Boyle puts his heart where his brain is
Alan Cheuse
The Dallas Morning News 12/24/00

We know T.C. Boyle has a mind and quite a brilliant one at that, particularly when it comes to recreating historical moments and figures from the past. Look at, say, the Africa of his novel Water Music and hero Mungo Park, or early 20th-century Battle Creek in The Road to Wellville and the doctor who changed America's eating habits. But he does just as well depicting both the illegal immigrants and indecent rich of contemporary upscale Los Angeles in The Tortilla Curtain. Carefully etched, comically skewed social satire doesn't get much better in contemporary American fiction than it does in Mr. Boyle's prodigious output of short stories.

But if there is any field in which mere brains aren't enough, it's the making of fiction. Just as being all heart is only half the story, so is being all-brain. Which is why Mr. Boyle's new novel is such a ringing success. In all his admirable body of work, he has never before fused the realms of intellect and emotion with such force and effect.

Maybe it's his first leap into the future that has made this possible. A Friend of the Earth is set in Southern California in 2025. Urban sprawl is endemic: California's two major cities are now Los Andiegoles and San Jose Francisco. As the result of global warming, fierce storms constantly buffet the cities and the forests are almost gone. Drought is pervasive.

In the midst of this uncomfortable new world we meet the protagonist, a half Irish-Catholic, half-Jewish fellow named Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, a 75year-old convicted eco-terrorist: Since his release from prison, Tierwater has lived a quiet life as de facto keeper of a private zoo owned by rock 'n' roll magnate Maclovio Pulchris. (Pulchris, a sort of latter-day Noah, has gathered together dying species, such as hyenas and lions, in the face of the spreading ecological disaster.)

Then in walks Tierwater's wife, Andrea, from whom he has been separated for years, and the past - the early 1990s - rears its ugly head. In chapters that alternate with Tierwater's first-person account of the ravaged 2020s, we hear the third-person story of how he was drawn into the eco-terror movement, and as a result, lost his only child and his marriage.

The shifts in time and point of view allow Mr. Boyle to put forward the best aspects of his talent, beginning with his dark comic gift for describing slightly off kilter lives, whether it's an eco-terrorist action in the deep woods to keep a lumber company from cutting down some very old trees, or the way it feels to wake-up in a world swiftly going to pot. "It was a morning of common heat," he writes of Southern California in July of 1989, "a hundred and three by eleven o'clock, the San Fernando Valley baking like cheap pottery. The dry wind they called Santa Ana was rattling the leaves of the grapefruit trees in the desiccated backyard - nothing there, not a spike of grass, not even a gopher mound - and knocking the dead fronds out of the palms out front with a sound like sabers rattling."

He also displays his gift for creating unsettling quasi-comic set pieces, in this case, a 30-day trek into the wilderness by Tierwater and Andrea, both naked, in which they attempt to live off the land, or the bizarre moment when some of the most dangerous animals in Pulchris' little zoo go out of control, with awful results.

But a new element emerges out of the story of Tierwater's loss of his daughter and his attempt to piece his life together again. There seem to be no specific passages as evidence of this; the feeling grows from the narrative as a whole. It is thoroughly appealing and gives this sharply told and brilliant dystopian fiction real heart. A dozen books into his career, and T.C. Boyle has raised his special art to a higher level than ever before.