hankies, cry and go home."

A Christian Science Monitor reviewer noted, "The day I finished reading it, the United Nations weather agency announced they'd recorded the largest-ever hole in the ozone layer. This seems a strange time to satirize the excesses of the environmental movement. But Boyle has always been a writer of complex sympathies." The reviewer continued, "Polemists on both sides of the environmental debate will feel betrayed by the book's pinwheeling satire. The chapters from 1989 depict green fanatics in all their comic excess. But the future Boyle describes in 2025 is a nightmare of environmental destruction. Gosh, it turns out those eco-nuts were right." The form of the book is a to-ing and fro-ing between the 1980s and 90s when Ty and his family are at their most outrageous and 2025 when he has become a zoo-keeper for a wealthy popstar. An Austin American-Statesman reporter wrote, "Boyle uses parallel narratives in alternating chapters. Those dealing with Tierwater's ecotage salad days of the late '80s and early '90s are omniscient, while the ones dealing with events a quarter-century from now are told in the voice of the seventy-five-year-old damp, disillusioned protagonist. The technique allows Boyle to have a global sweep and to bear down on the impact of world events on one man, Tierwater, a character who, in classic Boyle style, is born to fail." Several critics found this structure to be distracting but all found the novel powerful despite it.

To double and triple the turning, Ty's daughter Sierra becomes an even more fanatical rebel than he had been, ironically calling up his protectiveness as a parent:

"Raised on protest, she moves from vegetarian to veg-anism and finally refuses to disturb even dirt or rocks. What happens when a radical parent loves an even more radical child? Patterned after Julia Butterfly Hill, the young woman who recently completed two years in a giant redwood tree, Sierra beats that record by another twelve months…. This quiet treetop refuge captures the poignant interaction of pride and fear inspired by watching your daughter become a martyr to your own beliefs. In the end, Boyle is more interested in human nature than Mother Nature. But for a novelist, that's probably the best way to be a friend of the earth," concluded a Christian Science Monitor reviewer. Boyle himself commented to Bauer, "It looks very, very grim." Salon.com interviewer Gregory Daurer recorded some of Boyle's reasons for writing this novel: "Like Ty, I'm addicted to my machines too, and I'm just a criminal and enemy of the environment in many ways, even while I love it and want to save it. We're all, in the Western world, suffering from these contradictions. And that's another reason why I've written A Friend of the Earth."

The next novel, Drop City, is a companion piece to A Friend of the Earth, Boyle told Jay MacDonald of the Fort Myers, Florida, News Press in a telephone interview. Set in the 1970s—going backward instead of forward to a time when, as Boyle says, "there were only four billion people on earth"—it focuses on a California hippie commune, Drop City, whose members decide to homestead in the Alaskan wilderness in "the ongoing pursuit of free love, free dope and world peace," according to MacDonald. Instead, the communards first find themselves struggling with the overload of their physical possessions and then, once they arrive in Alaska, with surviving the harsh realities of an Arctic winter. Donald Secreast, in the World and I, argued that the dominant theme of Drop City, is that "spiritual structures must always allow for the weight of bodily needs." The commune hippies and other characters, such as the new wife of their fur trapper neighbor, search for spiritual transcendence but must come to terms with the realities of materiality in order to survive, but also as they are faced with their own unacknowledged consumerism. According to Secreast, Boyle argues that by the mid-twentieth century, we have replaced sublimation via poetry and spirituality with shopping and collecting objects, a theme he has played out in the story, "Filthy with Things."

Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times recognized the maturing of Boyle's writing in his development from the "pure satire and rollicking farce" of Budding Prospects to "a more subtle and sympathetic brand of comedy" in this novel, his former "manic verbal pyrotechnics" becoming "more sustained storytelling." She praised Drop City, commenting, "As might be expected, Mr. Boyle uses his merciless sociological eye and antic sense of humor to send up the self-delusions and flaky pretensions of the Drop City denizens. Though this might sound like shooting fish in a barrel—exposing the sexism that flourishes beneath the talk of sexual freedom and the nostalgia for the comforts of bourgeois life that lurks beneath the commune's self-righteous proselytizing—he manages to make their hypocrisies funny and oddly touching." She maintained that Boyle "has written a novel that is not only an entertaining romp through the madness of the counterculture 70's, but a stirring parable about the American dream as well."

Boyle's tenth novel, The Inner Circle, features the narrator John Milk, an undergraduate at Indiana University. Set in 1939, John takes a class taught by infamous sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey. Kinsey, a true historical figure, was notorious for his ignorance of the emotional element of sex and for his unorthodox research methods. A.O. Scott, writing in The New York Times Book Review, noted that "the picture of Kinsey that emerges has an element of creepiness to it." Eventually, Milk must choose between Kinsey, his mentor, and Iris, his beautiful wife. While Scott felt that Boyle's novel had a "blurry, hasty, unfinished quality," Jennifer Reese, writing in Entertainment Weekly, noted that "no one … is better at capturing a grotesque."

Following The Inner Circle Boyle published two collections of short stories, Tooth and Claw and The Human Fly and Other Stories. In a review of Tooth and Claw, Booklist critic Donna Seaman pointed out Boyle's "evocation of visceral detail" and applauded his "great gift for supple social commentary." A Kirkus Reviews critic similarly praised The Human Fly and Other Stories, stating that the collection gives "young readers a taste of real quality in these seriously thought-provoking selections." Another Kirkus Reviews contributor, upon critiquing Tooth and Claw, called Boyle "one of our most versatile and prolific writers."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 36, 1986, Volume 55, 1989.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, 1986, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1987.

Short Story Criticism, Volume 10, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

PERIODICALS

America, April 23, 1994, p. 20; May 22, 1999, p. 31.

Atlantic Monthly, November, 1987, p. 122; October, 1990, p. 135.

Austin American- Statesman, September 24, 2000, p. L6.

Booklist, June 1, 2005, Donna Seaman, review of Tooth and Claw, p. 1711; November 1, 2005, Gillian Eng-berg, review of The Human Fly and Other Stories, p. 37.

Boston Herald, March 9, 2003, p. 56.

Buffalo News, September 16, 2001, p. F4.

Carolina Quarterly, fall, 1979, p. 103.

Christian Science Monitor, September 14, 2000, p. 21.

Denver Post, October 22, 2000, p. G-03; February 23, 2003, p. EE-02.

Entertainment Weekly, September 10, 2004, Jennifer Reese, "Nookie Monster: T.C. Boyle's Novel The Inner Circle Gets into Bed with Sex Researcher Alfred Kinsey," p. 166.

Financial Times, November 3, 2001, p. 4.

Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), September 30, 2000, p. 17.

Interview, January, 1988, p. 91.

Irish Times, May 31, 2003, p. 55.

Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2005, review of Tooth and Claw, p. 650; September 15, 2005, review of The Human Fly and Other Stories, p. 1021.

Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, May 25, 1994; March 9, 2001; November 15, 2001, p. K5036.

Library Journal, August, 1996, p. 136.

London Review of Books, January 6, 1994, p. 19.

Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1982; October 7, 1987; April 21, 1988; April 6, 1990; October 3, 1990, p. E1; September 24, 1995, p. 4; September 15, 1996, p. 44; April 28, 2001, David Ferrell, interview with Boyle, p. A-1.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 3, 1982; May 6, 1984, p. 3; June 30, 1985; October 11, 1987, p. 3; July 24, 1988, p. 10; May 21, 1989, p. 3; May 30, 1993, p. 2.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, September 12, 2001, p. 04.

Nation, April 7, 1979, p. 377; September 1, 1984, pp. 151-153; September 25, 1995, p. 326.

New Republic, February 10, 1979; June 12, 1989, p. 40; October 4, 1993, p. 43.

News Press (Fort Myers, FL), March 16, 2003, p. 8E.

New Statesman, August 26, 1988, p. 36; March 29, 1991, p. 31; October 22, 1993, p. 38; February 10, 1995, p. 44; November 10, 1995, p. 39.

Newsweek, April 19, 1993, p. 62.

New Yorker, January 19, 1998, p. 68.

New York Review of Books, January 17, 1991, p. 31.

New York Times, May 19, 1979; May 22, 1989; September 7, 1990, p. C25; January 20, 1998, p. E10; October 3, 2000, p. E8; February 17, 2003, p. E1; February 17, 2003, p. E1; February 23, 2003, p. 9; March 16, 2003, p. 4.

New York Times Book Review, April 1, 1979, p. 14; December 27, 1981, p. 9; June 6, 1982; July 1, 1984, p. 18; June 9, 1985, p. 15; July 21, 1985; September 27, 1987, Michael Freitag, interview with Boyle, p. 53; December 6, 1987, p. 85; May 14, 1989, Brian Miller, interview with Boyle, p. 33; May 6, 1990, p. 38; September 9, 1990, p. 13; April 25, 1993, Tobin Harshaw, interview with Boyle, p. 28; May 8, 1994, p. 9; September 3, p. 3; December 3, 1995, p. 78; September 15, p. 44; February 8, 1998, p. 8; September 2, 2001, p. 5; September 19, 2004, A.O. Scott, "The Joy of Sex Research," p. 8.

New York Times Magazine, March 19, 1989, p. 57; December 9, 1990, p. 50.

Publishers Weekly, October 9, 1987, pp. 71-72; July 3, 1995, p. 47; July 22, 1996, p. 234; September 21, 1998, p. 71.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, summer, 1991, p. 17.

Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO), March 7, 2003, p. 25D.

Rolling Stone, January 14, 1988, pp. 54-57.

St. Louis Post- Dispatch, September 19, 2000, p. C3.

Saturday Review, March 31, 1979.

Seattle Times, March 23, 2003, p. K12.

Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), February 23, 2003, p. 16F.

Time, May 10, 1993, p. 71.

Times (London, England), March 21, 1991.

Times Literary Supplement, June 20, 1980; February 26, 1982; September 14, 1985; January 31, 1986; August 26, 1988, p. 927; March 22, 1991, p. 19; October 27, 1995, p. 25.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), October 11, 1987, p. 3; May 21, 1989, p. 7; July 15, 1990, p. 4; September 9, 1990, p. 5.

Village Voice, January 6, 1982, p 39; September 6, 1989.

Voice Literary Supplement, November, 1987.

Wall Street Journal, September 7, 1990, p. A13.

Washington Post, May 23, 1989.

Washington Post Book World, February 7, 1982, p. 10; June 23, 1985; November 1, 1987, p. 4; March 9, 1988; April 20, 1988; September 2, 1990, p. 1; May 9, 1993, p. 5.

World and I, July, 2003, p. 242.

Writer, October, 1999, p. 26.