Entertaining tale about environment
Karen Sandstrom
Cleveland Plain Dealer 9/10/00

If Al Gore's campaign staff is even half-awake, they'll buy him a copy of "A Friend of the Earth" and make sure he's seen reading it. In one swoop, he can wave the flag for his pet cause, the environment, while identifying himself as a man in touch with the cool side of American culture.

T.C. Boyle is one of our cooler writers. He's a modern with a love of plot, a writer with story ideas worthy of his language. In his short stories and previous novels, including "Riven Rock" and "The Road to Wellville," he has married quirky clips from history to his cockeyed imagination and produced tales that are recognizably "Boyle" - with or without a byline.

"A Friend of the Earth" is a rollicking look at the life and troubled times of one Tyrone Tierwater, who in the 1980s goes to work as an eco-activist and is still around some 35 years later to see the collapse of the biosphere. In chapters that move back and forth in time, the novel renders a world where El Nino proves just the beginning of weather that's become weird on a biblical scale. Against this eerie backdrop Boyle studies the more pointed issues of Ty as a social man, husband, father and, eventually, gamekeeper to a rock star.

The "now" chapters, told in Ty's voice, begin in 2025. Ty is a septuagenarian caring for lions, hyenas, peccaries and other beasts still alive at a time of precipitous extinction. It's raining. It's raining torrents in California, has been for weeks, and Ty's ex-wife, Andrea, has returned to him out of the blue - "for love," she says, and also because her friend April Wind wants to write the story of how Sierra, Ty's daughter from a previous marriage, died a martyr.

The "then" chapters, told in third-person, begin in 1989, when Ty, Andrea, the then-13-year-old Sierra, plus their cohort Teo, stage an act of peaceful protest by fixing themselves in concrete across the only path available to loggers. Neither the corporate chiefs nor the local law are amused. Soon, Ty and friends are arrested and Sierra is sent to a foster home.

Apocalypse and adventure scent the air throughout this tale. Much of the Tierwaters' time together is spent hiding from the law, or trekking through the woods. Like many families, they bicker and chafe within a prevailing atmosphere of love. Unlike most families, they share an out-there sensibility in their pure devotion to Mother Earth.

Or do they?

"A Friend of the Earth" poses some discomfiting questions beyond what we're going to do when the planet becomes irredeemably spoiled. Is it natural to be a naturalist? Is it possible to wear clothes and live in a house and be pro-environment? And is it always obvious when a movement has ceased to function for the benefit of society and has become the instrument of an individual's ego?
Boyle allows these questions to bubble up out of a transcendent narrative and solid characters. Ty isn't quite perfectly drawn - his whole-hog environmentalism at times feels false - but he's likable even when he's being a jerk. Andrea comes through most clearly in the chapters Ty narrates, and he sees her through love-fogged lenses. We know Sierra first as a Goth-garbed teenager, then as a young woman who (mirroring the antics of real-life environmentalist Julia Butterfly Hill) takes to living in a treetop.

Boyle's wonderful writing, while simultaneously wild, talky and charming, stops a dime short of overstatement. He also constructs delicious phrases such as "he wore depression like a lampshade over his head."

But his greatest talent is in speaking about the problems of the meta-world by focusing with laser precision on his invented micro-dramas. If "A Friend of the Earth" is a provoker of conscience, it is also - and foremost - rich entertainment.