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Loading... A Friend of the Earthby T. C. Boyle
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Boyle's prose rings like poetry. Reading it was like savoring a piece of candy, each word brought something new. Its rare to find writing like this anymore. The story itself was engaging about a family of eco-saboteurs on a renegade mission to save the planet. Or at least as much of it as they possibly could. Highly recommended. (  ) malachitemoon | Aug 25, 2009 |  It is 2025 and Ty Tierwater is the manager of a private menagerie of some of the last surviving animals in the world. The world has been devastated global warming, floods and winds. Out of the blue, Ty’s ex-wife Andrea turns up and Ty tells the story of his previous life as a notorious eco-warrior. The story moves between 2025 written in the first person from Ty’s perspectives, to the past (late 80s and 90s) told in the third person. This changing perspective is a technique Boyle does well and here was no exception. Some reviews have criticised it for being too preachy, but I didn't find that at all. The actions of the environmentalists are shown to have been pointless and their motivations at times questionable. It is also as much a story about loss and family, which was much more moving than the environmental aspect. Rather a bleak depiction of the future, but a good read nonetheless. (  ) sanddancer | Mar 10, 2009 | tc is a great narrator. his books are involving, questioning but lightly enough, not ham-fisted. good for readers who like a good yarn, better for those who delve deeper and ask the questions that linger... (  ) junevonjune | Dec 6, 2008 | Read this before Drop City and thought it would have been a better follow up. I loved the characters in this, as well as who/what they represented to me as I was reading this. Hopefully this is not what we are looking forward to, but in the end, Ty perseveres with a here and now attitude that can be describes as a cross between acceptance and buddhism. ( ) Jamnjazzz | Aug 6, 2008 | Semi-dark and satirical humor, but maybe with a message, maybe not. Boyle's typical will shoot their own leg off--all the while you and ever other character in the book can see it coming from a mile away--and yet somehow these characters are sympathetic. ( ) jaygheiser | Jul 23, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0141002050, Paperback)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 (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:09 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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