A grave new world When T.C. Boyle's latest novel opens, the year is 2025. The Earth is in terrible shape, and the worst fears of contemporary environmentalists have been realized. The landscape of "A Friend of the Earth" (Viking. $25) is grim. Years of pollution have resulted in drastic climatic changes: "Grapes are a thing of the past. Napa-Sonoma is all rice paddies now, the Loire and Rhine valleys so wet they'd be better off truing to grow pineapples-though on the plus side I hear Norwegians are planting California rootstock in the Oslo suburbs," killer flu decimates the population, and most of the major mammalian species are extinct or nearly so. People are still around, however, if just barely. Seventy-five-year-old Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, with his arrhythmic heart, uncooperative bowels and transplanted kidney, is nearly as bad off as the planet. Decades earlier, as a member of Earth Forever!, he had been a fervent ecoterrorist, using any means possible to forestall the slow-motion apocalypse. Now, the fires of his fanaticism banked, he endures the monsoons of Southern California, working as caretaker to rock star Maclovio Pulchris' menagerie of "warthogs, peccaries, hyenas and jackals, with the three lions thrown in for the excitement factor." This collection is maintained in the probably futile hope of breeding or cloning the animals, thereby restoring some small part of the natural order. A phone call from Andrea, his former wife and compatriot, interrupts Tierwater's routine. Why, after more than 20 years, does she wish to see him? "For love," she says. Well, partly. Actually, Andrea is in cahoots with writer April Wind. They want to scavenge Tierwater's memories for details of his daughter Sierra's life. Sierra, his child from his first marriage, like her father joined the environmental movement. Her accidental death while protesting makes her a martyr to the cause, and Wind wishes to publish her biography. Boyle alternates Tierwater's sardonic first-person account with chapters written in the third person and set in the 1980s and '90s. These detail Tierwater's growing involvement, then disillusionment with Earth Forever!, his monkey-wrenching activities, incarcerations and the events leading to Sierra's death. Her demise is one of several that punctuate events in the novel. Characters die in different ways but always suddenly, violently and often in some grotesque fashion. In what may be a literary first, one person is dispatched by a meteorite. While the deaths may be diverse, they all, in a manner of speaking, occur through natural causes. A central irony of the book is that Tierwater is committed to preserving nature, but it seems bent on taking those closest to him. Given its subject matter, "A Friend of the Earth" could have been merely a one-sided diatribe against corporate culture and unthinking consumerism. Dogmatism is not Boyle's style, however. An equal opportunity satirist, he skewers the aforementioned targets, as well as zealots, luxury-car-driving and professional environmentalists. Boyle specializes in eccentrics, chronicling their lives with wit, black humor and a finely tuned sense of the absurd. In his best work, he combines these qualities with honesty and compassion to elevate his stories above the merely bizarre, illuminating the workings, and failings, of the human heart. In books such as "Water Music," "World's End" and "The Tortilla Curtain," Boyle proved he could write excellent historical and contemporary novels. Now he extends his range into the future. Tales of ecological collapse are certainly nothing new-they've been a staple of science fiction for years. But Boyle invests his with a profound wisdom and sadness few can match. Angry, mordant, occasionally cynical but ultimately hopeful, "A Friend of the Earth" is a worthy addition to its authors already-impressive body of work.
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