Identity is a slippery beast, slithering out of the gene pool and into the layered muck of experience. By the time we reach credit-card carrying age, most people have grown, stretched, and shed many skins.

T.C. Boyle, for example. There's Tommy Boyle of Peekskill, dutiful son; Tom Boyle, teenage stoner turned 4.0 grad student; T. Coraghessan Boyle, black humorist, dandy, and Pen/Faulkner winner; and T.C. Boyle, best-selling author of the galvanic Talk Talk, from which he'll read in Rhinebeck on Friday, July 7. None of these personae resemble the genial, avuncular fellow who picked up the phone on the top floor of Frank Lloyd Wright's first California house in Santa Barbara and said he had "nothing ahead but joy" for the rest of the day.

Officer, who was that masked man? I don't know, he was tall and thin. Brown hair. No, reddish. Bleached blond and piled asymmetrically. He had a goatee. He was wearing an ear-cuff. Shades. Dunno, man, but the dude had a radical freak on.

T.C. Boyle, or his spokesman du jour, has identity much on his mind. Talk Talk is a high-octane riff on identity theft, with a couple of twists: the intended victim, Dana Halter, is female and deaf, and the man who assumes her identity—credit cards, bank accounts, PhD—is a whip-smart impostor from Peterskill, New York, who's given himself a top-to-toe West Coast makeover.

You won't find Peterskill on a map, but Boyle aficionados will recognize the author's fictional gloss on his Hudson Valley hometown from World's End, The Road to Wellville, and such stories as "The Fog Man," which describes a class trip to the brand-new reactor at Indian Point. Why the extra syllable? "The purposely disguised name is to remind readers that this is a fiction, in the manner of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Macondo."

False modesty isn't an issue, but Boyle beats accusers to the punch in his blisteringly frank autobiographical essay "This Monkey, My Back": "What is cockiness, arrogance, whatever you want to call it, but a kind of preemptive strike on your own weaknesses?" He portrays himself as an addict who traded his parents' alcoholism and his early flirtation with heroin for a literary jones, reading "everything" and writing "seven days a week, the addiction full-blown," abetted by life-changing mentors in college and grad school. 

Boyle is a high culture/pop culture omnivore who decries the idea that rock, television, and movies have outpaced literature as popular entertainment, but enjoys them all. He can reference Borges in one sentence and Oprah in the next, and his range as a writer is equally broad: He's as comfortable slinging OED-busters like lucubrated, caliginous, and omphalos or describing the pixels that turn stuntmen's heads into aliens.