Where the Twain Meet : Books: L.A. writer T. Coraghessan Boyle’s latest work, ‘East Is East,’ is a Southern novel with a Japanese twist.

History probably will not record Thomas Coraghessan Boyle’s march through Georgia. Unlike Gen. William Tecumseh (“War is Hell”) Sherman, the ruthless Union Civil War commander who ravaged the Peach State in his epochal drive to the sea, Boyle left no burned towns, pillaged farms and impotent wrath in his wake.

Nope.

But it’s easy to imagine the swath the Los Angeles writer and three buddies cut while researching his latest novel, “East Is East” (Viking, $19.95), in a trek through a rural landscape dotted with swamps, alligators, country stores and Mother’s Day church suppers for the lost and hungry. (All you can eat for $5.)

For one thing, there just aren’t that many big, ol’ wide, white Lincoln Continental convertibles left on the road. At least not with Boyle in them.

So, picture it: Boyle--a lean, frizzy-haired, pale novelist, teacher, reformed punk and Westchester County, N.Y., native--checking out the Southern mores, the flora, fauna, cuisine in a gas-guzzling dinosaur of an automobile.

There he is, a man who has seen a chunk of the world, a veteran of media exposure, a guy with an admittedly large literary ego, owner of a house in Woodland Hills, staying for a couple of days in a remote county where the outlets for fun--maybe even electricity--are, well, limited.

What’s he going to do?

Get in the spirit of things, of course.

Up the street from the motel, Boyle and company spied the local Dairy Queen. They soon discovered the drive-in was “the nexus of social life in Clinch County, Ga.” because “everybody, all day and all night long, cruised around it.”

Ever eager for new cultural experiences, the intrepid adventurers “got in our car and cruised around it too.”

Throw in a church supper (“Would you boys like some more tea?”) that Boyle and his companions discovered while lost on a back road, a trip to Georgia’s Sea Islands, a tour of Savannah and a two-day canoe trip in the Okefenokee Swamp. Add it up and you have a pretty good tally of how much actual, on-the-ground Southern research Boyle did for the new novel.

In a way, Boyle, 41, admits, he is massively unqualified to publish a Southern novel.

“I have no right to write a Southern novel because I’m not from the South,” he explains. “In fact, my joke is that I’m thoroughly qualified to write about Georgia because I’ve flown over it several times on my way to Miami.”

And we haven’t even gotten to the Japanese aspect of this business yet.

That’s right, the Japanese angle.

“East Is East” isn’t just a Southern novel. For Boyle, a lover of complexity, that would be too simple. It’s really a Southern-Asian novel because it’s about a Japanese sailor named Hiro Tanaka who jumps ship and creates havoc among the natives after drifting and swimming to the Georgia shore.

No, no. That’s not right either.

The characters also include an Immigration and Naturalization Service agent from Los Angeles and a bunch of writers in an artists colony.

OK, maybe the safest thing to say is the novel contains a conglomeration of things, some Southern, some Asian and some pure Boyle.

The novel sprang from a story that a friend saw in a newspaper, Boyle says. It was about “an Asian seaman (who) had jumped ship somewhere in the south of the United States, had been at large for six weeks and when he was captured was emaciated and full of bug bites.”

Boyle told his friend, “Boy, that’s right up my alley, you know me well. It’s got swamps, everything.”

Despite its origins in a fuzzy set of facts, “East Is East” is, above all, an exercise in imagination, Boyle says, noting that his first novel, “Water Music,” was about African explorer Mungo Park. Not unexpectedly, Boyle has never been to Africa.

“Since you’re creating the world, you can put anything in it you want,” he says, “and I’ve always been very fascinated with fish, with swamps, with animals who live in them, with human excrement, with muck, with the processes of the body, with the names of trees and plants and animals and their life cycles, all of that stuff. . . . It is fiction, it is an exercise of the imagination, it is a test of how strong your imagination is.”

Yep. Sounds like the kind of stuff you gotta care about in the backwoods.

But don’t go thinking that Boyle has gotten countrified and owns a pickup truck full of blue tick hounds.

He’s way too hip for that. Georgia was fun, but he seems more smitten by Japan, where he traveled last summer, sponsored by the U. S. Information Agency, to give a series of readings and lectures.

Aside from picking up a small grasp of the language and a kaleidoscope of impressions, Boyle recalls with delight a series of small encounters.

For instance, he met a man who urgently told him, “I love you. I love America. But I do not love your economics.”

Boyle says he replied, “I love you. I love Japan. I am not an economist.”

While Boyle’s sense of humor is a key personal characteristic--and an important feature of his novels and short stories--it may obscure his iron discipline and ambition.

Since moving to Los Angeles in 1977 to teach writing at USC, Boyle has published seven books--three collections of short stories and four novels. Two of the latter, “Water Music” and “World’s End,” were so hefty that some speak of the novels’ “throw weight,” a term usually applied to nuclear warheads.

Last year, Boyle’s short story collection, “If the River Was Whiskey,” raised some eyebrows by being published in the middle of the furor over Salman Rushdie’s novel “Satanic Verses,” which provoked an Iranian call for Rushdie’s assassination.

Into this international furor, Boyle thrust a collection that included a story about a Los Angeles public relations man retained to improve the image of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. (Rushdie, of course, remains in hiding somewhere in England.)

Actually, “Hard Sell” may have been one of the author’s more restrained offerings. His other short stories have included a talking statue of the Virgin Mary, a guy who wants to be famous so badly that he tries to ride on the wing of a jet and a woman who requires her lover to wear a “full body condom” when they make love.

All of the books are still in print and over the years Boyle’s critical and popular reputation have built steadily.

That trend continues with “East Is East.” Some 45,000 copies are in print and the book already has made four regional best-seller lists, including Washington and San Francisco. The number is some 20,000 more than his last novel, “World’s End,” racked up. Critics have called “East Is East” “irresistible,” “brilliant,” and “another triumph.”

The enthusiastic receptions for “World’s End” and “East Is East” apparently have ameliorated some of Boyle’s sharper hungers.

When “World’s End” appeared three years ago, Boyle was impatient for a larger audience, his literary ambitions seemed closer to the surface and he spoke at length about scaling the heights of American literature to bump elbows with the likes of John Updike and William Faulkner.

In 1990, Boyle seems to have mellowed. He still has his penchant for unconventional clothes, offbeat hairstyles and earrings. His attire at an interview included a T-shirt emblazoned with a reproduction of the dust jacket of “East Is East,” for example.

Nonetheless, Boyle appears considerably more detached about the fame game, partly, perhaps, because he is more satisfied with the way things are going.

This week, for example, Boyle is scheduled to appear on “The Today Show” and “Late Night With David Letterman.”

While the appearances are a sign of arrival, Boyle sounded wary of the tube.

“I don’t really think that I will enjoy being on those shows. In fact I know I will not enjoy being on them and don’t really want to be on them,” he said. “I’m going on there because I think it will help the success of the book. I don’t want to be schmoozing on late-night shows like Truman Capote, stoned out of my mind and not doing my work.”

And for all his brazen exterior, there is a conventional, domestic side to Boyle that may protect him from the more bitter fruits of egotism and talk shows. He has been married for 16 years. He and his wife, Karen, have two sons and a daughter. They live in a good--but not palatial--house not far from the Ventura Freeway and Boyle is fond of showing visitors around his suburban domain.

This sober side of Boyle speaks out in favor of slow but sure progress in the literary marketplace.

“As long as you get there, I think it can be very rewarding,” he said. “The danger of hitting it right off the bat is what do you do for your next act? Everybody is waiting to shoot you down and say, ‘Ah, this guy was a flash in the pan.’ I can’t complain. My career has built steadily and I’m getting more and more attention.”

Surprisingly, after his touring for “East Is East” ends in a few weeks, Boyle promises to recede from the limelight for a while. “The public needs a break,” he said. “I’ve had three books in three years. They’ve probably seen enough of me.”

While his flair for self-promotion--now backed strongly by his publisher’s scheduling and advertising--probably has helped his career, Boyle also knows that the books are the thing.

“The most important thing is to work each day,” he says. “The most frightening thing is to lose inspiration . . . for whatever reason--maybe because there’s too much pressure on you, maybe because you don’t really have any inspiration. Who knows where it comes from to begin with? So that terrifies me. I don’t feel good unless I’m working every day.”

Boyle says he might feel even better if the weather in Southern California were worse. Ever since moving here, the mild climate has bugged him, prompting frequent longing for lowering skies and bitter winds.

A sharper distinction in the seasons may some day prove stronger than his attachments to Los Angeles, he hints.

“I still have the Easterner’s prejudice against the weather here particularly,” he says. “I hate sunshine. I love USC, the job I have there. I like the fact that Los Angeles has really supported my career here a lot . . . I live here. My children were born here. I have close friends. It would be difficult to leave.

“And yet, particularly in these four years of drought, I just get kind of a hankering for that lushness of the East Coast. I know it’s boring there. I know there are a lot of mosquitoes. I know I’ll regret it if I go back. But I just want to see some gloom and misery. . . .For me, a bright sunny day, especially after 12 years of them, doesn’t make me feel good.”