Tackling violence

Lead review

The Harder They Come
T C Boyle
Bloomsbury 2015, pp 400, Rs. 1,129

The title of T Coraghessan Boyle’s stunning new novel, The Harder They Come, refers less to the Jimmy Cliff movie than to a D H Lawrence observation quoted at the beginning of the book: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

An equally fitting epigraph for Boyle’s tale of rage and madness and Oedipal conflict might have come from Philip Roth’s 1997 classic, American Pastoral, which contrasted the optimistic strain of Emersonian self-reliance in the American character with “the fury, the violence, and the desperation” of “the indigenous American berserk.”

The Harder They Come often seems like an homage to that Roth novel — it too is about the dark side of the American dream, and the efforts of a father to come to terms with a violent child wanted by the law. At the same time, it recapitulates themes that have preoccupied Boyle throughout his long career: his fascination with characters who pit themselves against their neighbours, the system and nature; freedom as both a founding principle of America — and an invitation to rebellion and self-indulgence; and the dark fallout of ideological certainty and obsession.

Over the years, the antic satire and Grand Guignol hyperbole of Boyle’s early work — like World’s End, East Is East and Budding Prospects — have given way to a more modulated approach. In the case of The Inner Circle (about sexologist Alfred Kinsey) and The Women (about architect Frank Lloyd Wright), this led to some tepid writing and cartoony characters. But when Boyle found a way to balance his taste for exaggeration with a more naturalistic style, his caffeinated energy with introspection, the result has been deeper, more emotionally affecting works. A Friend of the Earth and Drop City demonstrated that he could do it all — comedy and compassion, psychologically vivid characters combined with big ideas about America and the American dream.

He has pulled it off again in this new novel — and with even more complexity and chiaroscuro. In fact, The Harder They Come, which the publisher says was inspired by two actual events, is very much a showcase for all of Boyle’s storytelling talents. It’s gripping, funny and melancholy, and opens out from the miseries of a father and his troubled son into a resonant meditation on the American frontier ethos and propensity for violence — a dramatic novelistic rendering, in many ways, of scholar Richard Slotkin’s pioneering studies on the mythology of the American West (Regeneration Through Violence, The Fatal Environment and Gunfighter Nation).

The father in The Harder They Come, one Sten Stensen, is regarded as something of a vigilante hero himself: At 70, this Vietnam vet faced down — and killed with his bare hands — a bandit who’d tried to rob him, his wife, Carolee, and other members of their tour group in Costa Rica.

Sten feels terrible about being glorified “for a single act of violence that haunted him every time he shut his eyes,” but when the small California town he calls home comes under threat from drug cartels (that have come north to grow marijuana on state and federal lands), he finds himself being looked to for leadership and advice.

Sten and Carolee have worries of their own: Their son, Adam, who has long been an angry, aggressive boy, has become, at 25, even stranger and more menacing. He’s gone missing in the forests, where one of Sten’s friends has been found, shot dead, and he’s begun calling himself Colter, after the legendary mountain man who once walked with Lewis and Clark and later spent months alone in the wilderness.

Adam may remind Boyle fans of Ty, the Eco-Avenger in A Friend of the Earth. If he’s the least interesting character in this novel, it’s because his madness remains somewhat generic and opaque, impervious to sympathy or understanding.

It’s Adam’s relationships with his lover, Sara, a middle-aged anti-government anarchist, and his father, that propel The Harder They Come: Boyle makes us care about these two people, and the repercussions that Adam’s increasingly hostile and violent behaviour will have on their lives. In Boyle’s earlier work, Sara might have become a caricature — the sort of nutter who worries about black helicopters and rants about communists all the time. But here, she’s a difficult woman — impulsive, eccentric, unreasonable, but also recognisable, someone whose moods and irrational feelings for Adam are made comprehensible to readers, even as we begin to worry what consequences his actions will have on her and Sten.

Sometimes, Boyle cuts back and forth from Adam’s point of view to Sara’s (much the way the innovative Showtime series The Affair moves between the perspectives of its two central characters) while recounting Sten’s own travails in separate takes. From the novel’s thrilling set piece of a start (recounting Sten’s faceoff in Costa Rica) to its pensive conclusion, The Harder They Come is a masterly — and arresting — piece of storytelling, arguably Boyle’s most powerful, kinetic novel yet.