The One-Night Stand That Ruins Everything
In T.C. Boyle’s ferocious new novel, lust, class, and rage collide.
The Tuesday Review
Alarm bells ring so loudly at the start of T.C. Boyle’s new novel that I expected my wife to yell, “Turn that thing down!”
No matter: I wouldn’t have heard her.
For more than 40 years, Boyle has been sounding off about the human condition, particularly the myriad ways we lash out at each other when frightened or jealous or angry.
In story after story, he catches the embers of grievance in the air. No Way Home, his 20th novel, is a conflagration of rage that starts with a little electrical fire behind the drywall and eventually burns the whole place down. It’s about strangers rubbing up against each other in a country still pretending that class — and real estate — don’t determine our fate.
The protagonist, Terry, is a young doctor in his third year of residency at a city hospital in Los Angeles. As usual, Boyle’s prose drips with the sweat of the dangerously stressed. Friendless, sleepless, and overwhelmed by desperately ill and sometimes reckless patients, Terry is struggling to maintain an impossible balance of compassion and dispassion in hallways slick with blood and viscera.
Then his mother dies.
That’s an emotional crisis, of course, but for Terry it’s also a logistical one. Stealing a few precious days off, he drives to Boulder City, Nev., to close up his mother’s house and find a place for her old dog. Immediately, condescension radiates off him like heat from a Walmart parking lot:
“People who claim to love the desert always talked about the uncluttered vistas, but to his mind it was like looking at the bottom of an old running shoe, nothing there but dirt and worn-out tread. The desert was empty for a reason, a negative space interposed between you and someplace you’d actually want to be.”
Much of Boyle’s success stems from that voice — how coolly he rides parallel to the minds of his characters, leaving just enough space for the spark of irony to arc across.
Terry is grieving and irritated, sure, but he’s still sharp enough to feel superior, and it’s in this conflicted state that he spots a pretty young woman at a diner near his mother’s house. He’s generally awkward with people, but as luck would have it, Bethany works at a hospital, too — as a receptionist — so they’ve already got something in common. Even more promising, when Terry asks, “Where are you staying,” she says, “I don’t know, you want to take me home with you?”
What follows is more convincing than any abstinence campaign ever devised.
There’s something almost Grecian about the set of calamities that this encounter sets off, as though sex in his late mother’s bed — a creepy consummation of Eros and Thanatos — has offended the gods. But, in fact, this is a disaster concocted entirely by mortals, by their radical, even willful misunderstandings. For the distracted doctor, his one-night stand is a welcome release from the parade of horrors at the hospital. For Bethany, who we learn was living in a storage unit, it’s a chance for permanent housing. And once she’s walked through that door, she’s not walking out.
Although No Way Home could easily have settled into a worn remake of Fatal Attraction — just boil the dog instead of the rabbit — Boyle has something more surprising in store. Yes, Bethany is a clever grifter who immediately settles into Terry’s house and passes herself off as his fiancée, but she’s not crazy; she’s not even all that sinister. She’s just wildly pragmatic. And Terry erratically plays along with her scheme. The sex and the semblance of domesticity, not to mention the convenience of having a housesitter, are just too attractive for him to give up.
“If he was being manipulated,” Boyle notes, “he was complicit.”
I asked T.C. Boyle, “How does a bad decision become willful self-destruction?”
At every step, I kept yelling, “Get out of the house!” — but it’s his house. His bed, and he’s made it.
One of the many deft ways Boyle complicates this confluence of deception and self-delusion is by showing us Terry’s work with a desperately ill homeless patient back in L.A. He can’t fathom why she won’t take better care of herself, won’t follow his instructions, won’t fill her prescriptions. He’s blind not only to the atmosphere of despair in which she lives but to the symptoms of self-destruction that he exhibits just as well.
Boyle narrates No Way Home in the third person, but section by section, the perspective shifts from Terry to Bethany — and then, most alarmingly, to Bethany’s kinda-sorta ex-boyfriend, Jesse. A local schoolteacher who rides a motorcycle because he thinks it makes him look cool, Jesse is a menace, a sexual predator, a low-rent thug with aspirations of being a novelist. He seems intellectually and culturally so distant from Terry that the good doctor can’t believe they even share the same roads, let alone the same woman.
What a classic Boyle triangle: the chance encounter that draws together people who fundamentally can’t relate. In the charged plasma of their fusion, even the tiniest provocation can set off an explosive reaction. Terry thinks, “You went into medicine so you could stand above the fray,” but the right mix of lust and self-righteousness drags him deep into that fray.
Honestly, I love the pulpy way this novel keeps ratcheting up the violence, the cringe-inducing humiliations, the face-planting missteps! And, of course, it all pours down on us in the great avalanche of Boyle’s prose that can feel chaotic in the moment until it delivers us masterfully to some breathtaking catastrophe of primal, self-justifying rage. During the bone-breaking battles that erupt among these characters, Terry keeps wondering “what was the equation” of retribution, of revenge?
But, of course, there is no calculus to that fraudulent equation.
In the long stretch of Boyle’s novels and short stories, No Way Home resonates with his great ethical impulse to demonstrate that the demarcations between us — all the things we imagine make us essentially different and better than others — are illusory.
When a friend warns Jesse that he’s only seeing things from his point of view, Jesse complains, “That’s the only point of view I’ve got.”
If you believe that, then there really is no way home.◆
No Way Home, by T.C. Boyle (Liveright, 368 pp. $29.99)
Previous review: Woman on the Verge of Losing Control
Maria Semple’s “Go Gentle” ricochets from ancient philosophy to rom-com thrills
A classic, brilliant Ron Charles review.
Ron Charles, you have a great sense of humor, and your use of language is unsurpassed! Loved your review.