A Friend of the Earth

by T. C. Boyle Narrated by Scott Brick

Overview

A Friend of the Earth*opens in the year 2025, as Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tidewater ekes out a bleak living in southern California, managing a rock star's private menagerie. Global warming is a reality. The biosphere has collapsed and most of the major mammalian species are extinct. Once Ty was so seriously committed to environmental causes that he became an ecoterrorist and convicted felon. Once he unwittingly endangered both his daughter, Sierra, and his wife, Andrea. Now when he's just trying to survive, Andrea comes back into his life. What happens as the two slip into a reborn involvement makes for a gripping and topical story told in Boyle's uniquely funny and serious voice.

"America's most imaginative contemporary novelist blends idealism and satire in a story that addresses the ultimate question of human love and the survival of the species."-Newsweek

Editorial Reviews

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

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.
—Times Literary Supplement

Michiko Kakutani

. . . 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.
—New York Times

L.S. Klepp

As usual, Boyle's razor-edged style is an unnerving pleasure.
—Entertainment Weekly

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.

From the Publisher

As disaster tales go, this is a sly, hip one. . . . Boyle has always liked to play circus barker for life's extremes and what better freak show than the environmental apocalypse itself?”—The Washington Post

“Fiction about ecological disaster tends to be written in a tragic key. Boyle, by contrast, favors the darkly comic.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

“Both entertaining and informative . . . hits like a warning shot from twenty-five years into the future.”—Chicago Tribune

“A Friend of the Earth is about people and nature coming to terms with each other. In many ways it is a far more convincing argument for sustainable living in nature than any nonfiction environmental tract.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Boyle gives us a vivid, grim, hilarious portrait of our world . . . he has a marvelous gift for translating large-scale environmental scenarios into immediate, palpable terms . . . What gives A Friend of the Earth's comically dismal future its bite is how profoundly it is embedded in the present . . . Boyle's energetic prose achieves a fine balance between wacky comedy and serious reflection.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune

“Ripped from tomorrow's headlines, the ecobiography of Tyrone Tierwater—failed monkeywrencher, ex-husband, ex-con, ex-zookeeper of the last Patagonian fox, and still-grieving father of the tree-dwelling Sierra, a twenty-first-century martyr to the redwoods.”—Outside

“The story careens along with the breathless authority of a roller coaster . . . In A Friend of the Earth, Boyle sets himself a new challenge, swinging a leg wide to plant a foot solidly on new ground. Part antic comedy, part ecological intelligencer, part heartfelt plaint, it is a comic novel on grievous themes, a serious exploration of tragic truths. It not only marks Boyle's progress as a literary talent but demonstrates his consistent ability to entertain.”—Los Angeles Times

“Boyle is still one of the most inventive and exhilerating novelists around, showing how you can drive a narrative and still have fun with language.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Boyle’s wonderful writing is simultaneously wild, talky, and charming. If A Friend of the Earth is a provoker of conscience, it is also—and foremost—rich entertainment.”—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169348880
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/18/2000
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Prologue: Santa Ynez, November 2025

I'm out feeding the hyena her kibble and chicken backs and doing what I can to clean up after the latest storm, when the call comes through. It's Andrea. Andrea Knowles Cotton Tierwater, my ex-wife, my wife of a thousand years ago, when I was young and vigorous and relentlessly virile, the woman who routinely chained herself to cranes and bulldozers and seven-hundred-thousand-dollar Feller Buncher machines back in the time when we thought it mattered, the woman who helped me raise my daughter, the woman who made me crazy. Jesus Christ. If somebody has to come, why couldn't it be Teo. He'd be easier-him I could just kill. Bang-bang. And then Lily would have something more than chicken backs for dinner.

Anyway, there are trees down everywhere and the muck is tugging at my gum boots like a greedy sucking mouth, a mouth that's going to pull me all the way down eventually, but not yet. I might be seventy-five years old and my shoulders might feel as if they're attached at the joint with fishhooks, but the new kidney they grew me is still processing fluids just fine, thank you, and I can still outwork half the spoonfed cretins on this place. Besides, I have skills, special skills -- I'm an animal man and there aren't many of us left these days, and my boss, Maclovio Pulchris, appreciates that. And I'm not name-dropping here, not necessarily -- just stating the facts. I manage the man's private menagerie, the last surviving one in this part of the world, and it's an important -- scratch that, vital -- reservoir for zoo-cloning and the distribution of what's left of the major mammalian species. And you can say what you will about pop stars or the quality of his music or even the way he looks when he takes his hat and sunglasses off and you can see what a ridiculous little crushed nugget of a head he was born with, but I'll say this -- he's a friend of the animals.

Of course, there isn't going to be anything left of the place if the weather doesn't let up. It's not even the rainy season -- or what we used to qualify as the rainy season, as if we knew anything about it in the first place -- but the storms are stacked up out over the Pacific like pool balls on a billiard table and not a pocket in sight. Two days ago the wind came up in the night, ripped the roof off of one of the back pens and slammed it like a giant Frisbee into the Lupine Hill condos across the way. Mac didn't particularly care about that -- nobody's insured for weather anymore and any and all lawsuits are automatically thrown out of court, so don't even ask -- but what hurt was the fact that the Patagonian fox got loose, and that's the last native-born individual known to be in existence on this worn-out planet, and we still haven't found the thing. Not a clue. No tracks, no nothing. She just disappeared, as if the storm had picked her up like Dorothy and set her down in the place where the extinct carnivores of all the ages run riot through fields of hobbled game -- or in the middle of a freeway, where to the average motorist she'd be nothing more than a dog on stilts. The pangolins, they're gone too. And less than fifty of them out there in the world. It's a crime, but what can you do -- call up the search and rescue? We've all been hit hard. Floods, winds, thunder and lightning, even hail. There are plenty of people without roofs over their heads, and right here in Santa Barbara County, not just Los Andiegoles or San Jose Francisco.

So Lily, she's giving me a long steady look out of the egg yolks of her eyes, and I'm lucky to have chicken backs what with the meat situation lately, when the pictaphone rings (think Dick Tracy, because the whole world's a comic strip now). The sky is black -- not gray, black -- and it can't be past three in the afternoon. Everything is still, and I smell it like a gathering cloud, death, the death of everything, hopeless and stinking and wasted, the pigment gone from the paint, the paint gone from the buildings, cars abandoned along the road, and then it starts raining again. I talk to my wrist (no picture, though-the picture button is set firmly and permanently in the off position-why would I want to show this wreck of a face to anybody?). "Yeah?" I shout, and the rain is heavier, wind-driven now, snapping in my face like a wet towel.

"Ty?"

The voice is cracked and blistered, like the dirt here when the storms move on to Nevada and Arizona and the sun comes back to pound us with all its unfiltered melanomic might, but I recognize it right away, twenty years notwithstanding. It's a voice that does something physical to me, that jumps out of the circumambient air and seizes hold of me like a thing that lives off the blood of other things. "Andrea? Andrea Cotton?" Half a beat. "Jesus Christ, it's you, isn't it?"

Soft and seductive, the wind rising, Lily fixing me from behind the chicken wire as if I'm the main course: "No picture for me?"

"What do you want, Andrea?"

"I want to see you."

"Sorry, nobody sees me."

"I mean in person, face to face. Like before."

Rain streams from my hat. One of the sorry inbred lions starts coughing its lungs out, a ratcheting, oddly mechanical sound that drifts across the weedlot and ricochets off the monolithic face of the condos. I'm trying to hold back a whole raft of feelings, but they keep bobbing and pitching to the surface, threatening to break loose and shoot the rapids once and for all. "What for?"

"What do you think?"

"I don't know -- to run down my debit cards? Fuck with my head? Save the planet?"

Lily stretches, yawns, shows me the length of her yellow canines and the big crushing molars in back. She should be out on the veldt, cracking up giraffe bones, extracting marrow from the vertebrae, gnawing on hoofs. Except that there is no veldt, not anymore, and no giraffes either. Something unleashed in my brain shouts, IT'S ANDREA! And it is. Andrea's voice coming back at me. "No, fool," she says. "For love."

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