Even the grimmest climate-change novels usually contain a glimmer of humor, and books such as Lydia Millet’s The Children’s Bible contain passages that are downright fun, despite all the tragedy. Nevertheless, TC Boyle is onto something different in his new novel, Blue Skies. It’s a comedy, for sure, but in Northrop Frye’s sense of the “Society of the Old” in conflict with the “Society of Youth.” Old people, of course, are responsible for the looming catastrophes of climate change which appear, in bold, in each chapter, but the youth of Blue Skies are none too wonderful themselves.
The novel focuses on three central characters: Ottile, a graceful, if often flummoxed, Montecito matriarch; her daughter Cat, a borderline alcoholic living in a decaying beach house on the South Florida coast with twin babies and her “Bacardi ambassador” husband, Todd; and Ottile’s son Cooper, a “bug nerd” whose romantic entanglements are fraught and who can never quite get it together to complete his PhD in entomology.
All the characters are deeply flawed, some much more so than others, and initially that may be a bit off-putting. However, their inadequacies make them real and give the novel its frisson. What Boyle has done is tell the story of the sort of dysfunctional family that might be found on any block in Santa Barbara and set them down in a world that’s disintegrating even more rapidly than our own. The characters go about their lives haltingly, ignorant, sometimes disgustingly entitled — frequently bumping up against the devastations of climate change as if they were just another headache to deal with during the course of the day.