THE ESSENTIAL AMERICAN FLAW: A READING BY T.C. BOYLE



It’s like Leipzig wanted to welcome us in the best way one can welcome two literary geeks: a reading by an author whose name already makes your hand shiver because the hand knows all to well that it took hold of many a novel with this author’s name on it, titles popular and numerous:
World’s End, The Tortilla Curtain, When The Killing’s Done,… And now: The Harder They Come. 66-year old American novelist and bestselling author T.C. Boyle, or Tom Coraghessan Boyle, read from his latest novel in Leipzig on Sunday. It's the opening event of "Leipzig liest", an event that will lead to the Leipzig book fair in March.

Although he is so famous, I have never read one of his novels or short story collections and during the course of this evening I come to regret it. I feel he is the kind of writer I need in my “author collection”.

Once he is on stage in WERK 2, you can perceive the kind of wisdom that comes with age and probably with the fact that for every new novel he tried to understand – understand profoundly that is – a new and complex topic, e.g. environmental pollution, immigration laws, history as such. But then again, he is not old. He seems to carry a younger, almost timeless, version of himself around his skin and bones. He wears a dark jacket over a t-shirt with a comic cat print, there seem to be Arabic characters written on top and at the bottom of the cat.

T.C Boyle. Picture by Jamieson Fry.

He mentions Charlie Hebdo in the interview; he is concerned with the fact that the right to possess firearms is an American virtue regardless of the many deaths it provokes year after year. His new book, The Harder They Come, talks about this, about the weapons and the violence and the explosive outcome when these things come together. He uses three characters: Adam, who is schizophrenic, Sara, who belongs to a movement that refuses to acknowledge any state authority and Adam’s father, a Vietnam veteran who kills a robber while being on a trip with his wife.

As serious as T.C. Boyle can come across, particularly while reading parts of his prologue to the audience, he squeezes a joke in here and there. His motto: “The best you can expect is to avoid the worst”. His answer to the question of the interviewer whether he has a gun himself: “I have a dog.” His explanation why German readers seem to love his stories so much: “If you love me, I love you.”

What becomes more and more apparent in the interview after the reading, is how much he despises the, in his eyes, American flaw of declaring weapons an essential (human?!) right.

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
(Second Amendment to the United States Constitution)

It’s the encounter with such deeply felt convictions that makes you want to read a novel, see a play, watch a film, to understand its implications for the real world. It’s what makes you want to look much closer at your own environment, because stories can open your eyes to things you have not encountered yet, lived with yet, heard of yet, understood yet.

The more than 400 people in WERK 2 clap and clap and clap and T.C. Boyle, this tall man up there, takes a bow, very gracefully, and leaves the stage.

Read more on T.C. Boyle in
Die Welt (2015) or The Guardian (2009)

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