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A Friend of the Earth (Paperback)

~ T.C. Boyle (Author) "This is the way it begins, on a summer night so crammed with stars the Milky Way looks like a white plastic sack strung out..." (more)
Key Phrases: ride your pony, gauze mask, action camp, April Wind, Sheriff Bob Hicks, Coast Lumber (more...)
3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
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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 --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.



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. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 368 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (August 28, 2001)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0141002050
  • ISBN-13: 978-0141002057
  • Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.7 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #186,798 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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T. Coraghessan Boyle
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This is the way it begins, on a summer night so crammed with stars the Milky Way looks like a white plastic sack strung out across the roof of the sky. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
ride your pony, gauze mask, action camp
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
April Wind, Sheriff Bob Hicks, Coast Lumber, Maclovio Pulchris, New York, Deputy Sheets, Los Angeles, Chris Mattingly, Judge Duermer, Tom Drinkwater, Delbert Sakapathian, Johnny Taradash, Josephine County, Big Timber, Bill Driscoll, Climber Deke, Santa Ynez, Lupine Hill, Uncle Sol, Chariots of Love, Child Protective Services, Kurt Cobain, Pulchris River, Sierra Tierwater, Tyrone Tierwater
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Customer Reviews

37 Reviews
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3.7 out of 5 stars (37 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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10 of 10 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)   
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.
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5 of 5 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 (Paperback)
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.

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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Silent Spring meets The Time Machine, July 6, 2006
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
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting story, but sloppy writing
I've never read anything by TC Boyle before this book, so I can't compare this book with his previous works. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Mommy Kind

5.0 out of 5 stars Recommended
Though it wasn't quite the thorough post-apocalyptic story that I was hoping for when I bought it, I found this to be a well-written and entertaining read. Read more
Published 14 months ago by JEA

5.0 out of 5 stars Does the earth need a friend
I am a huge fan of TC Boyle's novels and A Friend of the Earth does not disappoint. I laughed out loud as I read, which is one of the draws for me to his work, it is so darn... Read more
Published on March 7, 2007 by Lynn Barry

4.0 out of 5 stars Disturbing, but sticks in your brain
While reading this book, I didn't enjoy it all that much, though I've liked others of his. Seemed a bit too soapboxish and not as funny as it was trying to be. Read more
Published on May 6, 2006 by A. C. Seligman

3.0 out of 5 stars Made me laugh, but left me feeling empty
"A Friend of the Earth" is a book about evironmentalism, the destruction of the planet, and personal decisions. Read more
Published on October 31, 2005 by Mike Smith

5.0 out of 5 stars Author Sharing Personal Message
I just finished this book this morning. It moved at a good pace and remained an interesting look into the mind of an eco-terrorist in its pages. Read more
Published on January 27, 2005 by Gary Scott Thompson

5.0 out of 5 stars Funny, Thought Provoking and Great Satire
Unlike most of the previous reviewers, I had never read T.C. Boyle before I read A Friend of the Earth. I usually do not step into anything that's even remotely futuristic. Read more
Published on December 14, 2004 by Shayrul

4.0 out of 5 stars A darkly comic satire with mixed messages
With this work, Boyle has entered the world of what he has disparagingly called "genre fiction," although--in reality--"A Friend of the Earth" is to science fiction what... Read more
Published on February 15, 2004 by D. Cloyce Smith

5.0 out of 5 stars Staying Power
I've only read this book and East is East by the author, but I have to say that unlike many reviewers, I thought it was great. Read more
Published on March 19, 2003

1.0 out of 5 stars Very Poor
This is by far the worst book by Mr Boyle I have read. Not his best work, poor story, slow and boring.
Published on February 23, 2003

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