
I believe the first Boyle book I ever read was World's End,

Water Music is grand. It's phenomenal. It is spectacular. This book actually began as his doctoral thesis, as legend serves, and took on a life of its own. I'll let the author himself describe it, as lifted from his website:
Water Music is my first novel. It was published by Atlantic-Little, Brown in 1981 (though it actually appeared in early January, 1982), and was subsequently published by Penguin in soft cover, now in its 21st edition. This is a wild ride of a book, the one that taught me to follow my imagination, and it consists of 104 chapters, each a story in itself. It was three years in the writing. The back cover of the current Penguin edition has this to say: "Funny, bawdy, full of T.C. Boyle's inimitable flights of imaginative and stylistic fancy, Water Music follows the wild adventures of Ned Rise, thief and whoremaster, and Mungo Park, explorer, through London's seamy gutters and Scotland's scenic highlands--to their grand meeting in the heart of darkest Africa. There they join forces and wend their hilarious way to the source of the Niger." I remember that when the book was half-finished at about 250 pp., both my editor and agent advised me to cut out the Ned Rise story, worrying in concert that the novel was getting out of hand; I assured them that I had a plan and that Ned Rise had to stay. I hope I was right. In any case, I've never looked back.
You can read an excerpt from the first chapter here.

My copy of Water Music, alas, is not inscribed to me, but to someone named Marjorie. However, I am proud

If you haven't read Boyle, start with this one. It's a wild ride.
Love Boyle, as you know. The poor guy used to think I was a stalker. In any event, I remember first reading him in a survey contemporary lit class in college. We were assigned a short story called "Greasy Lake and All" (also the name of the collection in which it was published...)
ReplyDeleteLike you say, fan for life. He is absolutely unique and absolutely great.