Books by author: T.C. Boyle

After my hopeful disappointment with Water Music, I decided to give T.C. Boyle another try, and I'm glad I did so.

The protagonists of Talk Talk are a deaf woman named Dana and her non-deaf boyfriend, Bridger. Their lives are turned upside-down when Dana becomes a victim of identity theft, and the plot turns into a quest to make things right. As you might guess, this doesn't involve spending hundreds of pages on the phone with Equifax. Rather, Boyle takes us on a cross-country chase that intertwines the viewpoints of both protagonists with that of the thief. The ending isn't entirely a feel-good affair, but it feels real.

I'm looking forward to reading more of Boyle's work.

Water Music is a playful re-imagining of the adventures of Mungo Park, the Scottish explorer who attempted to chart the course of the Niger River in Africa. His story is interwoven with the stories of Ned Rise (a British scalawag with great talent for nearly getting killed) and a handful of other colorful characters. T.C. Boyle's prose is inventive and anachronistic, and he has a knack for crafting one or two sentences that jump off of each page.

I wanted to like Water Music a lot more than I actually did. The plot is surprisingly tedious, and the regular bits of clever wordplay weren't enough to save it. I quite liked the Ned Rise character, and would have enjoyed a novel about him alone, but the frequent changes of viewpoint gave the novel a start/stop rhythm that was hard to get into.

I'd like to try another of Boyle's novels because this one was almost in my sweet spot.