UCLA's Schoenberg Hall can accommodate 500 people, but not everyone on the line snaking around the building is going to get lucky. Inside, the atmosphere's electric; it takes 20 minutes to seat the crowd, and by the time writer/performer Sandra Tsing Loh comes up to the stage to introduce the main event, the excitement's reached revival-meeting proportions.

"What other writer," Loh asks, "seduces us with those words? Melanomic... monophonous... testudinous...." She pauses. "Testudinous?" She throws up her hands. "...and he's so fucking cool!"

T.C. Boyle comes up to the podium and the audience roars. He is, without doubt, almost 30 years after his debut (Descent of Man, 1979), still believable as the bad boy of literary fiction in his black suit, red sneakers, rock 'n' roll T-shirt and ...is that an ear cuff? Or a Band-Aid?

He transfixes the place with a short riff and a new story that ran in the NewYorker, about a guy delivering a liver for transplant who gets caught in a mudslide on a California highway. Boyle gesticulates, he changes voices; he changes expressions and, afterward, he takes standard-issue questions from the audience with the enthusiasm and interest of someone who's never heard these questions before.

Boyle is here in L.A. at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books to promote his 19th book of fiction, Talk Talk, a novel out in July from Viking about a beautiful young deaf woman whose identity is stolen, and to record the unabridged audio version (the only kind he'll do). "For posterity," he tells me across a corner table in the back of an empty restaurant in the lobby of his hotel. "I love to hear authors read their own work. You get an insight into them. Actors might do better, but their rhythm would be different."

The rhythm and music of language, and how we make language and how language identifies us, are important to Boyle. Which takes us to this new book. That and the fact that he worries about absolutely everything and his worries inform his writing: global warming and the disappearing frogs (A Friend of the Earth), immigration (Tortilla Curtain) and, lately, identity theft. "I'm fascinated and disturbed and I want to know how and why. Certainly I'm not going to find out by writing a book. I don't have solutions, I'm just meditating."

He actually does have a solution, he tells me conspiratorially. "If everyone would refrain from sexual intercourse—no cheating," he adds, "for 100 years, the earth's problems would be solved." Boyle has an infectious laugh. There's nothing inauthentic about him—not his art, or his relationships, or even the way he looks. The T-shirt today says, "Santa Barbara, Mistress of Imminent Doom" and that was an ear cuff I was puzzling over yesterday "It's just me," he says. "This is who I am. We writers are the weird of the world."

The truth is T.C. Boyle is a nice guy. I would sense this, even if he hadn't made a point of telling me. "My enemies don't want to hear that, but I am a nice guy."

"Enemies?" He laughs at my concern.

"I'm kidding... but all the disgruntled critics and writers who resent who I am… who think I'm full of myself. I don't have any gods and I don't care about anybody else, just my audience. And I don't schmooze and I don't go to literary parties and I don't kiss ass and I don't care about anything like that."

I ask him if he worries about being so recognizable, and he admits there have been some "freaky happenings" and "real nutballs," but he hopes for the best and mentions his Hungarian Puli dog who barks at anything that moves.

The way we look is one form of identity. But how do we know who we are? We talk to each other. We talk to ourselves. Boyle was mulling this over at the dentist's; the patient before him was a gorgeous girl. The dentist told Boyle that the girl was deaf, and "the whole book opened up for me," he says. "What would it be like to be deaf, since language is such a part of who we are? The deaf have a totally different culture. Computers have changed everything, but traditionally the language of the deaf is a visual and spatial language. This gave me a way of talking about identity theft. My character would be deaf, someone with a special identity, something the thief could not have imagined."

Knowing nothing about deaf culture, he started reading. "I only do research to make the art. I don't get lost in it. I'm the antithesis of Tom Wolfe. I don't have a journalistic background. If I'm going to write about the fire chief, I might walk by the firehouse and peek in the door, but I'm not going to say hello to anyone or talk to anybody. That freaks me out. I want to imagine it."

Boyle read Oliver Sacks and Steven Pinker and, serendipitously, he was invited to speak at Gallaudet University for the Deaf in Washington, D.C. "There's a screen with the words on it and an interpreter signing and at first it was strange, because the audience reaction was delayed but then I got used to it and it was wonderful. I went for lunch with the students after the talk and the dean said that they should come up and sit next to me and ask me questions. Now anyone in the hearing world would run screaming from the room, but they loved it! Some of them came up three and four times; they were dying to do it. Gallaudet was staggering, utterly staggering...."

Boyle talks in superlatives: his agent Georges Borchardt is "the most wonderful man who ever lived on this earth." Boyle loves his publishing house (Viking), "and they love me. I feel extraordinarily lucky. All my books are in print. My editor [Paul Slovak] is amazing. I introduced him to his wife!"

Even more than his publisher, Boyle loves his readers. "I will never get over the thrill and the honor of knowing that I am touching people in some way. To have an audience is a miracle. It's pure joy to connect with them... exhilarating!" And his readership responds. On his Web site, tcboyle.com, fans dissect his books, talk to each other and read his monthly letter to them about his day-to-day goings-on. The Web letter dated May 31 lists his tour schedule, with apologies for its brevity. The plan for Talk Talk is for seven cities. For Drop City, he visited 70 cities worldwide. Boyle estimates that he's been touring almost two months a year, and now "he has to get a life." He's planning a two-week road trip with his wife in the fall to see the leaves change.

From a working-class family in upstate New York, Boyle just walked through SUNY Potsdam and, for a few years after, dabbled in drugs and disaffection—until he published a story in the North American Review and applied to Iowa, where he studied with John Irving and John Cheever. Five and a half years later he left with an MFA, a Ph.D. in 19th-century British literature and a job teaching creative writing at USC two days a week. He still loves teaching and mentoring his students.

"Art bailed me out," he says. "It sounds corny but there's a power in it that I would never give up. There's a light that fills you when you're writing; there's a magic. I don't know what it is. It's a miracle and it's a rush and immediately on finishing, you want to do it again. It's so utterly thrilling to me it's all I want to do." Like he says in his essay, "This Monkey, My Back," he's got a jones, bad.

There's a pattern to Boyle's writing. He alternates novels with short story collections, historical novels with contemporary ones ("Moving back and forth," he says, "keeps me alive.") and one book flows from the next, although he admits this is all hindsight. He doesn't think about it. "I leave it to the graduate students," he tells me.

The Inner Circle, a historical featuring Dr. Kinsey and of course, sex, was followed by the National Book Award finalist Drop City, about a commune of hippies in Alaska and... sex. His characters connect: Dr. Kellogg in The Road to Wellville has the same kind of arrogance as Peck Wilson, the bad guy in Talk Talk, and the chimp in his very first book, Descent of Man, uses language, which is a theme in Talk Talk. It goes on and on.

Boyle works 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. every day, seven days a week. He's had the same agent his whole career, and he's been with Viking since the 1980s. He's been married since 1974, has three children and reads all his work to his wife. He seems grateful that she's willing to listen. Not such a bad boy after all.