A Friend of the Earth
by T.C. Boyle
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Book Summary Information
Author: T.C. BoyleEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-09-01
ISBN: 0141002050
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of A Friend of the Earth
Book Review: Silent Spring meets The Time Machine
Summary: 5 Stars
TC Boyle writes about way-out-there characters, and *A Friend of the Earth* is no exception. Ty, the main character, used to be a member of an eco-terrorism group like Earth First! (called here, Earth Forever!) before events in his own life changed him and the environment collapsed.
One thing that I really enjoy about TC Boyle's work in general and *A Friend of the Earth* in particular is the way Boyle contemplates time. Here, the book alternates chapters between Ty's life as a young father and then eco-terrorist in the 1980s and 1990s and events in the eco-ravaged world when Ty is a young-old person in 2025. In the intervening three decades, Ty has changed dramatically as a human being (though we can see the roots of his changes) and the world changes. Only 25 years ago, Reagan had just begun his presidency, Germany was two countries with a wall between them, and the biggest threat to our lives was the Soviet Union, the Iron Curtain, and enough nukes pointed at us to destroy the world 1000 times over. In 1990, 16 years ago, Clinton was in his first term, his opinion was that our greatest challenge in America was race relations, the Soviet Union was in shambles, and Berlin Wall rubble was being sold by mail order, because there was no Ebay. Five years ago, in July, 2001, everybody was getting rich on internet stocks, housing prices were stagnant, people were still arguing about hanging and dimpled chads, and we had two blissful months of navel-gazing left before we the public started worrying about Osama bin Ladan, radical Islamists, burkas, rape rooms, WMDs, and Middle Eastern wars. Time changes things. Time changes people. Boyle understands that better than most other writers and uses it in his novels.
In Boyle's book, Ty changes dramatically over the intervening years between the two time periods that the book examines. One of the major questions that Boyle explores and uses as a tension device is why Ty changed so much and what Sierra's (his daughter) fate was. By using these, Boyle has written a tightly woven, entertaining, tense book that, while it offers no pretty assurances or head-patting, does hold one's interest to the bitter end.
TK Kenyon
Author of Rabid: A Novel and Callous: A Novel
Summary of A Friend of the Earth
Funny and touching, antic and affecting . . . while Boyle's humor is as black as ever, he demonstrates that satire can coexist with psychological realism, comedy with compassion." (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)In the tradition of The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle blends idealism and satire in a story that addresses the universal questions of human love and the survival of the species. In the year 2025 global warming is a reality, the biosphere has collapsed, and 75-year-old environmentalist Ty Tierwater is eking out a living as care-taker of a pop star's private zoo when his second ex-wife re-enters his life. .
. . Both gritty and surreal, A Friend of the Earth represents a high-water mark in Boyle's career-his deep streak of social concern is effortlessly blended here with genuine compassion for his characters and the spirit of sheer exhilarating playfulness readers have come to expect from his work.
If, as we are frequently cautioned, ecological collapse is imminent, the future might someday resemble T.C. Boyle's vision of Southern California, circa 2025: strafing wind, extortionate heat, vast species extinction, and a ramshackle, dispirited populace. A more bleak backdrop--part Blade Runner, part Silent Spring--for his eighth novel is difficult to imagine. But the ever-mischievous, ever-inventive Boyle is all too willing to disoblige; and so, in extended homage to early Vonnegut, his Sierra Club nightmare is rendered, well, comically. Toss in streaks of unabashed sentimentality, a scattershot satire, and several signature narrative ambushes, and A Friend of the Earth only further embellishes the already prodigious Boyle reputation.
During the 1980s and '90s, Ty Tierwater had exchanged a sedately acquisitive existence--"the slow-rolling glacier of my old life, my criminal life, the life I led before I became a friend of the earth"--for a fairly ambivalent position on the front lines of an ecoterrorist posse called Earth Forever! The only complication is his dual penchant for empathy and ineptitude, exacerbated by a frustration that swells with accumulating incitements. After his daughter is taken from him, and his second wife, Andrea, becomes more committed to the cause than to their marriage, Ty finds solace in blind destruction. He serves his almost predictable terms in jail; he endures the eventual death--and martyrdom--of his activist daughter, Sierra. At 75, and a quarter of the way into the dismal and decayed 21st century, he unaccountably finds himself tending an eccentric rock star's private mini-zoo of ragged animals and wryly lamenting the collapse of his race. And then Andrea resurfaces--along with his long-fallow faith in love.
Old Testament digression stalks Ty throughout A Friend of the Earth, from a publicity-stunt-cum-Edenic-retreat during his heady Earth Forever! days to a chaotic menagerie roundup amidst flooding rainfall. Boyle's future, however, is less apocalyptic than resigned, more drearily pragmatic than angst-ridden. It's a world Ty ultimately finds untenable: a constricted diversity, ecological or ideological, proves stultifying, a fact he only dimly recognized while awash in his earlier radicalism. "To be a friend of the earth," he avers in retrospect, "you have to be an enemy of the people." Boyle's spirited tale sustains the brashness of Ty's convictions. --Ben Guterson
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