Novelist T.C. Boyle isn't about to take the end of the world sitting down, especially not today. Just back from a monthlong book tour for "Drop City," his novel of counterculture meltdown, he knows there's no time to waste. The battle's gone personal, and it's not about developers versus tree huggers or hippies versus homesteaders.
This time it's all about termites -- he points to a small cone of black granules on the window ledge above the back stairway -- and this living museum he calls his home.
Swarming insects don't have anything on him. After all, he's already faced down mildew, rot and a leaky roof -- everything you'd expect in a house that's nearly 100 years old -- but here the stakes are always high, especially if you're the custodian of a Frank Lloyd Wright design, and it happens to be the first he drew for the Golden State.
That Boyle, spinner of subversive tales about marijuana farming, illegal aliens and eco-terrorism, lives in a Wright house may come as a surprise. A tall lanky shape, dressed in black with red Converse high tops, who's as apt to carry on about drugs and free love as he is about global warming and declining sperm counts, he might seem more at home in a rambling shed buried deep in Topanga Canyon or the penthouse suite of an Ian Schrager hotel.
But sit with him on the back deck -- one of his favorite places -- where you might catch him one summer evening barbecuing a mixed grill, and you'll find a man at ease with his surroundings. From here you can look into the cathedral-like space of the living room or out into the brilliant green canopy of trees that surround the home.
"It's quite wonderful here," he'll tell you, as if you need to be told. "It's two stories up from the ground, and it's like you're floating in the trees. The overhang protects you from the sun, yet as the sun goes west, it can warm the area. It's a magic sort of place."
So who is this man, sometimes known as Tom Boyle or T. Coraghessan Boyle, who wears this home, this monument of aestheticism, so well around his shoulders? Like an animal trainer, he's been putting the Four Horsemen through their paces since he stepped upon the literary stage in 1979, and now nearly 25 years and 14 books later, he's got a bestseller on his hands in "Drop City." But outside his novels, he is, for sure, a carefully cultivated mystery.
