A Friend of the Earth [Hardcover]

T. C. Boyle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 7, 2000

The bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain and Riven Rock takes a provocative new turn with a brilliant, timely, darkly funny novel about love, activism, and the future of the planet

T. C. Boyle's range as a novelist is breathtaking; he is the kind of writer who is always setting himself new challenges, who never ceases to astonish. In A Friend of the Earth, "America's most imaginative contemporary novelist"(Newsweek) blends idealism and satire in a story that addresses the ultimate questions of human love and the survival of the species.

Friend of the Earth opens in the year 2025, as Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater ekes out a bleak living in southern California, managing a rock star's private menagerie of the species "only a mother could love"--scruffy hyenas, jackals, warthogs, and three down-at-the-mouth lions. Global warming is a reality. The biosphere has collapsed in a grim but very funny way, and most of the major mammalian species--not to mention fish, birds, and frogs--are extinct. Once, as we see in alternating chapters that flash back to the last two decades of the twentieth century, Ty was so seriously committed to environmental causes that he became an ecoterrorist and convicted felon. A "a member of the radical environmental group Earth Forever!, he unwittingly endangered both his daughter, Sierra, and his wife, Andrea. Now, when he's just trying to survive in a world torn by obdurate storms and winnowing drought, ""drea comes back into his life. What happens as the two slip into a reborn involvement makes for a gripping, topical, and ever-surprising story that is certain to stir readers' emotions.

Gritty and surreal, frightening yet touching, 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 real compassion for his characters and the spirit of sheer exhilarating playfulness readers have come to expect of his work.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: The Viking Press; 1st edition (September 7, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670891770
• ISBN-13: 978-0670891771
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #623,388 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

T. C. Boyle is the author of eleven novels, including World's End (winner of the PEN/FaulknerAward), Drop City (a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award), and The Inner Circle. His most recent story collections are Tooth and Claw and The Human Fly and Other Stories.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For Friends of Good Writing, January 1, 2006

By 

B. Musler "History Gamer" (New York, New York USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Friend of the Earth (Paperback)

While it's true that the protagonist of this book is an eco-terrorist, he is also a father and husband and this is a novel primarily concerned with reconciling family life with personal responsibility to create a life that makes some kind of sense. In this Ty Tierwater is a self professed failure and so I don't believe Boyle intended this as a "message" novel. While Boyle's research adds immeasurably to the appeal of the story interpreting it exclusively through the lens of eco-politics is a mistake that will rob one of its considerable pleasures. (And to measure it by the conventions of science fiction is beside the point entirely.)

So why should you read this book? Because the sentences burst with flavor in your mouth. Also because it's a wonderfully crafted novel. The first person narration is convincing to the point that I completely identified with Ty even as I came to realize he was in many ways a self destructive crank likely to do as much harm as good to those around him. The book's time structure -- jumping from past to present -- is an effective technique for helping the reader trace evolving relationships (especially between Ty, wife Andrea, and daughter Sierra) and understand the impact of decisions over time. And finally, Ty tells his story with passion and intelligence in spite of an enroaching emotional exhaustion that matches the degradation fo the biosphere (a terrific act of authorial slight of hand, btw.)

Ecopolitics and craft aside, when you come right down to it the reason to read "A Friend of the Earth," is because Boyle creates an unforgettable character in Ty Tierwater. Love him or hate him, you won't forget him...or this book.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars More great prose from T.C. Boyle, December 1, 2000

By 

Edward - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Friend of the Earth (Hardcover)

Having read all of T.C. Boyle's previous novels, I knew when I picked up A Friend of the Earth that I would be treated to this author's elegant and poetic writing style. I was not disappointed. This man can truly turn a phrase: a girl has "hair the color of midnight in a cave." Wildflowers are "on fire in the fields." And that's what kept me going until the end of the novel. I didn't find the plot particularly riveting andI wasn't drawn to any of the characters. But the pure poetry of T.C. Boyle's prose carried me along as if I were floating down a clear mountain stream. If you're concerned about global-warming, the rape of the forests by the timber industry, and the struggle to save the Earth from the clutches of humanity--a species that insists on reproducing and using up every last vestige of the Earth's resources, then read this book. If not, you may enjoy it anyway, if only for the beautiful writing contained herein.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Compelling Eco-Dystopian Fiction with a Distinctive Voice!, December 13, 2000

By 

"marycarrieh" (Northeastern United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Friend of the Earth (Hardcover)

T. C. Boyle's A Friend of the Earth addresses that most difficult challenge--how to write about the near-future and the changes that may come to us all while sustaining the reader's belief and interest. In the year 2025, as Boyle imagines it, global warming and pollution have radically transformed the Earth's ecosphere, and the protagonist's past as an environmental activist and "monkeywrencher" is in ironic contrast with the world he now inhabits, where he works to protect a handful of endangered animals in the private zoo of a reclusive pop star.

Ty Tierwater is, as one might expect, a protagonist who has lost his energy and passion--an existentialist without much reason to go on. There is always something risky about writing a book which turns on the memories of such a dispirited character, and indeed the flashback scenes (to the 1980s and 1990s) have far more vitality than the sections of the book set in 2025. It's a fascinating literary choice, albeit one which takes away from the book's momentum and appeal. Those who love Boyle's characteristic humor will also be disappointed, but, as one friend remarked "there are some things that just aren't funny." At the end of the day, though, A Friend of the Earth is a truly thoughtful book and a work of great integrity.