Doom With a Side Salad: T.C. Boyle's Cheerful Pessimism
It was one of those perfect Southern California afternoons, the sun peeking through a thick grove of trees, the air just a touch autumnal. I was eating lunch with the novelist T.C. Boyle in the backyard of his Frank Lloyd Wright–designed house in Montecito, the posh enclave of Santa Barbara where he has lived for more than two decades, raising three children with his wife of 42 years. His black puli, Ilka, played happily on the deck.
“It’s quite clear to me that our species is on the way out,” Boyle said casually, as if the scene had grown just a little too suburban. It is the novelist’s job, after all, to jostle us out of our comforts, while being entertaining—that is, to make discomfort pleasurable. Boyle has proved remarkably capable in this regard through his 26 works of fiction, which combine the zany humor of early Woody Allen with An Inconvenient Truth’s concern for our collective fate.
Boyle’s latest novel, , is set in the desert of Arizona—which, with global warming on the rise, much of California is starting to resemble. It is the story of a Biosphere 2–like experiment to prepare for the colonization of space, giving humanity the chance to ruin another planet with Starbucks-laden strip malls. There had been encouraging news that day about SpaceX, the Mars mission overseen by Tesla founder Elon Musk. “Elon Musk is a great, great, great visionary,” Boyle told me. “However, I think he’s mistaken. I don't think it's possible to re-create an ecosystem.” Besides, Boyle mused, the class politics of space colonies are sure to be brutal to those who can’t afford a ticket to get up and out. “Who’s gonna be left behind to die in their own
