Outside Looking In - T C Boyle

It's no secret, the high opinion I hold of T C Boyle.  It's only a month or two since I reviewed A Friend of the Earth on this blog.  I have to admit, though, that I prefer his offbeat picaresque novels to his offbeat academic novels.  I was disappointed by The Inner Circle (2004) and likewise not hugely enthused by this, an account of the early experiments with LSD by Dr Timothy Leary and his acolytes from Harvard.  There's no question about Boyle's ability - he writes like a dream, with irresistible pace and vigour (second only to Stephen King among contemporary US writers, in my opinion) and is always on top of his subject matter.  But Leary, and before him Alfred Kinsey, were the academic mindblowers of Boyle's youth; he is of the generation that came after, and either revered or disowned them.  For him, you have to be one or the other; there is no middle ground.

So here Boyle bolts a fictional grad student, Fitz Loney, onto Leary's ream at Harvard.  Fitz is older than some of his peers, having had to earn a living to support his wife and now teenage son.  He needs Leary's support for his thesis and thus starts attending psilocybin Saturday nights at Leary's house.  He supportive wife Joanie goes with him and throws herself wholeheartedly into the process.  This leads them, in Leary's wake, to Mexico and then New York State where properties are put at the disposal of the 'family' of academics and their children.  Psilocybin is supplanted by LSD, referred to as 'the sacrament', and academic research goes out of the window in favour of continual tripping and sex.

I had no problem keeping with the book but it didn't enthrall me.  The characters, many of them of course real, never really developed.  Leary in the book is as consensus history views him - an intellectual light-weight, a showman opportunist rather than a dedicated teacher.  Is that really all he was?  If so, why did so many intellectual and artistic heavyweights fall for his charms?  I suspect these are questions that any novel involving him so centrally has to address.  And Boyle really doesn't.

On the plus side, I was intrigued when Boyle swapped the narrative viewpoint from Fitz to Joanie for the middle section.  I liked the slightly different standpoint he uses here: where before and after it is 'Fitz' who experiences events, in this section it is just 'she' and 'her', which works well in contrast, and suits her character.  I also really liked the Prelude, set in 1943 Switzerland rather than Kennedy-era America, in which an obscure chemist develops and samples psilocybin, and which I found both funny and charming.

Ah well, we can't always have it all...

A Friend of the Earth - T C Boyle

 

Boyle was the hero of my reading back in the Naughties.  Water Music, Drop City, East is East, Riven Rock - I read them and I loved them.  I wasn't so keen on The Inner Circle and Talk Talk, but even so I"m amazed that I haven't posted any Boyle reviews on this blog, which means I haven't read any Boyle in the last ten years.

A Friend of the Earth dates back to the turn of the century, though this paperback was only published in 2019.  It is set at the end of the Eighties and into the Nineties, and in 2025.  Our hero Ty Tierwater starts off as a widower raising his daughter and tending to the dilapidated shopping mall bequeathed by his developer father.  His midlife crisis comes when he meets Andrea, ecology radical and future wife, who transforms Ty and daughter Sierra into eco-warriors and, in Sierra's case, eco-martyr.

Forty years later seventy-five year-old Ty is tending endangered ugly animals on the estate of rock legend Maclovio Pulchris.  His warrior days are done.  His back aches. Then Andrea reappears with news that someone wants to write about Sierra.  Ty's passions are roused - for Andrea, anyway.  But in the post-Millennium years the climate has gone to hell in a handcart.  Even California is blasted by seemingly never=ending storms.  The eco-hippies were right all along, but it's surely too late to do anything about it now.

That's the premise with which Boyle works his characteristic anarchic carnage.  His prose is fabulous, his exploration of his characters as extensive as the stage he has set for himself.  His technique - using first person for Ty now and third person Tierwater for Ty then - is so seamlessly done that we barely notice.  Nobody, but nobody does this kind of novel better.  Boyle is of his time yet stands squarely in the ultimate literary tradition of cowed nobodies oppressed by greater towers who nevertheless find the strength within themselves to rise up and howl.

Absolutely magnificent - and disconcertingly prescient.

The Harder They Come - T C Boyle

Boyle's more recent work seems to have settled into a sort of skewed state of the nation groove. When the Killing's Done was broadly about environmentalism, The Harder They Come is generally about survivalism. I use the word skewed because we are talking Boyle here, author of The Road to Wellville (enough fibre in your diet will quell your baser instincts) and, my personal favourite, Riven Rock. Boyle might start out in contemporary America but you are always going to end up somewhere in the past. Here, it is the closing years of the 18th Century and our avatar is the legendary mountain man John Colter.


Adam Stenson likes to be called Colter, in homage to his hero. When he is off his meds Adam starts thinking he is Colter, which makes everyone else he comes across 'hostiles'. Adam's dad, Sten, is a recently retired high school head who has become a local hero after tackling and killing an armed Costa Rican robber on his post-retirement cruise. Not that Sten is by nature a have-a-go-hero but the old Vietnam training never really goes away.


Adam has been living quite happily in the woods at his maternal grandmother's house, merrily developing a poppy plantation and milking the seed-heads. But the old lady is dead now and Adam's parents want to sell the house to cover the costs of their move to the Californian seaside. Adam resents this deeply, albeit he's built himself a couple of bunkers in the woods. Then he meets Sara, a militant freethinker twice his age - and things start to go generally haywire.


Boyle is a genius writer with a gift for taking you inside the heads of his various characters. Storylines overlap and intersect so smoothly you can't quite see the joins. His characters are always fundamentally decent people who have inadvertently found themselves adrift from mainstream life. I have devoured his novels ever since I first picked up Drop City ten or so years ago. I love his attitude almost as much as I love his writing. I recommend him without reservation.

When The Killing's Done - T C Boyle

Ten years ago I happened upon T C Boyle, who had by then wisely stopped calling himself T Coraghessan Boyle, thus accelerating his international sales. I began with Drop City and quickly read most of his other novels up to Water Music, which I considered his best. I stopped because I was obviously reading them faster than he was writing them. Now, something like five years since I read Water Music, I found this, Boyle's 2011 eco-novel.

Essentially, the premise is this: a series of women, earth mothers all, become involved with two islands in a chain of four off the coast of California. All are intent, one way or another, in perpetuating the natural haven which is their romantic view of the islands. The thing is, society's view of what is natural changes with the generations.

The contemporary storyline is that of Alma Takesue, a eco-scientist in charge of re-naturalising the islands. This involves ruthlessly expunging all non-native fauna like the rampaging razorback pigs left over from previous attempts at farming. This prompts rich slacker Dave LaJoy, who once had a disastrous first date with Alma, to launch a protest movement, and when the courts dismiss his claims, to resort to practical sabotage.

Dave's girfriend Anise was brought up on the island where her mother was cook to a half-baked sheep farming operation. The mother, Rita, was a former hippy musician. Alma' grandmother Beverley was the only survivor of a shipwreck off the islands in the late 1940s, when pregnant with Alma's mother Katherine. Katherine lost her husband diving for sea urchin in the same waters. Alma's partner Tim has a simpler answer to the prospect of becoming a father. He simply leaves.

Boyle is at his best with a diverse cast of characters taking diametrically opposed stands on the same issue, especially when, as here, he can roam over a number of time periods. When The Killing's Done is thought-provoking on the subject of interference with nature. Dave LaJoy is a typical Boyle bull-in-a-china-shop loser and great fun. The sole problem is Alma, a really annoying sanctimonious self-centered prig. I'm afraid I wanted to skip any section that started with her, though I'm glad I didn't.