JOIN USThe Harder They Come
T C Boyle
Bloomsbury
2015, pp 384, Rs 499
The writer Henry Miller’s 1930s description of the US, as an air-conditioned nightmare, was referenced in the 1960s by Norman Mailer. Yet another bleak nightmarish vision is articulated in this novel by T C Boyle, which begins with D H Lawrence’s critical comment that “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
It is not a coincidence that Boyle’s book has been published at a time when, according to the FBI, the annual average for active shooting incidents in the US has more than doubled during the seven-year period — 2007 to 2013, as compared to the average for 2000 to 2006. Reacting to the gunning down of nine African-Americans by a white supremacist inside a church in Charleston on June 17, President Obama observed that “You don’t see murder on this kind of scale with this kind of frequency in any other advanced nation on earth. Every country has violent, hateful or mentally-unstable people. What’s different is that not every country is awash with easily accessible guns.”
Guns and violence is something which the protagonist of Boyle’s novel, Sten Stenson, is familiar with, despite being a retired school principal. Sten, a Vietnam War veteran, reacts in true commando style when he and his wife and other senior US citizens on a cruise in Costa Rica are threatened by three thugs. Sten chokes a thug with a gun, and the other two flee.
The TV channels play up Sten as a hero when he returns to his Californian villa. Back home, his adult son Adam has befriended American veterinarian Sara Jennings, who believes that all governments are illegitimate. She is arrested for driving without a licence and her pet Kutya (a Hungarian Puli sheepdog) is seized and put in a pound after it bites a cop. Adam helps free her pet and takes her to his late grandmother’s isolated country home. Adam is addicted to hallucinogenic drugs and believes that he is the reincarnation of the legendary 18th-century American explorer and hunter John Coulter. Adam is convinced that everyone is out to get him and that the only way to survive is to hide in the woods and take out the “enemy” with his father’s assault-rifle.
When two of Sten’s neighbours are killed, he initially assumes that it could be members of a Mexican drug-running syndicate operating in California. However, when the sheriff tells him that the neighbours could have been killed by bullets fired from his assault-rifle, Sten realises that the enemy is not an outsider but his own son. And so begins a classic American man-hunt, with the cops trying to stop Adam from killing more people. A Californian tourist destination with the world’s oldest sequoia trees now becomes a killing zone. The inevitable happens when Adam is finally gunned down by a sniper.
The Harder They Come reads like an indictment of the American way of life and death. The book was published earlier this year, presumably around the time when American Sniper was nominated for six Oscars. The movie, directed by the iconic Clint Eastwood, is based on the autobiography of the late Chris Kyle who, during his four tours of duty in Iraq as a US Navy SEAL, killed more people than any other sniper in American history. The movie begins with the sniper Kyle perched on a roof-top and shooting dead a young Iraqi boy and his mother to preempt them from hurling grenades at a US army patrol. Even while the movie script was being written, Kyle was shot dead on a Texas ranch by an Iraqi war veteran who was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Kyle’s widow Kaya has recently endorsed a Republican presidential candidate, the former Texas governor Rick Perry.
Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction, with rifles and snipers continuing to be part of American folklore although Boyle’s book seems to question the rationale of the US’s National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA stickers, pasted on car-bumpers, proclaim that “The only thing that stops the bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
However, the good news — if it can be called that — is that, based on a 50-year perspective, a Pew Research Center study indicated in May 2013 that US gun-violence has plunged and levelled out over the last two decades after peaking in the 1980s and early 1990s. If, despite this, the Pew study notes that 56 per cent of Americans believe that gun-related violence is higher than it was 20 years ago, it could be because of the impact of the bad news on the 24/7 TV news channels. The Harder They Come makes for compulsive reading but the US is much more than just rifles and snipers despite the NRA’s hectic lobbying against gun-control.