[EDITOR’S NOTE: The table spins round and round. Where she stops, nobody knows! Today, Megan Sullivan and Gwenda Bond throw their respective hats in the ring. Previous discussion: Part One, Part Two and Part Four.]

Megan writes:

Ed and Dan, you’ve both obviously read a great deal of Boyle’s previous books. It’s interesting to see how you both picked up on things that never even occurred to me because I have no such experience. I am a Boyle virgin — or was for that matter. I had always thought much like Dan said: “Early in Boyle’s career, he was frequently accused of being a writer more concerned with flash and not with substance. He was often described as a writer with incredible skill, willing to write about anything… and would do so with every writing pyrotechnic available.” But I also kept meeting people who swore Boyle was one of the greatest authors writing today. I’m glad I’ve finally started reading him because he does seem to love both wordplay and great characters.

Ed, I think your question about whether or not Boyle relied on coincidences too much is a good one. I think he did to a certain degree, but I don’t know that the book suffered too much for it. If anything, this book seemed implausible from the get go and required a certain leap of faith. You both mention Dana and Bridger’s finances as they travel cross country. Exactly! Where’s all the money come from? Also just the plausibility of being able to track Peck down so quickly. Maybe I am underestimating the technology, but at least when they lost them in the car at the beginning of the chase and happened to find them again later on the road? Far fetched.

But beyond all of that, I still kept reading. What I liked about this book was that it was a novel of ‘ideas’ and was still immensely readable. Perhaps Dan is right when he notes that Boyle seems like the kind of author who writes about whatever interests him, regardless of genre or not. I can see him reading an article in the paper about identity theft and Boyle taking that idea and running with it. How else do you explain Peck? He seems more sympathetic toward the “villain” Peck, than to the victims Dana and Bridger (I say almost).

In the beginning, you’re supposed to empathize with Dana, I think, as she’s being arrested. Poor deaf girl, victimized again, or something like that. Yet as the novel progresses, Dana’s character is more fleshed out. She’s full of anger and rails against Bridger when he fails her basically by being human. She’s also very Don Quixote-esque in her pursuit of Peck. Nothing gets in the way, until the end when Bridger gets hurt and she sees what her pursuit has wrought.

Dan, I think the topics of of identity theft and language went well together. Having no voice can be construed as something like having no identity (perhaps to those who have their hearing anyway). What were your thoughts on the topic?

Sorry to cut it short, but I have to run off to an appointment and I want to get this sent off without more delay.

Gwenda writes:

Similar to Megan, I had only limited experience with Boyle’s work prior to this. I read The Road to Wellville in high school and then Drop City a couple of years ago, but nothing more (other than a stray interview or essay here and there about teaching writing). Reading this novel was a strange experience for me, because I did most of it waiting around an emergency room on a Saturday night — the heightened nature of the novel matched the surroundings almost as if I’d planned it (even though it was a coincidence — more on those later).

I too was blown away by the first few chapters. I think literary fiction has a somewhat justified reputation as often starting off slowly, deemphasizing the narrative. Dana’s arrest and subsequent incarceration, and to a lesser extent Bridger’s experience not being able to help her, are showstoppers. It takes, as they say, cojones to kick off a novel so strongly, because where do you go? How do you top that beginning? And, really, I think he doesn’t.

Talk Talk is a fine novel that borrows lots of thriller conventions, including motoring at a break-neck pace designed to discourage too many questions about the why and how of things happening that are credulity-straining. For the most part, Boyle pulls that off — especially, for me, when he’s holding on Bridger and Dana. I can believe their irrationality. The coincidences and actions that seem to just be needlessly risky on the part of Peck Wilson were much harder to buy for me (you’re busted for stealing Dana’s identity so you steal her boyfriend’s? you agree to take your fiance who doesn’t even know your real name to your mother’s house? the only justification that I can buy for these behaviors is the old cliche “he wants to be caught,” and I don’t believe Peck does).

Dan found the Peck Wilson character more engaging, but after those opening chapters I was more drawn to Dana. The biggest problem I had with the novel as it progressed was losing the immediacy of Dana’s point-of-view. She seemed less and less present as the novel went on (and this is likely intentional, I realize, and tied to the inability-to-communicate theme) and several times I was surprised by the order and point-of-view Boyle chose to reveal certain scenes in. This is particularly the case with the climactic scenes after Bridger is injured. It felt like Boyle became less interested in Dana as the novel went on, and far more interested in the male leads. I would have preferred more Dana. It’s her story I ultimately wanted to experience, after the devastation she suffers at the beginning.

I love the energy and flow in the writing, which I’m taking is a hallmark of Boyle’s. It marries especially well to the thriller plot, although, yes, some of the questions we’re left asking — where did Bridger and Dana get all that money? — the writing is simply not quite pyrotechnic enough to stave off. But almost. I suspect that one of the things Boyle’s trying to do here is mirror just how out there some of these identity theft cases become for the people involved, but in fiction the kind of coincidences and brazenness and hunches that people experience in real life mostly don’t come off believably. Dana’s sudden sixth sense that allows them to catch the criminal faux nuclear family eating at the restaurant after they’ve lost them is a prime example. That’s a tough sell and doesn’t quite make it. Emotionally, though, I think Boyle manages to get the reader to buy most everything, including the deep flaws in all the main characters. (Though, again, Peck is still somewhat of an enigma to me — his characterization is either too complex for his base motivations or not explicit enough to make his actions completely buyable.) They’re all stubborn and self-involved to varying extents at different times in the story. The self-entitlement issue is definitely something they all struggle with — and that includes Bridger, though to a far lesser extent than the others.

As for literary writers dabbling in genres more openly… There’s just not the stigma that there used to be. To a certain extent, it’s happening because it can, with no ill consequences or injury to the writer’s literary reputation.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Our roundtable discussion of T.C. Boyle’s Talk Talk continues, with Edward Champion jumping into the fray and Dan Wickett offering further thoughts. Part One can be accessed here. Here’s Part Three and Part Four]

Ed writes:

Talk Talk reminded me very much of Anthony Burgess’s spy thriller novel, Tremor of Intent. Like Burgess, Boyle is a literary author approaching a “lowbrow” genre with the intention of skewering it, only to learn midway through the novel that he must embrace its machinations instead of mocking them. I don’t know about you folks (and perhaps some of the more genre-blind participants might want to offer a few words here), but I find it extremely interesting when this happens. Updike ventured into these waters a bit with Terrorist, with mixed but by no means completely terrible results. And I’m extremely curious about John Banville’s upcoming mystery novel (under the pseudonym Benjamin Black). This is a side issue, but what do you think accounts for this recent rise of literary authors (and particularly Boyle) flirting with genre? Personally, I don’t believe that this is entirely a question of writers wanting to draw more money and awareness.

My feeling is that Boyle, despite a lumpy midsection, eventually figured out a way to fuse his penchant for troubled humans (and certainly Peck Wilson comes across as a farcical foe) with a gripping cross-country thriller. I could quibble over the dubious economics that permit Dana and Bridger, both of them unemployed, with scant savings and with tarnished credit histories, to chase Peck Wilson. Nevertheless, I found myself drawn to the vengeful rage, both justified and petty, common to all of the characters in the book. There was something tragicomic about the police and the courts being useless and unsympathetic in exacting justice, forcing the characters to operate self-sufficiently in a state of anarchy. But here, there are wry parallels of self-entitlement that Boyle draws between Dana and Peck. Peck, of course, is concerned primarily for his self-interest, arising from past circumstances where he has been humiliated and believing that he is entitled to luxury condos, fine restaurants, and the like. He struck me as a sad but strangely amusing character. But Dana is also solipsistic about her need for personal justice and insists on Bridger accompanying her, berating him for having the temerity to fail or for being a flawed human. I should note that this is Boyle’s first novel set in the present since The Tortilla Curtain and, like that novel, Talk Talk also explores issues of shifting ideologies and personal contempt, with Boyle hoping to take on his issue from two perspectives. Did you folks feel that these two characters offered a sufficient comparison and contrast on these points? Did Boyle’s points about the many shades of self-entitlement work for you? And I’m also curious if you folks felt that Boyle went a little over-the-top to make his points. I didn’t mind this flamboyance (with Boyle, it often comes with the territory), but given the more nuanced feel of Drop City and The Inner Circle, it was a bit eye-popping to see him return to such a wild narrative.

I also wanted to address Dan’s interesting observation that Boyle sees human animals as part of the food chain, at the mercy of environmental vagaries. But if the author is the one responsible for plotting the world that the characters inhabit, one can draw a corollary between this and another of Boyle’s qualities: a tendency to play cruel god, flinging his characters into horrible fates — sometimes of their own making, sometimes because of the world’s circumstances. This extends to the merciless Alaskan environment in Drop City or the coyotes who eat Delaney Mossbacher’s lapdogs in The Tortilla Curtain.

To weave this question of cruelty into Talk Talk, both Dana and Bridger are very much victims of the environment they live in. But I think that the environmental struggle this time around arises more from personal decisions: both theirs and others. It couldn’t be any clearer with the amusing metaphor of Bridger toiling at a job in which he creates artificial environments for a visual effects company. But there is also a dog-eat-dog feel, perhaps a sly reference to the rugged Western frontier, in which individuals are at the mercy of other individuals’ vagaries. Rather interestingly, a good deal of the oppressive forces here are employers. Dr. Koch is particularly unsympathetic to Dana’s false arrest. Radko is a little more helpful, but, with him, it’s about the bottom line of getting a movie done. I suspect that Boyle’s concern here resides more with how capitalism or some of society’s undercurrents enslave identity, but what do you folks think?

I slightly disagree with Dan about the humor. I thought the humor wasn’t so much insider in nature, but that it had much to do with these characters being unable to get a feel for the environments they’re trying to negotiate. Bridger, for example, can’t even recognize the country that Radko is from and complains when he can simply ask Radko this question. And then there’s Peck resorting to the hard prison look, believing that he can exist on intimidation alone. And I was also amused by Boyle’s sly suggestion that operating in the world isn’t so much about clinging to one’s job or credit cards, but about breaking out of the routines and actually getting to know people. Bridger, for example, learns a good deal about Dana that he hasn’t bothered to ask about. Dana isn’t the only deaf person in this book. It seems indeed that the characters here are all deaf in their own ways. (Consider the two African-Americans near the end of the book who get pissed off at the police. They are rather interestingly glossed over.)

And I think I’ll curb my rambling here and open the floor to you folks. (And, Dan, I will get to some of your other points in the next email.) For now, I’ll proffer two more questions:

Did you folks feel that Boyle relied too much on coincidences and unexpected run-ins to drive the plot? Did this, in your view, hinder the story or prevent you from being interested in the self-discovery at work here?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

P.S. What did you make of the egrets?

Dan writes:

As to your quick side issue up front about literary writers venturing into genre, I was immediately reminded of a response Daniel Woodrell gave to a question I posed to him about how reviewers looked at his own work:

But the key to how I am viewed seems to be based on the fact that my first book was a crime novel- and to some critics that’s it, you are forever genre or genre trying to crawl to the brighter lights, or whatever, if you start in genre. The reverse is not true, the assumption being that anybody who can write mainstream stuff about that dicey year in prep school, or how Big Sally and her fried yellow cheeseballs became the heart and soul of Stage Right, Alabama, can surely master the requirements of genre in a long weekend. There are, however, the bleached bones of many a mainstream potentate who underestimated the undertaking lying beside the ol’ popular fiction trail, my friend.

I’ve not read the new Updike, nor the forthcoming Banville/Black, but believe Boyle’s venture may just be the product of the topics that interested him this time around. If there’s a literary author around willing to admit to wanting to draw more awareness more than Boyle, I’m unaware of who it might be, but don’t believe that wanting has ever determined the path for his work.

As to the “lumpy midsection”, first, I couldn’t agree more with you over the dubious financial means Dana and Bridger would have had to allow them to make this cross country drive. It was something that absolutely detracted from my reading of those sections of the novel as the question grew larger and larger throughout. Second though, I do think any midsection was going to be at least a small drop after the opening chapter – I’ve re-read Dana Halter’s arrest and subsequent scenes a few times now and am amazed at the job Boyle did with it.

I think the comparison of Peck and Dana and their self-entitlement is a great one. Even with the problems that befell Peck earlier in his life, I think the two characters were sufficiently different enough in what led to their self-entitlement, as well as how much entitlement I as a reader felt they deserved. I didn’t really think Boyle went too far over the top, though, in my mind, I may be comparing this work more with older work like World’s End and Heart of a Champion than with more recent efforts like Drop City or The Inner Circle.

I do wonder about Boyle’s views on capitalism and how it affects the identity of employees within the system. Dr. Koch, and his reaction to Dana’s arrest, was nearly as difficult for me to believe as the fact that Dana and Bridger could afford their traveling. With no back history of Dana being a poor employee or anything else, it is one of the things that seemed way over the top. I thought Radko and his reactions seemed quite fitting for what was going on in his employee’s world. Even Peck, in his pre-convict life, had run-ins with his own boss at the restaurant he ran.

While the humor may not have been so much, insider humor, I guess my bigger question was where was Boyle’s standard black humor?

As to Ed’s question of coincidences, while there certainly were many, it didn’t affect my reading. Or, if it did, it wasn’t nearly as much as the fact that Dana and Bridger shouldn’t have had any money, or Dr. Koch’s crazy reaction to Dana’s imprisonment.