author: T.C. Boyle

name: Steev

average rating: 3.60

book published: 1990

rating: 3

read at: 2011/02/01

date added: 2011/02/02

shelves: after-the-fall, fun, novels, own-it

review:
Once again I've encountered a book that is about issues I'm extremely interested in and concerned with, but the formal characteristics of the writing are problematic to me. I'd never considered reading any of T.C. Boyle's work, though I'd heard his name quite a bit. Then I heard about this book and its subject: a washed-up old environmental activist trying to survive in a 2025 world ravaged by the effects of the global climate change he had been trying to fight in his youth. I eagerly snapped up a copy.



It turns out that Boyle does a pretty decent job envisioning that future situation - although he doesn't touch the 2 other interrelated future dooms we're heading for, economic collapse and peak oil. My main problem, though, is his writing. He seems to be considered a serious literary-type author, I thought, but I couldn't help getting caught up in the various flaws of his prose. For instance, he tends to be one of those writers that employs useless, over-the-top metaphors (a metaphor, to my mind, should be used to compare one thing the reader is less familiar with to another thing that the reader is more familiar with, as a way of conveying more clearly what that first thing is. But Boyle is fond of the reverse - using something even less familiar as a metaphor, which might serve to illuminate the narrators inner monologue but doesn't work as effective description). He also seems uncertain whether he wants to use first person or third person, and whether he's writing a surreal satire or a piece of science-based realism.



I still enjoyed this book, and it really deserves more like a 3.5 star rating, but in the end it didn't satisfy, neither from an aesthetic, i'm enjoying-the-pleasure-of-reading-good-writing standpoint nor from a this-adeptly-explores-the-concepts-I-want-it-to standpoint. Maybe I was just looking for a different book. Nevertheless, the concept of "Tortilla Curtain", another of Boyle's books, intrigues me just enough to want to risk another go at his work, and I guess that's the best indicator of my opinion.