T.C. Boyle will receive this year's Evil Companions Literary Award,which honors a writer wholives in the West or whose work "embodies thespirit of the West." As a talented author who has lived in California for decades and has set six of his 11 novels in the West, Boyle certainly qualifies.

From his home in the Santa Barbara area, the author spoke to the Rocky about Western writing, his forthcoming novel, The Women, and his daughter's prospects as a newly minted writer.

Question: Do you consider yourself a Westerner now, or do you still feel like a transplanted New Yorker?

Answer: Choice B. What is hilarious about the idea of regional writing or Western writing is that it no longer applies, because we are such a peripatetic society - everybody lives everywhere. It might have been true even 50 years ago when most writers lived in New York City because that's where the industry is and everything else was considered the hinterlands. But in my generation and on down, writers live anywhere they like.

Anyway, within a year of my having moved to L.A., The New York Times Book Review was asking me to review Western writers. So I guess I am a Westerner. I have a unique perspective on things because I always feel a little out of place.

Q: Your 1995 novel The Tortilla Curtain is often selected for community reading programs in cities throughout the West.

A: I've been very lucky. Many universities and cities have chosen The Tortilla Curtain for citywide reads, and I go as often as I can because I want to promote the idea of the community read. . . . It's so rare when we all have a book in common. I mean, you go to a party and people talk about a movie or a TV show or whatever. But not books so much, because if people are reading books, they're reading different books.

Q: I read that the book you're working on is about Frank Lloyd Wright.

A: Yes. Frank Lloyd Wright designed this house that I'm living in. So for many years, I've thought about writing about him, not only because I wanted to learn more but also because he fits in so well with some of the other historical characters I've taken on - for instance, Alfred Kinsey (The Inner Circle) and John Kellogg of The Road to Wellville. I call them the great egomaniacs of the 20th century. They're narcissistic personalities, like my bad guy Peck in Talk Talk.

This kind of personality appeals to me: someone who sees only his own agenda and for whom other people really don't have any valence or being except as they fit into that agenda. It's something that novelists are guilty of. And I guess I write about these characters as a cautionary tale for myself, reminding myself not to be a guru and not to go that far, and if I am a guru to be a very kind, gentle and persuasive one who persuades you only to enjoy art rather than to join some crazy enterprise.

Paul Slovak, my editor, has even said that once the paperback comes out, maybe we can do a boxed set of the egomaniac books.

Q: On the cover of each book, you should have each menacing face, like in Communist poster art.

A: I like it. We've got to sign you up for the art department.

Q: I read that your daughter attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

A: Yes, she got her MFA in fiction.

Q: Does she come to you for writing critiques?

A: No, we don't do any of that. We do play our work off of each other, sure. But she's a totally different sort of writer. She's writing really beautiful kind of imagistic stories, very dense and language-obsessed, and less plot-oriented. She has different mentors. We try to discourage her as much as possible by saying that writing is bankrupt and all writers are the most despicable people on Earth, but that's her life.

Q: How does the outlook for the publishing industry look different for her, starting out now in 2007, from how it did when you started publishing novels 25 years ago?

A: Well, for one thing, there were more readers then, percentagewise and probably in real numbers, too. There was TV, of course, which was the beginning of the death of literature, but now there are many other distractions such as the Net and video games. So reading seems to me these days to be confined to people who are obsessed with it. I think for some people, the only novel that they'll ever read will be one that they were forced to read in school, and because it's work, maybe they don't see it as a subversive pleasure and don't get the habit of it. . . .

So many of the publishing houses are run by big conglomerates that only look at the bottom line, and I wonder if they will make a long-term investment in a writer as Viking has done in me. It pays off for them, but it pays off over a long period of time, so that all my books are in print, they never have to spend a nickel on them and they sell and everybody's happy.

But will that happen with writers who publish their first novel today? I hope so.

Q: I read about something called "Authorgeddon," which, according to Wikipedia, refers to "the hypothetical date when the number of books published in a given year will exceed the number of people who have read even one book during the same year."

A: How depressing.

Q: It's projected to happen in 2052.

A: Well, the entire world will be gone by then. It's hard to foresee, though. I have to give some optimism here. It's hard to foresee how technology changes us. For instance, we're still typing - on our computers. And when the telephone came in at the turn of the last century, people said, "Here goes letter-writing," and so it did, but then who could foresee that we would e-mail each other, which is a form of letter-writing, to supersede even talking on the telephone?

Q: It seems that people will always want to consume stories in some form or another.

A: We need stories desperately. Again, we got them from TV, we're getting them from video games and we're getting them in the movie theater. And you know, technology is driving people away from public arenas for entertainment. People can get movies right on the Internet. So we're more invested in being at home and being entertained at home, and books might play a part in that. Who knows?

Q: Especially if there's some noxious gas outside and people can't leave the house.

A: Which is on its way, I'm sure. But once you're an artist, it doesn't matter what happens - you do it anyway.

Other Boyle honors

• National Book Award finalist for Drop City

• Winner of the 1997 Paris Prix Médicis Étranger, for the best foreign novel of the year, for The Tortilla Curtain

• Winner of the 1988 PEN/Faulkner Award for best novel of the year, for World's End

• His books are available in many foreign languages, including Portuguese and Lithuanian.

If you go

• What: Boyle receives the Evil Companions Award at an event to benefit the Denver Public Library.

• When and where: Wednesday at the Oxford Hotel, 1637 Wazee St. Cocktails and hors d'oeuvres, 6 p.m.; award presentation, 7 p.m.

• Cost: $65

• Information: www.denver library.org

Wright or wrong

Asked by the Rocky about the subject of his new book, Frank Lloyd Wright - and the fact that Wright was known for houses that often fell apart - Boyle noted:

"There are many wonderful stories about him.... You know, the stories about the flat roofs, the house he built for his brother Richard with the mitered glass corners and so on: It leaked, of course. Richard called up and said, 'There's water dripping on the piano,' and Frank said, 'Well, move the piano.' "

Jenny Shank's fiction has appeared in "Michigan Quarterly Review," "Image" and other journals. She lives in Boulder.

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