Short Story Review: The Silence, T.C. Boyle

Tucked away in the back of the current Atlantic, away from where their delicate readers may stumble upon it by accident, is their yearly quota of fiction. I’m not going to spend too much time on the Atlantic’s outrageous stance on fiction, except to say, they claim they love it, but gave no justification as to why hiding it in a little ghetto once a year is the best way to show the love. So let’s just jump to a story.

T.C. Boyle has been kicking around the big leagues of American publishing for quite some time now, so his story “The Silence” could well be considered the centerpiece of this collection. I know Boyle from his novel "The Road to Wellville," a historical novel of the breakfast cereal industry’s roots in health food and spa retreats. (It’s also a movie, almost unwatchable, starring Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Broderick). Other than that, I know what Wikipedia tells me: he’s a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he lives in Southern California with his wife and kids, and teaches at USC. He’s written twelve novels and won Major Awards. He also bears an uncanny resemblence to Zonker Harris, from Doonsebury. (Boyle is the one on top.)

All good reasons to be resentful of his success. But let’s take the high road, and assume he got where he is because he’s a good writer. And sure enough, this is a funny, wicked story. “The Silence” is a satire of man’s quest for enlightenment, and his urge to drop out of society (common themes for Boyle). In this case, he follows a group of Tibetan buddhist converts who move out to the desert, under a vow of silence, to live for three years, three months, and three days. The silence is both fitting symbol and comic foil, used to generate humor when the narrator, Ashoka, tries to impart the wonder of a dragonfly to his girlfriend, or when his ex-wife and children drop by for a visit, or the clan leader tries to give instructions for Ashoka to go peel potatoes.

Like the easy humor, there are many other reasons for this story not to work, but Boyle dodges them all. Cartoony cliché, for instance: Ashoka is a former fine arts potter who cashed in on the dot com boom, then dropped out of society to chase enlightenment. That it is precisely all his worldly goods that allow him to drop out is a cleverly understated motif. But I suspect that underneath this cliché you’ll find hundreds of real people with this back-story, especially in Southern California, where flakes and mid-life crises go to flourish. I wrote Boyle to ask whether he based these characters on real people, but his response was that he “makes it all up… That’s the beauty of fiction.”

I suspect he’s being a bit coy about that. But as Boyle plays with the theme of enlightenment through cheerfully self-inflicted suffering and deprivation, and their life turns from a game to a chore, and their minds soften in the desert heat, the story darkens. Then tragedy strikes one of the members, and the results are both comic and horrifying. This is where their suffering turns real, and Akosha gains a form of enlightenment he hadn’t been seeking at all – which, in a way, is what enlightenment is all about.

I also asked Boyle for his thoughts on whether enlightenment was possible or just an illusion, the result of people doing stupid things in the name of enlightenment, and he told me to look at the story. He said you could pretty much figure out whether Ashoka was enlightened from the context of how he ends up, which of course, to me, has all the clarity of a Zen parable.

But I'm okay with his vague answer. To look at the story for answers is exactly what an author should tell a reader, if you think about it.