“There is copyediting, there are sometimes small suggestions from my editor or agent, but basically, I’m not the sort of writer who works with an editor or with anybody. It’s just, ‘There it is, it’s done, it’s published, we go onto to something else.’” He pauses and chuckles. “We each have our peculiarities.”

In this hyper-mediated, multi-tasking age, Boyle prefers a linear method when writing.

Naturally, to illustrate his point, he begins to tell a story: “About two or three years ago, two of the new students in my fall grad school class who I didn’t know came to speak to me.

“Each of them said to me, separately, ‘I’m working on a novel and I’m really having trouble with it.’

“I said, ‘Great, we can work on it together. How far have you gotten?’

“ ‘400 pages.’

“I said, ‘Well, wonderful.’ But, unfortunately, they’re working on seven other things at the same time. The novel wasn’t continuous, it wasn’t organic. They had written the kitchen scene because the kitchen scene interested them, but they didn’t know how it would fit in the larger picture.

“Well, maybe some artists work that way, but I don’t. I could never conceive of working that way. It has to be integral, it has to happen as it goes along. And of course, there are times in any given story or novel when I can see what it is, where it’s going, and maybe I want to get there, but to get there, you have to go step by step.”

When asked if he ever gets to a passage that seems boring to write, he says, “It’s funny, I don’t know if it seems boring to me. It just seems as if it’s hard to do and it’s not working right. And, of course, you’ll put ten times the amount of work into that than when it’s going well. Nonetheless, when the product is finished, I can’t tell where those spots are.”

Later, he gives his interviewer and photographer a rare tour of the exterior of the house. The professor in the red tennis shoes eventually ends up hunched on dark wooden steps, sunglasses on, silver ear cuff in place. He casually mentions he’s been listening to George Eliot’s classic 1872 novel Middlemarch in his car while driving to and from Los Angeles. This elicits a burst of excitement from his interviewer, who maintains that Middlemarch is the finest novel ever written in English.

When queried about what his favorite novel is, Boyle smiles patiently.

“It depends on the day,” he says.