In Dark Days, the Human Hyena Has the Last Laugh Up till now T. Coraghessan Boyle has been the Jim Carrey of fiction: all broad gestures and mimicry, nervous hyperbole and dazzling razzmatazz. He's used his satiric gifts and bravura showmanship to give us a gallery of weirdos and bug-eyed misfits - a man who believes he's a killer bee, a press agent determined to upgrade the image of the ayatollah, a woman fond of full-body condoms - and in doing so, he's energetically limned the lunatic fringe of America's zeitgeist. The inner lives of his characters, not to mention their domestic dilemmas, have always eluded Mr. Boyle's radar. The social, not the personal, the extreme, not the mundane, have been the focus of his stories, and his heroes have tended to elicit contempt or pity, not sympathy or insight. All this has begun to change with "A Friend of the Earth," his latest novel, which manages to be funny and touching, antic and affecting, all at the same time. At first glance the novel's hero, Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, seems like just one more of Mr. Boyle's cartoony obsessives. Since meeting Andrea, an ardent member of an environmentalist group called Earth Forever!, Ty has abandoned his sedate suburban life to become an Eco-Avenger. Even as Andrea and her colleagues are exchanging their radical tactics for mainstream lobbying efforts, Ty is becoming increasingly violent and out of control. He starts sabotaging timber company machinery at night, tries to bring down a power-line tower with a blowtorch and soon finds that he's become a fugitive from the law. He likes to think of himself as the "Phantom of California," the "Human Hyena." "To be a friend of the earth," he declares, "you have to be an enemy of the people." Though Mr. Boyle sends up Ty's countercultural excesses with his usual sardonic glee, he also manages to make the psychological underpinnings of his fervor palpable and real. More important, he makes the consequences of Ty's radicalism for Andrea and for his daughter, Sierra, the real focus of this novel, turning the book's four-decade-long narrative into a long sad-funny-unnerving account of Ty's efforts to come to terms with the fallout of his actions. To build suspense and underscore Ty's emotional maturation, Mr. Boyle cuts back and forth between two time frames. The first recounts Ty and Andrea's adventures in the 1980's and 90's: their romance, their efforts to protest timber company policies on behalf of the spotted owl, Ty's arrest for eco-terrorism and their years on the lam from the law. Most notably it features a hilarious account - somewhat reminiscent of a similar survivalist set piece from his 1990 novel, "East Is East" - of a publicity stunt in which Ty and Andrea, naked as Adam and Eve, set off to spend a month in the wilderness, foraging for food and shelter. No sunscreen, no toothpaste, no Desenex, no aspirin and no matches. No coffee, no English muffins, no chocolate, no vodka, no books and no music. "All those things he'd accumulated in his life," Ty thinks, "all that detritus from his parents and his house and office" was gone now, irrelevant, and now "he was like one of the roving Bushmen of the Kalahari, blackened and bearded little men who accounted themselves prosperous if they had an empty ostrich shell to haul water in." The second time frame is set in the year 2025. All of Ty's worst fears have come to fruition. The greenhouse effect has taken hold, the biosphere is collapsing, and dozens of mammalian species have vanished from the earth. There's little left in the oceans except zebra mussels, and birds are disappearing, too. There are no more giraffes or margays, no more Alaskan crabs, Indiana bats or Californian grizzlies. The rainy season brings torrential, "Blade Runner"-esque downpours; the dry season, scorching, dust-filled winds. "Techno-country" plays on the radio day and night, and deadly strains of flu waft through the polluted air. Ty now works as an animal handler for a wealthy rock star, presiding over a menagerie of endangered species. He is 75 and more or less resigned to his circumscribed existence, when Andrea unexpectedly resurfaces in his life, reawakening memories of their failed marriage and their loss of Sierra, who became a martyr to the Earth Forever! movement. In recounting these events Mr. Boyle cavalierly disposes of many of his characters with the same sort of chilly detachment Nabokov famously displayed in eliminating Hurnbert's mother "(picnic, lightning)": one dies after being hit by a meteor, another dies from a bee sting, a third is eaten by a bear, two more are squished by a falling steel girder on Lexington Avenue. But while Mr. Boyle's humor is black as ever, he demonstrates, in telling Ty's story, that satire can coexist with psychological realism, comedy with compassion. He's demonstrated in "A Friend of the Earth" that he's not just a manic and maniacally talented performer, but that he's got the novelistic equivalent of solid acting chops as well.
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