A Friend of the Earth By T.C. Boyle by Lisa Zeidner The Washington Post Book World, Sept. 3, 2000 Forget eggs and bacon. Forget wine, because there are no more grapes "the Loire and Rhine Valleys so wet they'd be better off trying to grow pineapples." Frogs, giraffes and condors are extinct, of course, but so are crab, tuna and trout. You can still get catfish, though catfish pizza, catfish enchiladas, catfish sushi washed down with sake. There's the menu for Los Angeles circa 2025, the setting of T.C. Boyle's enticingly gruesome eighth novel, A Friend of the Earth. In Boyle's fiction, the fastest way to understand a society's heart is to look at its stomach. He has already offered us a treatise on the delicate art of preparing poisonous fish in his story "Sorry Fugu"; and in "The Descent of Man" restaurant-goers merrily eat, with chopsticks, raw brains from a live monkey. The disgusting details would be too surreal to be convincing-if they didn't also happen to be mostly accurate. Boyle has always liked to play circus barker for life's extremes, and what better freak show than the environmental apocalypse itself? As disaster tales go, this is a sly, hip one. Still, fans of Boyle's zippy, Zeitgeisty fiction, in which characters have names like Maclovio Pulchris and the metaphors are "as jittery as a cockroach on a griddle," may find afrifri Friend of the Earth surprisingly solemn. The novel teems with quite unironic paeans to a vanished world, to values such as love and loyalty, and of course to nature itself. "There is nothing I want," our hero, Californian Tyrone Tierwater, announces, "except the world the way it was . . . all the doomed and extinguished wildlife of America-put back in their places." Bankrolled by a rich rock star, Tyrone serves as gamekeeper for a straggling troop of animals nearing extinction: hyenas, a giant anteater, a couple of very irritated lions. At 76, Ty is in reasonably good shape thanks to personal DNA codes and "epidermal rejuvenators"; he leads as quiet a life as he can amid torrential floods and global warming. But then his second ex-wife, Andrea, returns, bringing trouble, as she always has. Way back in the '80s, Andrea and Tyrone were "ecoradicals" for an organization called Earth Forever! When a tree-savmg operation went awry, Ty was arrested and his daughter by his first marriage, Sierra, put into foster care. TTY's efforts to get his daughter back included a spell as a fugitive with a false identity, increasingly more acts of terrorism against lumber companies, and a publicity stint in which he and Andrea walked naked and empty-handed into the forest for a month to live on smashed lizards. Sierra, we learn, is now dead, "a martyr to the trees." Tie would rather not dwell upon her. But Andrea has brought along an opportunistic reporter named April Wind, forcing him to remember. So in between dealing with acid rain and escaped dangerous animals, not to mention the threat of the Mucous, "a sort of super-flu spread by casual contact," Tyrone reconstructs his story. The novel alternates between scenes set in TTY's present and scenes drawn from recollected material from the 1990s, as the reader waits to uncover the nature of Sierra's death and the fate of Tie and Andrea's reunion. Most of the themes that Boyle entertains here are the consequences of American excess and media hype, the vagaries of class, the macho male's secret fear of women-have appeared in his fiction before. But here he sets himself the challenge of using his impressive arsenal of literary tricks and tropes in the service of a more earnest exploration. The ecological D-Day he posits is compelling and complex. The world ends, he claims, with neither a bang nor a whimper but with a little of both, layered. Apple thought the collapse of the biosphere would be the end of everything, but that's not it at all. It's just the more of everything, more sum, water, wind, dust, mud." So how do people behave during an apocalypse? Same as they always has uncertainly. "To be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people," Tyrone avers, but he discovers that his choices are rarely that clear-cut. Progress, Boyle tells us, is never a clear climb. This assured novel gives us haunting images to prove the point: a Patagonian fox on a leash, an environmental purist who lives barefoot and bathless in a tree for a year-with her cell phone. Not to mention walking catfish. Home / Books / Short Stories / Articles / Personal Essays / Reviews / Biography / At Rutgers University / Contact Lisa Zeidner | |