Silver linings give way to clouds of eco-pessimism Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater is about as unlikely an ecological anarchist as, say, Drew Carey. Son of a tract home developer, living the high life in California, Ty Tierwater is the prototypical acquisitive suburban drone. Sometimes he remembers to recycle, more often he doesn't and, unthinkingly, he commits the casual, commonplace crime against nature on "this tattered, bleeding planet." Then he becomes a friend of the earth. His story actually begins in the future, several decades after Ty's conversion. And what a future! "Meteorological dislocations" at the turn of the century that have made life in the year 2025 a waking nightmare. Global warming has brought sauna like heat and biblical rains. In California, Napa-Sonoma is all rice paddies. Every remaining animal is endangered. Bars serve only sake and the radio plays something called techno-country. Cities have oozed together, forming the megalopolises of Los Andiegoles and San Jose Francisco. Ty is the keeper-in-residence of a rock star's private menagerie of rare and forgotten animals. The musician's name is Maclovio Pulchris, but everything about him screams Michael Jackson, right down to the fedora and "three strands of slick processed hair (his eel whips, he calls them) clinging to his mirror shades." Ty is trying to keep the animals alive and under control as he clings to aging memories and his remaining sanity. Suddenly, the woman who once led him, literally, down the Garden of Eden path re-enters his life. With Andrea's appearance, Ty is returned to the halcyon days of 1989, when he is seduced out of his cushy but empty life by the beautiful eco-radical. In her thrall, he commits his first act of "ecotage," which goes horribly, if amusingly, wrong and enmeshes Ty's young daughter in the consequences. But both Ty and his progeny are radicalized by the experience and become fervent members of Earth Forever!, a group loosely modeled on Earth First. Daughter Sierra becomes a treesitter, going aloft to save an old giant from the evil timber companies. Ty's conversion, it soon becomes clear, carries a high price. As he says, "to be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people." The story of Ty's life as a friend of the earth is informed by both cynicism and rage, emotions that alternate like the past-present chapters themselves in this whistling-past the-junkyard tale. But T. C. Boyle's acid wit is tinged with indignation. Even when he is ridiculing the hilarious poseurs among the environmental ninjas, Boyle never questions their motives. The earth has been fouled. In case you don't get it, an underline below the cover title says, "Fiction?" Yet, when I first saw the cover, I thought maybe Boyle had gone soft. He had dropped the mighty Coraghessan from his name for that wussy initial "C." Maybe all those years out in Montecito, Calif., tending his garden, had tempered his instinct for the jugular. But hey, it was just the cover. Inside, he's still the same old Tom, the Prince of Darkness. Boyle understands the threat to the environment, but he knows how righteous and sanctimonious the eco-radicals can be. Think Al Gore to the 10th power. He visit ed the subject before in an early 1990s short story called "Carnal Knowledge," in which the protagonist somehow finds himself liberating a flock of turkeys. In Friend, Boyle wraps the few silver linings about environmental activism in clouds so dense and dark that his pessimism becomes the only reality. His vision of the future is no future. He's like one of those bearded "End is Near" guys from the cartoons, except he's mugging for laughs. This is no cautionary tale. Boyle obviously believes matters have gone too far for that. Boyle likes to hold up a mirror to society. Sometimes it's a funhouse mirror, but even with the distortions, the image is all-too-recognizable. He's still one of the most inventive and exhilarating writers around, showing how you can drive a narrative and still have fun with language. I never can get through one of his books without visiting the dictionary several times. And the characters! His descriptions of the callipygian Andrea, and Teo, the Earth Forever! leader, are too wicked. "Andrea is watching my face, looking for the crack into which she can drive the first piton and begin her ascent to my poor quivery brain," says Ty. Demonstrating under an unforgiving sun, Ty recalls "sitting there frying like somebody's meal with a face." The rock singer's bodyguards are described as having skin "the color of the growth medium in a petri dish." The verbal pyrotechnics and the winning theme are way entertaining, but I couldn't help concluding that Friend doesn't have the feel of a fully realized vision. Maybe it's the characters, who are either loathsome or quirkily sympathetic. Maybe it's the construct that has the reader jumping from 2025 to 1989-1995 and then back to the future again. We're bouncing around in Ty's life, and we can't quite get a grip. The satire runs out of steam. This isn't a beach book. It's something to read on the barricades of the next WTO demonstration. Boyle has given us ample reason to care. Yet he never seems to resolve the question he posits early in this novel: "If a protest falls in the woods and there's no one to hear it, does it make a sound?" I saw it another way: With these kinds of friends, who needs enemies?
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