THE WOLF HUNT by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

Adam Shuster is a Jewish teenager in Silicon Valley who is accused of killing a Black student named Jamal Jones.  Adam’s mother, Lilach, the first-person narrator, claims, “But that’s not true.”  It actually takes quite a few pages for the murder allegation to take hold, but all signs point to Adam, who was being bullied by Jamal, unbeknownst to Adam’s parents.  The adult who does know about Adam and Jamal’s relationship is Uri, a self-defense instructor whom Adam has come to idolize.  Hence the overarching theme in this book is that parents don’t necessarily know their children very well.  To further that point, we find that Jamal’s bereaved mother was equally in the dark about her own son’s behavior.  In a side issue, Lilach draws damning conclusions about her husband’s conduct when he is out of town, proving that she is not totally in touch with either of her male family members.  Another theme that caught my attention is how the roles of sheep and wolf can so quickly be reversed when the victim decides to fight back and self-defense escalates into retaliation.  Lilach eventually becomes semi-unhinged, at first because of the treatment her son has endured and refused to share, and then later when she realizes that her son could be capable of murder.  Her husband’s denial that there is cause for concern doesn’t help matters.  Lilach undertakes an investigation of her own, but her findings do nothing to ease her mind.  I love psychological dramas like this, and Gundar-Goshen is very good at keeping us guessing.

BLUE SKIES by T.C. Boyle

The title of this book is ironic, as climate change is rearing its ugly head on both coasts.  Cat is a twenty-something in Florida where the rain never stops.  Her parents and brother, Cooper, are in California where wildfires rule.  These family members are on opposite coasts with opposite attitudes.  Cat buys a python as a fashion accessory, while her mother is experimenting with recipes using crickets that she is raising.  Cooper is an entomologist who loses his arm due to a tick infection and becomes sullen after his “abridgement.”  Will an environmental catastrophe in which all the insects die wake him up?  Cat, however, is the real focus here, and she just does not get any smarter as the book progresses.  I knew what calamity was coming and didn’t have to tear through too many pages to get there.  Afterward, Cat becomes marginally less vapid and more responsible but not enough to anticipate or head off the next disaster.  She and Cooper both attack their problems with lots of drinking, adding to Cooper’s depression and Cat’s tendency to screw up.  The sanest person in this novel is their mother, whose attempts at being a good steward of the planet, repeatedly get thwarted, but she keeps on striving to keep her family afloat—literally.  

TALK TO ME by T.C. Boyle

This novel bears some similarity to Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, in that it focuses on a chimpanzee who lives among humans and has learned sign language.  In both books, the chimp’s effect on human lives is significant.  Aimee is a college student who responds to a help-wanted ad posted by Guy, a professor at her university who is training Sam, the chimp.  Sam and Aimee bond instantly, and Aimee becomes a necessity to Sam’s world, just as Sam becomes the focal point of Aimee’s life.  Sam eats cheeseburgers, drinks beer, and smokes weed along with his caretakers, but his time among humans is limited.  Once he becomes fully grown, he will be in a position to overpower them, and the consequences could be catastrophic.  Sam may live among humans, but he is not exactly domesticated, and one of his tantrums has resulted in a serious facial wound to a woman who previously worked with him.  What happens to Sam at the end of his term with Guy is not something that Aimee has really contemplated, as there really are no good options, especially since she and Guy do not “own” Sam.  His fate is in the hands of a scientist who couldn’t care less about Sam’s and Aimee’s attachment to one another and sees Sam’s value in financial terms only.  Sam is not only ill-equipped to be returned to the wild, but he has never been around members of his own species.  The humans will survive without Sam, but his survival is totally dependent on humans. In other words, proving that a chimp can develop language skills may have scientific value, but his unfortunate endgame is cruel.  Boyle reminds us that animals are not on this planet to serve the needs of humans, but somehow we humans see them as property that exists to serve our own purposes.

OUTSIDE LOOKING IN by T.C. Boyle

Imagine a group of Harvard psychology professors and grad students in a big house regularly tripping on LSD in the 1960s when it was legal.  I have nothing against Timothy Leary or psychedelic drugs, for that matter, but my immersion in this novel was not always pleasant.  It focuses on a married couple, Fitz and Joanie, and their teenage son, Corey, who join Leary’s commune-like inner circle.  A grad student himself, Fitz, along with the others, is ostensibly engaging in an experiment to evaluate how LSD might cure mental illness, although none of the participants are technically mentally ill.  However, one might suggest that imprinting on Leary as their beloved leader and tripping in front of their children are not exactly ringing endorsements of their sanity.  These people are the epitome of bad role models, and just when you think they can’t get any more reckless, they give their kids LSD, too.  I am a huge T.C. Boyle fan, but this is not one of my favorites.  My problem is that he does not make LSD seem like all that much fun, while at the same time the characters’ lives all revolve around the drug—and around Leary, whose charisma does not leap off the page.  Part of the attraction that Fitz and Joanie have for this group habitation is financial, as Leary and his rich girlfriend mostly foot the bills.  Leary’s other hangers-on come across as smarmy and insincere.

THE TERRANAUTS by T.C. Boyle

Anything can happen, and does, when you put four men and four women in a giant terrarium, called an Ecosphere, with the media and the public keeping apprised of their activities.  This human experiment, as a dry run for populating Mars, did actually take place in the 1990s but fizzled.  In Boyle’s reimagining, the eight terranauts face overheating, under-oxygenating, and intense personal disagreements as they share an enclosed world, complete with livestock, agriculture, wild animals, and a small ocean.  Three first-person narrators carry the story.  Ramsay and Dawn are among the eight selected to spend two years in the Ecosphere, and Linda, who is best friends with Dawn, remains on the outside, working toward making the cut for the next group.  Having a narrator like Linda who is not a part of the experiment might seem like a bad idea, but her role entails gathering dirt on Ramsay’s and Dawn’s ex-lovers, along with other assorted gossip, which she may or may not pass along.  At first she is Dawn’s champion, or least tries to be, but Dawn makes some decisions that cause Linda’s attitude to deteriorate and devolve into bitterness and jealousy.  Even as she contemplates how to get even, Linda quotes her Korean grandfather as saying, “Before you set out for revenge, be sure to dig two graves.”  I love that!  Linda definitely does not exhibit the qualities that would make her a good fit for this experiment, but Dawn, who is perhaps more adamant than anyone other than Ramsay that they not “break closure,” is the one whose actions continually require spin control.  This book is full of surprises, and at each juncture I couldn’t wait to find out what the impact would be.

WHEN THE KILLING'S DONE by T.C. Boyle

This novel has an edge-of-your-seat opening.  It’s 1946, and a boat with three people on it sinks near the Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara, CA.  Beverly is the only one who survives, and her granddaughter, Alma, is the main character.  Alma Takesue works for the National Park Service and is involved in the eradication of invasive animal species on the Channel Islands.  Her nemesis is Dave LaJoy, a successful businessman and fanatical animal rights activist who does not want to see the rats on Anacopa Island poisoned.  These two warring factions both have a legitimate argument, but Dave takes his battles to an extreme and dangerous level, thus diminishing his influence.  In one scene, he and Alma are actually at a restaurant together, and he proves himself to be rude to the point of total irrationality.  That behavior is just the tip of the iceberg, compared to what else he does.  His most deranged acts don’t even have anything to do with preserving animal life.  This book recounts a multitude of adventures of several generations of channel island dwellers, divers, and pleasure seekers but never strays far from the central ecological issue.  Prior to her job in California, Alma was in Guam for three years, where the brown tree snake, accidentally introduced there, has almost completely annihilated all of the native animals.  This experience has fostered her passion for protecting the Channel Islands from a similar fate.  The novel keeps coming back to Alma’s personal and professional journey, but the myriad misadventures on land and sea of other characters, some of whom make a very brief appearance, provide the thrill ride that jumps off the page.

A FRIEND OF THE EARTH by T.C. Boyle

“To be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people.”  This is the mantra of Ty Tierwater, an eco-terrorist in the 1980s who vandalizes logging equipment and who, along with others, blocks a logging road by standing in cement.  These stunts, including a three-year tree-sitting protest by Ty’s daughter, seem crazy, but we also see Ty in his mid 70s in the year 2025, when the climate change apocalypse has arrived; almost all animals are extinct and the weather is either a monsoon or 130 degrees F.  The younger Ty may be a vandal with a cause, but his righteous indignation frequently gets the better of him, particularly when he starts to feel useless, landing him in jail and his daughter in foster care.  The purpose of these stunts is to gain media attention, but the bottom line is that they are totally ineffective at turning the tide of global warming trends.  The author’s gorgeous, evocative prose feels very prophetic.  For a book written 20+ years ago, it seems very current, especially when everyone starts wearing a mask during what appears to be a pandemic.  It also introduces themes that contemporary novels, such as Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Michael Christie’s Greenwood, have addressed, decades after this novel was written.  Ty is our flawed hero here who just doesn’t seem to be able to rein in his destructive impulses.  He constantly overestimates his own skill at avoiding detection and underestimates the inevitable consequences of his being caught.