Laughing giddily in the face of Earth's destruction, satirist Boyle strikes again Often the closest you can get to plumbing the cranium of a writer is to know what books they suggest you read. So when T.C. Boyle offered a reading list to an interviewer a couple of years ago, while in the midst of writing "A Friend of the Earth," the road map to the current state of his cerebellum was clear. At the top of Boyle's list was "Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World," followed by "Collected Fictions" by Jorge Luis Borges which in turn was followed by "The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions." Sift that data through the fine-mesh screen of Boyle's writing specialties-satire and historical setting's that illuminate today's struggles-and the only piece of "A Friend of the Earth" that feels out of place is that half the book is set in the near future, sure, but 2025 is the land of sci-fi, not exactly Boyle's regular landscape. The landscape may be different, but the terrain is familiar. "A Friend of the Earth" takes a look at the history of the environmental movement, from the middle of last century to 25 years into the future, told from the point of view of Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, a 75-year-old environmentalist. At least, he was an environmentalist; in the near future he is not much more than a survivalist, along with most everyone else on the planet. It is a planet battered and besieged by waves of parching heat and devastating rains driven by out-of-control global warming, not to mention a continuous parade of nasty new viruses sweeping the human population. Along with trying to survive, Tierwater is trying to protect the last examples of several species of critters: a Patagonian fox, several lions and a brutally nasty brown hyena trained Lilly. In Boyle's novel, the environmental movement is doomed, as are we all. Sure, the intentions are good, the goals important to the survival of the species. But we are just another annual on the planet-not much more in control than the hyena, and probably just as vicious. The only thing that sets us apart, maybe, is love. For Tierwater, love returns in the form of Andrea. She was the reason Tierwater transformed from restless suburbanite, with no trace of an environmental consciousness to eco-terrorist to convict to poster boy for the movement. She was also the reason he lost his beloved daughter, Sierra. Messy realities are set against idealized purity, whether in love or the fight to save the planet. Because the author is T.C. Boyle, the writing is sure, the situations surreal and the tone a mixture of bleak and humorous. "A Friend of the Earth" is Boyle's eighth novel, joining several short story collections on his personal bookshelf. From "Budding Prospects," set among the marijuana growers in Northern California, to "Riven Rock," the story of a misogynistic schizophrenic heir to a massive fortune, Boyle has demonstrated again and again his sense of the absurd in service of the serious. His writing skill is unassailable, built around soaring phrases that always seem to surprise. Sample the first three sentences of "A Friend of the Earth": "I'm out feeding the hyena her kibble and chicken backs and doing what I can to clean up after the latest storm, when the call comes through. It's Andrea. Andrea Knowles Cotton Tierwater, my ex-wife, my wife of a thousand years ago, when I was young and vigorous and relentlessly virile, the woman who routinely chained herself to cranes and bulldozers and seven-hundred-thousand-dollar Feller Buncher machines back in the time when we thought it mattered, the woman who helped me raise my daughter, the woman who made me crazy." Boyle's followers and fans won't be disappointed by his new novel, nor will his critics be satisfied. Though he may be a tad accessible for the defenders of high literature, Boyle has once again accomplished his goal of creating literature that is important and fun to read. That sense of easy fun, even in this often-bleak setting of worldwide environmental collapse, is one of the reasons Boyle's novels are gaining growing respect and sales. He is an effortless read, a skillful phrasemaker with strong powers of description playing, in this case, in a world of his own creation. You can't ask for much more than that.
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