T.C. Boyle thriller takes on America's violence
T.C. Boyle: what an interesting writer! He's 66 now, and over the years his fiction has managed to touch on a huge range of subjects, from the Kinsey Reports to illegal immigration to the inventor of corn flakes, while still feeling unmistakably like part of a single vision. The reason is that he's so avidly engaged, across all of his work, with his conception of America — and more specifically, America's intrinsic westward restlessness, the times and places where it has been still just unfinished, ragged at the edge, open to change.
And often, therefore, to violence. It's this strand of our identity that Boyle explores in his marvelous new novel The Harder They Come, a thrilling, intense book, his finest since Drop City.
The Harder They Come appears to be based on the sad saga of Christopher Dorner, the former LAPD officer whose killing spree in 2013 led to a massive manhunt across California. Dorner's proxy here is Adam Stenson, a furious and delusional young man whom police follow into the mountains of northwestern California.
Wisely, however, Boyle comes at Adam indirectly, beginning the book instead with Adam's father, Sten, a retired high school principal. On a day trip from a cruise they're on, Sten's tour group is mugged, and he intervenes, becoming, despite his reservations about the violent act he commits, a hero.
In other words, Sten represents sanctioned violence — he's also a Vietnam veteran — while Adam, whom the book slowly introduces after Sten's return home, represents the chaotic savagery of real psychosis. How closely connected are the two? The bridge Boyle builds between them is a woman named Sara, who is tender-hearted, and respectable enough to be a former colleague of Sten's, but who loathes the government and as a result has some sympathy for far right-wing terrorist groups. Her love affair with Adam is the trigger that brings his madness to the point of action.
The ideas lurking in this are sometimes blurry or glib. Boyle is too ready to suggest the affinity between Sten's violence, Sara's resentments, and Adam's insanity, whose particular form is, tellingly, inspired by the legends of the indomitable John Colter, the first European to lay eyes on Yellowstone. It's a flaw that becomes especially evident in the book's ending, which offers a facile restatement of its (sigh) themes.
But the story and the characters of The Harder They Come are amazing. Early in his career, Boyle could be pointlessly intense, careening between surrealism and satire and bloodshed. His late style, though, is something to behold; it has the same verve and pace, but in service now to an adroit realism. Sara, Sten, and Adam are nuanced, authentic, and their decisions, as a result, are both surprising and inevitable, just like the decisions of real humans.
More than that, some of the ideas in The Harder They Come succeed. While Boyle can be pat (Sten's cruise is emphatically over-indulgent), he can also be subtle, as his masterfully equivocal sketches of Colter's confrontation with the wilderness show. That variability is what happens when a writer takes chances. Boyle's not always careful or precise, but he's not afraid of failure either. To put it another way, he's not Ian McEwan, a coolly perfect post-imperial European — but rather a quintessential American, pushing farther out toward his frontiers, hoping to find something new, whatever the risk.
The Harder They Come
By T.C. Boyle
Ecco, 384 pp.
—3.5 stars out of four