A Friend of the Earth
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--partBlade Runner, partSilent  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, andA Friend of the Earthonly 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 throughoutA 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--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.