When I was in the opening stages of writing "Blue Skies," I sent one of my principal characters, Cooper Cullen—who was dating an acarologist—out into the field with her to collect ticks for study. It was a windy day. They collected nothing, the sheet they were dragging through the chaparral flapping in their hands, and yet, later, just as he was getting ready for bed, he noticed a miniscule tick larva embedded in his right forearm, which would lead to an infection with cellulitis and the eventual loss of his forearm. Two weeks later, I was hiking up over the San Marcos Pass, came home and discovered a tick larva embedded in my forearm. It transmitted cellulitis to me, and it was touch and go for the first week or so before the antibiotic began to kick in. Now, as you will know, I am not one to believe in voodoo or thought transference or deities of any kind, but still . . .
This is prelude to informing you of my current condition. I finished the new novel at the end of last month ("No Direction Home," coming in at circa 300 pp.). Toward the end of that book, one of my principal characters, Jesse Seeger, has an accident in which he breaks his right leg and elbow, which makes it difficult for him to maneuver with crutches. And me? Two weeks ago I had an accident in which I broke my right leg in two places and fractured a rib on the left side, making it difficult to maneuver with crutches. I am now confined to my desk, my bed and the kitchen, where I’ve been cleaning up after Frau B. on one leg. This is especially hard on me since I am so very active—hyperactive, some might say. What am I doing about it? Despairing, of course, and wondering why the imaginings of my subconscious wind up manifesting themselves in what we quaintly refer to as “real life.”
I have the new novel to tweak and perfect and I am putting together a “Best-Of” anthology of my short stories, including several pieces from the last two collections (since 2012’s "T.C. Boyle Stories II," the second volume of the collected) as well as a number of new uncollected pieces. Plenty to keep me busy. And I have even more time for reading and films (thank the blessed fates for Criterion), which helps (but not as much as my hikes along the beach and up into our tick-infested mountains). At present I’m rereading "Lucky Jim" and my own "Riven Rock", because of recent movie interest. I know "Lucky Jim" better than I know my own novel, having read the former a number of times over the years, especially when I was in need—as now—of a good laugh. It is of great historic interest to me to plunge back into "Riven Rock" (the story of the most catastrophic marriage since Bluebeard) for the first time since it was published in 1998. It feels lived in, of course, but also new in the way of any book we reread. Passionate stuff, indeed.
So. Have I spooked you? Certainly, I am spooking myself. When I first began touring in Germany in the late nineteen-eighties, one of the salesmen at Hanser Verlag said to me, “We are also publishing a novel by a British woman about a small village in which everything is always fine and people drink tea and eat crumpets together.” Pause. “But you don’t write stories like that, do you?”
What I’m thinking, given my present circumstances, is maybe I should.