Author of the week: T.C. Boyle

last updated 8 January 2015

T.C. Boyle is one uncertain environmentalist, said Kiera Butler in Mother Jones. For some time now, in both his fiction and his life, the author, who lives in Southern California, has been asking tough questions about our interactions with the natural world. “I’m extremely worried,” he says. “We are trying to understand our impact on the environment. The thing is, it’s such a large question that I wonder if any individual effort can really do much. That said, I’m a fanatical recycler. No scrap of food has left my house without going to the mulch pile. I don’t know if I’m doing this out of guilt. I think I’m doing it because I want to. And I think that might be a difference.”

The characters in Boyle’s newest novel don’t share his uncertainty, said Tom Jacobs in Miller-McCune. In When the Killing’s Done, Boyle pits two environmentalists against each other over the fate of California’s Channel Islands. Alma is a National Park Service agent charged with eradicating the island’s nonnative populations of rats and feral pigs, while Dave is an activist trying to stop her. “Dave believes all life is sacred,” says Boyle. Alma agrees, but she believes in making exceptions to save indigenous species “unique to the islands.” Boyle based the book on real life. Though he’s followed the Channel Islands story for years, writing the novel didn’t bring Boyle any closer to certainty regarding the fight. “I’m not going to choose a side between these two positions,” he says. “Each character has a good point.”