I Like The Part About Finding YOur Own Way

Letters to a Young Writer
In our Letters to a Young Writer series, Narrative’s featured authors respond to comments and questions from younger authors reflecting on the nature of the writer’s work. We inaugurate this series with a correspondence between Dennis O’Reilly and T. Corghessan Boyle:

Dear T. C. Boyle,
No one can accuse you of shying away from the most onerous issues of our time. Perhaps that’s why I’m reluctant to take Ty Tierwater at his word when he says, “I’m not preaching. I’m not going to preach. It’s too late for that.”

In a culture in which the presentation of all opinions has all but eliminated rational discourse, would you encourage young writers concerned with the problems our society faces to lay it all on the line, as you have done? Or is it too late for that?
Thank you for your time—and your work.

Best regards,
Dennis Thomas O’Reilly

Dear Dennis:

I wouldn’t want people to throw in the towel after reading A Friend of the Earth. Certainly Friend is not a book of advocacy (in fact, when I came back from that particular book tour to access my website, I was amazed to find that people there were debating whether or not I was an environmentalist), because advocacy and fiction do not comfortably coexist, though my sympathies should be clear to anyone who has read even a handful of my stories or novels. Not a single environmentalist holds out much hope for the future of our species or of the myriad other endangered species out there, given our overpopulation and destruction of the environment, the zero-sum game of capitalism that posits infinite product and infinite consumers, and our unsustainable lifestyle. The crash is coming. You’d have to be blind not to see that.

So what do we do? I am socially engaged, unlike many of my contemporaries, and I take on a whole variety of issues, yes, but increasingly I have found myself coming back to the central one of the environment, and, by extension, the meaning of our lives in the face of an indifferent universe. How and why do we master the other species? How long will our tenure be? Why have we evolved the power to contemplate our own future? Why do we exist? Why does anything exist? I write fiction in order to think deeply and to assuage my fear and my pessimism through the act of creating art. This is redemptive. And while I have no advice for any artist, young or old, other than to find his or her own way, I will say that each of us must create art in order to address the central questions of human existence—for our own sanity, and, we hope, for the sanity of our readers. (I Like this part).

Buena suerte,
T. C. Boyle