The New Yorker magazine has been pretty good to L.A. the last couple of weeks. The January 14th issue featured Dana Goodyear’s story on the Scientology Celebrity Center on Franklin, and this week’s fiction piece is by one of L.A.’s most prominent writers, T.C. Boyle.

During my graduate studies at USC, I took a writing workshop taught by Dr. Boyle. Many of his students, myself included, were mystified by his productivity. He wasn’t one of those “celebrity” teachers who showed up once or twice during the semester and let TAs handle the rest of it. The semester I took the class, Boyle cancelled one session because he was giving a reading in another city; all other weeks he made the two hour commute from his Santa Barbara home. Yet his dedication to teaching does nothing to dampen his output. Boyle has published 11 novels and 8 story collections and seems to complete a new one about every year. After our Friday afternoon class a few students went out for drinks and wondered how he did it. “Does he ever sleep?” we asked. “Does he write, like, ten hours a day?” Perhaps the fact that he wasn’t at the bar could have given us an idea about how to increase our own productivity. But I digress.

One might also think that the product quality of someone who churns out work constantly would be a little hit or miss, but, for me at least, Boyle’s stories are always engrossing and surprising. Like many of Boyle’s stories, “Ash Monday” features a Southern California locale, this time an unnamed canyon, and different cultures clashing, here a refined Japanese man living next door to a not-so-refined white mother and son. And the Santa Ana winds play a prominent role in the story, stirring up trouble and tension as they always seem to do.

Just when you think you’ve figured out which character will ultimately cause the most harm, the story ends on an unexpected but somehow inevitable note, another skill Boyle possesses in spades. As a New Yorker subscriber, I can attest that it isn’t often our fair city gets much play in its pages (unless you count the weekly movie reviews), so this is a good week to hit the magazine rack and treat yourself to a masterful L.A. story.

Photo by Wikipedia

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