Remember that biosphere experiment in Arizona, way back in the ’90s, where a billionaire oil magnate re-created Earth’s ecosystems pared down to three acres under glass and stuck a bunch of humans in there to see if they could survive? The crew were known as “terranauts,” and when they emerged two years later they were oxygen deprived, half-starved, and despised their teammates. The experiment went belly-up about six months later when the funding ran out, and that was that. Except near Tucson, where the old biosphere has become a museum, and in fiction, where it’s been the subject of a great short story by Caitlin Horrocks (“Life Among the Terranauts”), and now a funny, sexy novel by T.C. Boyle.
Ecco ($26.99).
Mr. Boyle inhabits diverse characters better than anyone I know, and he does a great job here having two women — one a chosen terranaut, one a disappointed reject — and a randy male terranaut alternate narratives about the experiment. Ramsay, or “Vodge” as his teammates call him, has no sympathy for Linda Ryu, the rejected terranaut, but he does have a serious crush on her friend Dawn, who’s under the glass with him. As he observes, “There are winners and losers in this life, from the crack babies and Calcutta street urchins to the millionaire sons of millionaires and the movie star daughters of movie stars, and while it’s not right and it’s not fair, the fact is that everybody, from bottom to top, is competing for space and resources through every O2-laden breath they draw.” Darwin and Stephen J. Gould might back him up, but that doesn’t stop Linda from hating both him and her former best friend who made the grade.
Linda laments, “I don’t know what to say. But everything stinks, that’s for sure. I want to tell you I used to live in a world of hope and now I live in a world of hate, but I don’t mean to come off as a whiner, so I won’t. And I won’t play the race card because I really don’t think that had anything to do with it, though look at the hair color of the women they chose and you tell me. Mission Control might as well have been curating an exhibit called ‘Blondes of the Biomes,’ and was it any accident that four of us rejects had hair that was either ethnic black or a shade of brown so dark it might as well have been?”
Meanwhile, Dawn, the voice of reason, soon has her values compromised by hunger, as do all the other terranauts trying to survive on the livestock they brought in and the crops they’ve planted, which hardly provide 1,500 calories a day for eight hard-working humans. Hence this seduction scene, where the resident geek woos Dawn with a contraband package of peanut M&Ms and she nearly snatches them out of his hand. “… [P]lease don’t laugh at me here unless you’ve been locked inside yourself, because you can’t begin to imagine what I was feeling in that moment — nobody can except maybe Solzhenitsyn’s gulag dwellers or the crews of the early Russian Bios experiments who had to get along on water, algae, and boiled millet once the potatoes and sausage ran out.”
Hell is other people, as Sartre well knew, and the novel nods to “No Exit” early and late. I love T.C. Boyle for his pitch-perfect short stories, but I must confess his novels have never rocked my world. Here, I applaud his prose and his humor — any given 50 pages of “The Terranauts” is lively and entertaining — but the combined weight of 500-plus pages didn’t add up to a more satisfying experience, just a longer one. The characters’ days and their themes (resentment, lust, hunger, revenge, curdled group dynamics) don’t evolve so much as simply repeat, and when the last page is turned, when we’ve been led to believe there’s going to be a scene that will give us “the big takeaway” — well, I won’t tell you what happens. The novel’s greater meaning seems to be, simply, “people never change.” For me, that’s not enough to hang a novel on.
Susan Balée’s memoir “Flannery O’Connor Resurrected” appears in the anthology “Literary Awakenings: Personal Essays From the Hudson Review,” due out from Syracuse University Press in November. She lives in Pittsburgh.
First Published: October 30, 2016, 4:00 a.m.