Big Hair Zeitgeist A measure of grace has descended upon Tucson. No, not just because the election is over. This is more important than mere politics: Tucson has an independent general interest bookstore again. Of course, this is both good and bad, news. It's good news because we have someplace to buy books again. It's bad news because it proves my disheartening thesis that Tucson is actually part of the U.S., rather than Mexico with better water, or an independent nation. You see, the much-anticipated opening of the Reader's Oasis on Speedway could very well be part of a nationwide trend. The big bookstore chains are not giving discounts like they used to and neither is Amazon, according to an October 9 New York Times article. Suddenly the world is looking better for independent booksellers-and for people who care about books. Please keep in mind that I'm writing this before the election. I'm determined to enjoy what could turn out to be my last chance for optimism. So until the real bad news comes in, I'm arguing that the opening of the modest Reader's Oasis in the little cowtown of Tucson is not just a sign that bookstores are back, but an indication that people are regaining their senses in all kinds of ways. A few weeks ago, I was drinking in the Algonquin Hotel in New York with Dave Foreman and Rick Bass. You should know these names. If the only one you know is the Algonquin, it proves my point that the environment fell dangerously far off the public's radar screen about 10 years ago. Foreman used to be Tucson's resident charismatic megafauna as part of the radical environmental group Earth First! and is now executive director of the visionary conservation group called the Wildlands Project. Bass is a nature writer who plays up a charming and very Southern combination of laser beam perspicacity and "Aw, shucks, ma'am" country boy naiveté. He made me laugh. I'm pretty sure this was intentional. Foreman downed a Bombay martini. I had a Campari and soda because I had already exceeded my limit at the stuffy dinner we had attended. Bass ordered a Bombay gin-and-tonic, per Foreman's paean to the superior quality of sub continental juniper. We needed fortification since we were talking about how environmental writing is at the lowest point that it's been in our entire adult lives. About how Ed Abbey is long gone and the people who count themselves his heirs are nincompoops who stare at their own navels when they should be looking back in anger at Washington, D.C. This decline is, shall we say, bad timing, since Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson tells us that three-fifths of the world's mammal species will go extinct over the next 30 years if we don't make big changes and do it fast. We laughed like hell in between bouts of writerly whining. (Neither being inappropriate in the hallowed watering hole of Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woolcott, et al.) The next night, I picked up a copy of T.C. Boyle's latest novel, A Friend of the Earth, at the airport. By the time I finished it, I felt like calling up the boys to tell them the long drought is over. For much of his career, T. Coraghessan Boyle has been tempted by his gift for soulless satire. One has to offer thanks these days for any writer who doesn't relentlessly vivisect childhood trauma. But I've always liked it when Boyle didn't play his cards so close to the vest, notably in his early novel World's End, and the eponymous story in his late '80s collection If the River Was Whiskey. Then came Tortilla Curtain, Boyle's book about Mexican illegals and Southern California yuppies. Tortilla Curtain was the work of a first-rate novelist at the top of his game, with a bang-up epiphanic ending rarely found in these-days of contrived, end-with-a-whimper, straight-outta-academia novels A Friend of the Earth does this all over again. Only this story I know better. Too well, in fact. The book's protagonist, Ty Tier-water, is the heir to a collapsing subdivision and strip mall in Long Island who becomes a member of a thinly disguised Earth First! analogue, Earth Forever! When we meet him, it's 2025. Global warming is just like we pictured it, a hellish rain soaked, windswept Blade Runner Hell. The only refuge is the mansion of a kindly rock star named Pulchris who bankrolls a menagerie of endangered hyenas and lions. Their shit is shoveled by 75-year-old (old-young, thanks to wonder drugs) Ty and a pesticide-addled Mexican named Choy, who gives Boyle another chance to show off his colloquial Spanish. The book ripsaws between 2025 and the '80s and '90s, making it slightly rough to navigate at the outset. But soon the passion and the texture kick in, from the bland taste of the planet's last seafood-farmed catfish-to the heroically dirty feet of Ty's tree-sitting daughter, a Julie Butterfly protest-alike named Sierra. Ty Tierwater's s passionate anger, propelled by Boyle's gifts for comic mise-en-scene and firecracker language, hurtles the reader through to the end. We've needed Boyle for a long time, someone from off the reservation to tell the most important story left to tell. This book alone would be enough to whip up a little dust devil. But there's more. When I returned from New York and stumbled into the Reader's Oasis, I discovered that co-owner Jeff Yanc had built a refreshingly non-Buddhist shrine to The Great God Boyle, prominently displaying A Friend of the Earth. If you don't know Yanc, former literary fiction czarist the BookMark, he is the one with the Mojo Nixon fop-fop haircut. Now that I think of it, this haircut is not unlike Boyle's. Hope for the future might be too much to ask. But all this synchronicity was one hell of an argument for big hair.
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