IF YOU GO
T.C. Boyle will read from and sign copies of his book, "The Harder They Come," 7:15-9 p.m. April 21 at the Georgia Center for the Book, in the Decatur Library, 215 Sycamore St., Decatur. The event is free. A Cappella Books will have copies of the book available for purchase and signing after the program. 404-681-5128, georgiacenterforthebook.org.
In “The Harder They Come,” Sten Stenson, an aging former Marine holidaying in a Central American country, kills a bandit in self-defense. With his bare hands. He is celebrated as a hero.
Stenson’s schizophrenic son, Adam, hiding out in the woods of Northern California, kills a man in a delusional fantasy of self-defense. He is hunted down like an animal.
These two men, and the violence that binds them, drive the action in T.C. Boyle's new novel. The prolific and celebrated Boyle will discuss the story Tuesday at the Georgia Center for the Book, in the Decatur Library.
The last time Boyle was in Atlanta, in 2010, he had just published "Wild Child," a book of short stories that peeked under the thin veneer of civilization to see the snakes inside. This is Boyle's perennial concern: the compact between civilized people that makes modern life possible, and the irresistible urge to either escape it or smash it.
That urge can be psychotic in a character like Adam, or merely menacing and misguided. Sara, who shelters and aids the outlaw Adam, is the second type, a fringe conspiracy theorist who calls herself a “sovereign citizen,” immune from taxes and the law.
The urge also can be natural contrariness. “I was a punk all my life,” said Boyle, 66, in a phone call from a San Francisco hotel. “Nobody told me what to do, ‘Don’t tread on me.’”
That’s why Boyle understands Sara’s personality, and the people who fed and cared for Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph during his five years as a fugitive in the Southeastern mountains.
"There is an anarchist streak with a lot of people, a whole 'government is evil, black helicopters' thing," said Boyle, who researched Rudolph and other Ned Kelly types while writing the book.
As a respected author, a teacher at the University of Southern California, a husband and a father, the former heroin user has made his compact with society. But that urge doesn’t go away.
“You go to any park in Atlanta or Decatur, and the first thing you see is a sign that says ‘No Smoking. No Campfires. No Sex.’ I immediately want to do all those things,” he said, “just to (spit) in their faces. Don’t we all?”
Boyle is the only writer of fiction to win the Henry David Thoreau Prize for nature writing, and “The Harder They Come” glows with the air of mountainous Northern California. Like Thoreau, Boyle’s characters want to go back to nature, and like Thoreau (who frequently walked into Concord, Mass., for his meals), they can’t. Not on a planet with 7 billion people.
“There just isn’t enough land,” Boyle said. “There’s nothing left. How can you live off the land when fish are extinct? It’s a terrible conundrum in our time. We are trapped in this civilization.
“So, what do we do? Maybe we take up guns and start shooting each other? Like everybody else, I’m disturbed by it, so I write a book to think about it.”
The book’s former Marine-hero-vigilante and schizophrenic fugitive are based on real events, and Boyle doesn’t apologize for using a violent storyline to question the American thirst for violence.
“It’s part of being civilized to be able to make art about it,” he said, “to have this conversation. Just about everybody, except the absolute fringe element, would say they regret what’s happening with gun violence in this society. So we are able to talk about it, and dramatize it, without shooting each other.”
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