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
From Publishers Weekly
Mordantly funny and inventive, this take-no-prisoners novel revolves around a few of Boyle's favorite themes: obsessive hygiene, compulsive consumerism, uneasiness in the natural world and fear of technology. As the Vonnegutishly named Tyrone "Ty" O'Shaughnessy Tierwater reminds readers, "to be a friend of the earth you have to be an enemy of the people." In the year 2025, Ty is 75, by contemporary standards a young-old man, and zookeeper for a private menagerie in Santa Ynez, Calif. Most mammals are extinct, and the environment as 20th-century humans knew it is destroyed. Besieged by floods, drought and Force 8 winds, people tramp through pestilential mud, eat farm-grown catfish and drink rice wine. In flashbacks from the frenetic 21st-century sections to Ty's past as a rabid environmentalist in the late '80s and early '90s, Boyle choreographs a syncopated dance, riffing on the mores and manias of environmental crusaders. To prove a point in their early campaign, Ty and wife Andrea spend 30 days naked and unprovisioned in the wilderness, emerging triumphant. But otherwise, Ty is subjected to a lifelong series of humiliations, and his forthrightness about them makes him sympathetic, while eco-warriors in general are skewered as relentlessly as the bulldozer-driven corporations. A bad time is had by all, most notably by Ty's daughter, the tree-sitting Sierra, who, unlike Julia Butterfly Hill (the real-life tree-sitter who surely influenced Boyle), does not descend from her perch to publishing contracts and public radio interviews. Boyle (The Tortilla Curtain) allows for a hint of redemption in the end, but his depiction of the cruel fate of humankindAthe fate of monkey wrenchers, lumber companies, the not-quite-engaged and the engaged, tooAis as unflinching as it is satirical. Major ad/promo; first serial to Outside magazine; 8-city author tour. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The year is 2025, and global warming is a catastrophic reality; most mammalian species are extinct. Tyrone Tierwater looks back to the late 1980s, when he first predicted that disaster would happen. Although it was his activist wife, Andrea, who initially goaded him into joining the ecoterrorist group Earth Forever!, Tyrone and his daughter Sierra quickly surpassed Andrea in their commitment to monkeywrenching. Tyrone was repeatedly arrested for criminal trespass and the destruction of property and ended up spending years in prison. Meanwhile, Andrea advanced in the movement's leadership council, and when her husband's antics threatened her position, she quickly divorced him. In retrospect, Tyrone realizes that history's having proven him right offers little solace for a wasted life. In his new work, Boyle (Riven Rock) mercilessly skewers developers and environmentalists alike; clearly, developers have trashed the planet, but Boyle also shows that Tierwater's monkeywrenching is partly destruction for its own sake, and Earth Forever! is more interested in protecting its own bureaucracy than the environment. Even Mother Nature comes in for a drubbing, as when a wealthy rock star is eaten by one of the animals in his private zoo. What results is powerful satire that rethinks the basic premises of Edward Abbey's classic The Monkey Wrench Gang, arguing that there are no quick and easy solutions. This book shows Boyle maturing from a glib comedic talent to a more serious novelist. Recommended for most fiction collections.-DEdward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From AudioFile
It's a mystery why some masters of the short story are such dreadful novelists, and T.C. Boyle is a prime example. His short fiction is always clever and occasionally unforgettable, while this boggy "satire" is a mess. In this family drama, male-menopause division, set in an unfunny futurist vision of a post-environmental disaster America , Boyle strings scenes together but seems to have no idea how to make them build into anything. Scott Brick's reading is unobjectionable, but it would take a great deal more than that to make A FRIEND OF THE EARTH worthwhile. B.G. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
Friend of the Earth FROM THE PUBLISHER
First off, A Friend of the Earth represents both a return and a departure for me - a return, in that it focuses on the environmental themes.
As the book opens, in 2025, our hero, Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, baby boomer, ex-radical environmentalist, ex-con, ex-father, widower and divorce, is seventy-five and battling to stay afloat in the rising Social-Securityless waters of a meteorologically-challenged society. He is working as an animal keeper for a wealthy but faded rock star who maintains a menagerie of some of the last specimens of formerly wild ex-wife, Andrea Cotton, comes back into his life after a twenty-three year absence. He is reluctant to get involved, but intrigued too. He makes an assignation with her for that very night at Ahigetoshi Swenson's Catfish and Sushi House, where he regales her with the locally brewed sake (wine is a thing of the distant past) and the only sushi left available on this picked-over planet: catfish, tilapia, and the always-in-demand crappy roll. And so begins his new career and his newly kindled romance.
Alternate chapters take us back to the past, where we see a younger Ty and Andrea in action as the driving wheels behind the radical environmental group, Earth Forever! We also delve into Ty's relationship with his daughter, Sierra, now famous as a "matyr to the trees." All of this is presented with satiric verve - this is a funny book, albeit on the most depressing possible topic.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
The year is 2025, and global warming is a catastrophic reality; most mammalian species are extinct. Tyrone Tierwater looks back to the late 1980s, when he first predicted that disaster would happen. Although it was his activist wife, Andrea, who initially goaded him into joining the ecoterrorist group Earth Forever!, Tyrone and his daughter Sierra quickly surpassed Andrea in their commitment to monkeywrenching. Tyrone was repeatedly arrested for criminal trespass and the destruction of property and ended up spending years in prison. Meanwhile, Andrea advanced in the movement's leadership council, and when her husband's antics threatened her position, she quickly divorced him. In retrospect, Tyrone realizes that history's having proven him right offers little solace for a wasted life. In his new work, Boyle (Riven Rock) mercilessly skewers developers and environmentalists alike; clearly, developers have trashed the planet, but Boyle also shows that Tierwater's monkeywrenching is partly destruction for its own sake, and Earth Forever! is more interested in protecting its own bureaucracy than the environment. Even Mother Nature comes in for a drubbing, as when a wealthy rock star is eaten by one of the animals in his private zoo. What results is powerful satire that rethinks the basic premises of Edward Abbey's classic The Monkey Wrench Gang, arguing that there are no quick and easy solutions. This book shows Boyle maturing from a glib comedic talent to a more serious novelist. Recommended for most fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/00.]--Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\
Michael Newton - Times Literary Supplement
As an image of the difficulty of relating to others and of continuing to be human, even in such desperate circumstances as here predicted for us, A Friend of the Earth is a success.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
. . . manages to be funny and touching, antic
and affecting, all at the same time. . . . [W]hile
Mr. Boyle's humor is black as ever, he
demonstrates, in telling Ty's story, that satire
can coexist with psychological realism,
comedy with compassion.
L.S. Klepp - Entertainment Weekly
As usual, Boyle's razor-edged style is an unnerving pleasure.
James Sullivan
It takes a special kind of talent to tell an unconvincing story with high style. T.C. Boyle has many talents; this, as it turns out, is one of them.
Boyle's eighth novel finds the history-minded author casting his gaze toward the future for a change. Set in the year 2025 with flashbacks to the late 1980s, the book tells the story of ecoterrorist Ty Tierwater, his once-and-future wife Andrea and his tree-hugging daughter from a previous marriage, Sierra.
Boyle's tales are never lacking for big ideas, be they Yankee ancestry (World's End), cultural divides (East Is East) or fitness obsessions (The Road to Wellville). With A Friend of the Earth, however, the question readers might want to ask is: "What's the big idea?" Committed as it is to its environmental theme, the novel reads like an elaborate ruse, a conceit desperately in search of credibility.
Tierwater is a man desperately in search of something--anything--and when he meets Earth Forever! agitator Andrea Knowles Cotton, he thinks he has found it. Their back-to-the-land politicking, which involves sabotaging earth-moving equipment and luring the media with a thirty-day retreat into the woods in their birthday suits, quickly becomes Tierwater's raison d'etre. So much so, in fact, that even after spending time in jail for his participation in the movement, he cannot stop goading the lumber companies and their law-enforcement friends. Eventually it ruins his marriage.
Decades later, Tierwater turns up in Southern California as the curator of pop star Maclovio Pulchris' exotic menagerie--lions, a hyena, a Patagonian fox named Petunia. Global warming is in full effect, and some terrible fates have visited the animals as Pulchris' estate endures endless downpours and a massive mudslide. The long-departed Andrea shows up with a writer friend who wants to get Sierra's story on tape, and their arrival forces the flinty Tierwater to confront the sad episodes of his life.
Far-fetched scenarios usually aren't problematic for Boyle; typically, they're his forte. This one, though, never finds much purchase. "The environment is a bore," Tierwater grouses, and he might as well be voicing the author's anxiety. "Nobody wants to read about it. What they want is to know . . . what Maclovio Pulchris' sex life was like." (Pulchris, with his omnipresent shades and his "eel whips" of hair dangling across his forehead, is essentially a double for Michael Jackson. Sierra, meanwhile, with her monthslong occupation of an endangered redwood, is a cartoon copy of real-life activist Julia Butterfly Hill.)
Boyle writes often about creeping materialism; his short story "Filthy With Things," for instance, is a meditation on buyers' remorse. A Friend of the Earth could be the author's attempt to temper our guilt over the modern conveniences by painting a less-than-flattering portrait of a committed eco-warrior. The title phrase finds its rejoinder in the book's central line: "To be a friend of the earth," Tierwater says in one of several first-person passages, "you have to be an enemy of the people." For Boyle, a fiction writer who relishes the eccentricities of his fellow man, that's no option at all.
Even in his lesser moments, the author doesn't lose his tight, amusing grip on the English language. In one scene, Tierwater, lost in fury, can barely listen to Andrea and their Earth Forever! cohort Teo discuss their next move: "Tierwater took this all in," Boyle writes, "not consciously, not alertly, but in the way of a sponge absorbing a slow trickle of water." Elsewhere, writer April Wind, no favorite of Tierwater's, is said to possess "a stare like two screws boring into a four-by-four."
"Sometimes," Boyle writes of his protagonist near this tale's merciful end, "hiking the trails, dreaming, the breeze in his face and the chaparral burnished with the sun, he wished some avenger would come down and wipe them all out, all those seething masses out there with their Hondas and their kitchen sets and throw rugs and doilies and VCRs." It's a true enough emotion. Regrettably, the characters Boyle has come up with to express it don't ring true at all.
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