Fiction

T. C. Boyle, No Way Home (Liveright), 368 pp. Hardback, $29.99.

Dr. Terry Tully works at a hospital in Los Angeles, not in Pittsburgh, but it’s easy to imagine him as a character on The Pitt. He’s still young, not far removed from medical school, and trying to keep up with the long hours and high expectations of his residency. Like most residents, he’s not making much money; he has a small, spare apartment near the hospital, and he often gets dinner from a food truck. When his mother dies suddenly, he gets a colleague to cover for him and drives out to her small house in Boulder City—a house he has just inherited.

Terry himself grew up in Southern California. His mom decided to move out to Nevada when his father passed away, while Terry was in medical school, and he never quite understood the appeal of the desert (“last resort of saints and scorpions”). When he arrives in Boulder City to take care of things, Terry is a fish out of water. He’s been working so hard that his social life is virtually non-existent. Between diagnosing indigent patients and walking his dog, he has little time for leisure, and he has grown accustomed to a fairly Spartan lifestyle. Small-town Southern Nevada may as well be a whole new world. After grabbing a drink at a local bar, he takes a suspiciously flirty young woman back to his late mother’s place and has the best night he can remember having in years.

This is the set-up of T. C. Boyle’s twentieth novel, No Way Home. The septuagenarian author, no stranger to the West, has made an interesting move in centering all the action in Boulder City, a town that doesn’t usually get much literary attention. He has also chosen to focus this new narrative on a love triangle between three millennials.

When Terry hooks up with 24-year-old Bethany (a former UNLV English major now working as a receptionist), he assumes it’s a one-night stand. But Bethany has lost her apartment and needs a place to stay—and how serendipitous that Terry might need someone to look after his mother’s house! In fact, when Terry returns to L.A., Bethany just moves in and tells the neighbors she’s his fiancée.

Initially upset, Terry cools down quickly. He knows he’s being played, but he doesn’t mind. His medical residency hasn’t left much time for romance; he’s so thrilled to be lying next to a pretty girl that he’s willing to accept a long-distance relationship rooted in dishonesty. “If he was being manipulated, he was complicit in it.” In fact, having a casual lover four hours away might be perfect. He can drive to Boulder City and spend weekends with Bethany, and he can settle his mother’s estate down the road.

But Terry winds up with more drama than he bargained for. Bethany has a jealous and aggressive local ex-boyfriend, Jesse, who has every intention of winning her back—even if that means getting violent. And Bethany likes to go out and have a good time, which, in a small town, often means running into your ex—for whom she still might have feelings. This desert idyll is more dangerous than it had at first seemed. Terry has entered “a complex world, a fraught world, a world of connections he could barely fathom.”

Boyle masterfully punctuates his narrative with moments of disturbing violence, and the result is a story that drifts further and further into darkness.

Boyle has divided the novel into sections, each of which switches to the point of view of a different character: Terry, Bethany, and Jesse. While Terry remains the protagonist, the shifting perspectives work to create a kind of Rashomon effect in which the facts are differently colored, if not exactly altered. Terry realizes right away that he’s being taken advantage of, but Bethany and Jesse also see themselves as victims—certainly not as victimizers. For each of them, in different respects, Terry appears as a figure of unusual privilege: a West Coast doctor who has inherited an entire house and treats their neighborhood like a weekend playground.

Jesse, for example, isn’t a nobody; he’s a full-time schoolteacher with a college degree. But he sniffs elitism when he meets Terry: “There was nobody in this town but lifers, like himself, and certainly not the kind of society an up-and-coming Los Angeles physician would have expected in any way, shape or form. Déclassé, that was the word. The doctor was slumming.” Rich Californians are supposed to hit up nightclubs on the Strip. What business did this guy have picking up girls in Boulder City bars?

* * *

The best aspect of this novel is its pacing. Boyle masterfully punctuates his narrative with moments of disturbing violence, and the result is a story that drifts further and further into darkness (perhaps not unlike the hit Netflix series Beef). Rehab, recovery, restraining orders, reconnaissance missions—Terry and Jesse push each other to extremes as Bethany only catalyzes their passions. This is why David Ulin has written of the novel as both “vigorous and chilling” and “hard and flinty.”

In a way, it approaches the ethos of the Western. The mild-mannered Dr. Tully gradually transforms into a hardier, flintier version of himself as he spends more time in this desert community. And as Harry Stecopoulos notes for LARB, while Boyle doesn’t dwell on the environmental context, the “brutal drought” apparent through the shockingly low waterline of Lake Mead may be a factor in the characters’ “violent tendencies.”

In an amusing detour from the novel’s central plot, Jesse tries to write his own novel about his great-grandfather, Asa Seeger, who was the last person to vacate the town of St. Thomas before it was flooded in the 1930s to create Lake Mead when the dam was built. (This may be a nod from Boyle to Jackson Ellis’s 2018 novel Lords of St. Thomas.) Jesse imagines him “watching the lake appear first as a shimmer on the horizon and then creep closer day by day over the course of three long winnowing years until it was finally lapping at his front porch and he had to pack up his things in a rowboat and float away.” Home is never permanent, he realizes. Whatever you think you have can always be taken away.