Greasy Lake Study Guide

Raised in Westchester County, New York in the 1960s, T.C. Boyle weathered a rebellious youth (he describes his younger self as “a maniacal, crazy driver [and] a punk pure and simple) and a drug-addled early adulthood before landing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied with American masters of the short story John Cheever and Raymond Carver. Inspired by writers of the grotesque and the fantastic such as Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Flannery O’Connor, Boyle’s work melds satire and dark comedy, moral inquiry, and observations on humanity’s role in the destruction of nature. The author of sixteen novels and eleven short story collections, Boyle’s starry career spans four decades. He has won awards from the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, the O. Henry Prize, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

A child of the 1960s, T.C. Boyle is a member of the Baby Boomer generation. “Greasy Lake” explores the tensions that grew out of the prosperity of the period, as well as the failures of the American dream despite the appearance of boundless opportunity and great fortune. The narrator and his friends think it is cool to be “bad”—context clues within the story tell the reader that these boys are financially comfortable and middle-class, but they reject their cushy position in life in favor of seeking thrills and danger in places like Greasy Lake. They’re tourists in the land of “badness,” just as were many members of the counter-culture of the sixties and seventies.

T.C. Boyle was inspired during his time at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop by the work of mentors like John Cheever (“the Chekhov of the suburbs”), John Irving, and Raymond Carver. From these teachers, the authors of acclaimed works such as Bullet Park, The World According to Garp, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Boyle inherited an interest in writing dark humor, “dirty realism,” and stories that investigated the failure of the American dream. Boyle’s work is often described as lush and “maximalist,” where the work of Carver and Cheever pioneered a “minimalist” writing aesthetic. Boyle’s rich language and highly imaginative plots have roots in the work of Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow), Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist, Great Expectations), and even noted American satirist Mark Twain (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn).