In T.C. Boyle's new climate-focused novel, 'Blue Skies,' insects are haute cuisine, floods drive the plot, and people (and readers?) are largely indifferent.
T.C. Boyle, prolific and funny, discusses our losing battle against nature and his new novel, ‘Talk to Me,’ about a perennial fixation: chimpanzees.are the de rigueur foodie alternative, and why not? As the most abundant life form on Earth, there are plenty to go around, and, given the right culinary sleight of hand, they make a dandy, nutritious meal. But now they, too, are quietly dying off, and no one is really paying much attention.
Boyle’s entertaining if somewhat bloodless novel circles around an affluent Santa Barbara family that includes Cooper, a biologist who loves bugs to the extent that he nearly loses his life observing them; his mother, Ottilie, who usesand other haute cuisine, thereby doing her part, among other things, to cut down the methane footprint of the cattle industry; and Ottilie’s daughter, Catherine, a lost soul living on the Florida coast who has a drinking problem and an unhealthy lust forThen, the...
There are some trademark Boyle tropes here, including unexpected death and transgressive sex. He is especially good at describing Catherine’s ascent into the social media empyrean. Unlike her kin, she is blithely unconcerned with the fate of the Earth; when she spots a Burmese python for sale, she has an epiphany: She will be a “snake influencer.
Is “Blue Skies” a cautionary tale? Of course, but the notion of the natural world crumbling while humans whistle past the graveyard is nothing new, given the
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