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The Harder They Come
Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author T.C. Boyle makes his Ecco debut with a powerful, gripping novel that explores the roots of violence and anti-authoritarianism inherent in the American character.
Set in contemporary Northern California, The Harder They Come explores the volatile connections between three damaged people—an aging ex-Marine and Vietnam veteran, his psychologically unstable son, and the son's paranoid, much older lover—as they careen towards an explosive confrontation.
On a vacation cruise to Central America with his wife, seventy-year-old Sten Stensen unflinchingly kills a gun-wielding robber menacing a busload of senior tourists. The reluctant hero is relieved to return home to Fort Bragg, California, after the ordeal—only to find that his delusional son, Adam, has spiraled out of control.
Adam has become involved with Sara Hovarty Jennings, a hardened member of the Sovereign Citizens’ Movement, right-wing anarchists who refuse to acknowledge the laws and regulations of the state, considering them to be false and non-applicable. Adam’s senior by some fifteen years, Sara becomes his protector and inamorata. As Adam's mental state fractures, he becomes increasingly schizophrenic—a breakdown that leads him to shoot two people in separate instances. On the run, he takes to the woods, spurring the biggest manhunt in California history.
As he explores a father’s legacy of violence and his powerlessness in relating to his equally violent son, T. C. Boyle offers unparalleled psychological insights into the American psyche. Inspired by a true story, The Harder They Come is a devastating and indelible novel from a modern master.
Set in contemporary Northern California, The Harder They Come explores the volatile connections between three damaged people—an aging ex-Marine and Vietnam veteran, his psychologically unstable son, and the son's paranoid, much older lover—as they careen towards an explosive confrontation.
On a vacation cruise to Central America with his wife, seventy-year-old Sten Stensen unflinchingly kills a gun-wielding robber menacing a busload of senior tourists. The reluctant hero is relieved to return home to Fort Bragg, California, after the ordeal—only to find that his delusional son, Adam, has spiraled out of control.
Adam has become involved with Sara Hovarty Jennings, a hardened member of the Sovereign Citizens’ Movement, right-wing anarchists who refuse to acknowledge the laws and regulations of the state, considering them to be false and non-applicable. Adam’s senior by some fifteen years, Sara becomes his protector and inamorata. As Adam's mental state fractures, he becomes increasingly schizophrenic—a breakdown that leads him to shoot two people in separate instances. On the run, he takes to the woods, spurring the biggest manhunt in California history.
As he explores a father’s legacy of violence and his powerlessness in relating to his equally violent son, T. C. Boyle offers unparalleled psychological insights into the American psyche. Inspired by a true story, The Harder They Come is a devastating and indelible novel from a modern master.
384 pages, Paperback
First published March 30, 2015
435 people are currently reading
6006 people want to read
About the author
T. Coraghessan Boyle
164 books2,971 followersT. Coraghessan Boyle (also known as T.C. Boyle, is a U.S. novelist and short story writer. Since the late 1970s, he has published eighteen novels and twleve collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988 for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is married with three children. Boyle has been a
Professor of English at the University of Southern California since 1978, when he founded the school's undergraduate creative writing program.
He grew up in the small town on the Hudson Valley that he regularly fictionalizes as Peterskill (as in widely anthologized short story Greasy Lake). Boyle changed his middle name when he was 17 and exclusively used Coraghessan for much of his career, but now also goes by T.C. Boyle.
Professor of English at the University of Southern California since 1978, when he founded the school's undergraduate creative writing program.
He grew up in the small town on the Hudson Valley that he regularly fictionalizes as Peterskill (as in widely anthologized short story Greasy Lake). Boyle changed his middle name when he was 17 and exclusively used Coraghessan for much of his career, but now also goes by T.C. Boyle.
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March 23, 2023
Here was guilt. Here was the shit of the world coming home to roost right here in the redwoods.A part of the American mind has been off its meds for a very long time. There are some fine specimens of the syndrome tramping through the landscape in TC Boyle’s latest novel, The Harder They Come. Sara Hovart Jennings, 40, divorced, lives with her dog and her paranoia.
Was she wearing her seatbelt? No, she wasn’t, and she was never going to wear it either. Seatbelt laws were just another contrivance of the U.S. Illegitimate Government of America the corporate that had given up the gold standard back in 1933 and pledged its citizens as collateral so it could borrow and keep on borrowing. But she wasn’t a citizen of the U.S.I.G.A, she was a sovereign citizen, a U.S. national, born and raised, and she didn’t now and never would again acknowledge anybody’s illegitimate authority over her.She makes a living helping take care of horses and other animals on the northern California coast. Sara is more a garden-variety crank than a certifiable one.
There was talk on the radio, but it was mainly left-wing Communist crap-NPR, and how was it their signal was stronger than anybody else’s?Adam Stensen is more the latter sort, mid 20s, hitchhiking, late of a local institution for the very nervous. Sara picks him up. Adam has issues. His grasp on reality is less than firm. He calls himself Colter, for John Colter, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, considered by many the first mountain man. The border between Adam’s reality as Adam and his reality as Colter is way too permeable.
TC Boyle - from his site
Sten Stensen, 70, a Viet Nam veteran and retired school principal offers an example of the traditional Protestant work ethic.
He’d been up early all his life and though everybody said the best thing about retirement was sleeping in, he just couldn’t feature it. If he found himself in bed later than six, he felt like a degenerate, and he supposed he could thank his mother for that. And his father. The work ethic—once you had it, once it had been implanted in you, how could you shake it? Why would you want to?He and his wife, Carolee, were on a group tour in Costa Rica. The bus driver who drove them to a remote location may or may not have been in on it, but after getting off the bus the group is accosted by several armed men and robbed of their possessions. At least that was the plan. Sten, away from the group when the action begins, gets the drop on a gun-toting bandit and kills him. The other robbers flee. Sten returns home a hero.
Boyle’s northern California is a place living in fear, of BIG government, of Mexican drug runners and drug growers, of foreigners. That fear plays a big part in the story of Adam’s surrender to madness. Violence plays a huge role as well. The story of Adam/Colter’s descent is a gripping, moving, and frightening one. But, as in most good stories, there is another layer. Boyle opens the book with a quote from D.H. Lawrence
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.Boyle has been looking at that soul for a while. His vision of it remains interesting. It is not a pretty sight. In straight narrative sections he gives us an up close and personal look at the historical Colter contending with existential 19th century threats. America was a challenging environment, whether for its early residents enduring a European invasion or for explorers taking on the risk of encountering actual hostiles in parts of the continent that were not under European/American rule. Of course, like so much of history, American and other, the details can be lost over time while the idealized image remains. See, for example, Supreme Court justices basing decisions on mythical, lumped-together, founders, while the fact is that those founders were a contentious lot who disagreed about most things. History as fantasy is as rich a seam in the American lode as is violence. Adam has fixated on one such fantasy, glorifying hardship. As a result he cannot reconcile his image of the archetypal independent mountain man with the fact that Colter actually returned to civilization after six years away and settled down. Adam, like much of America, has failed to learn from the lessons of the past.
Sten’s actions in Costa Rica, justified or not, echo his, and his country’s, army experience in Viet Nam, Americans in the jungle, killing natives. Boyle is known for his satire and Sara is nothing if not an exaggeration (hopefully) of an extreme segment of the national psychosis. At least she is not out shooting people. Adam, before diving even farther off the deep end, built a wall around the place where he was living, his grandmother’s home. He does not even build a door to allow entry and exit. (Maybe he had some help from The Donald?) It is hard not to smile at this concrete manifestation of isolationism. He sees hostiles everywhere, which is merely aberrant when he is going about his business, but manifestly dangerous when his paranoia combines with automatic weapons. (Think Ditto-heads with Glocks, or stand-your-ground vigilantes in Florida)
The notion of invasion is considered. The original Colter was nothing if not an invader of Native American land. The US invaded Viet Nam, and most Meso-American countries, among other places. The American tourists in Costa Rica might be considered invaders of a sort. But the tables are turned as Mexicans are seen as invaders of American territory. A local couple run a reserve for non-native endangered species, another sort of invasion, perhaps.
The general terrain is one Boyle knows, a not-long drive from his residence in Santa Barbara. There’s plenty of crazy up in them thar hills.
One of the things that dogs Boyle’s writing it that it is tough to relate to many of his characters. The same applies here. If you are hard-core, biochemically delusional you may relate to Adam. The rest of us are mostly limited to observing him. Despite her quirks, Sara is actually an appealing character and we don’t want to see her come to harm. She is more crazy-aunt nuts than Adam’s more virulent form. She seems to have a good heart.
The satire and attempt to understand the American psyche may be major elements in Boyle’s oeuvre, and they are present here in abundance, but if the story is not engaging, it all goes for naught. Happily, Boyle does know how to engage readers and keep his story rumbling through. There is certainly some fun in the satirical elements but there is also considerable action throughout. The tale moves quickly. You will definitely not be bored.
I have no idea of the title of the book was meant to reference Jimmy Cliff beyond a bit of weed in common.
I have read only a small sample of Boyle’s body of work. Budding Prospects, When the Killing's Done, probably a short story collection, so I cannot really place this among his works for a compare and contrast. I do believe it is a better book than WTKD. I was reminded of a 2014 book that also looked at an extreme national element, Fourth of July Creek, but while their subject matter intersects, they are very different stories.
So, bottom line, an interesting tale, well told and with some perspective on larger issues. What’s not to like?
Trade Paperback released March 1, 2016
=============================EXTRA STUFF
September 21, 2015 - The Harder They Come is named to the Carnegie Awards Longlist
In a piece on Boyle in The Guardian the author talks about his relationship with the digital world.
I'm not on Twitter or Facebook. My website contains my blog going back 13 years. It requires a good deal of my attention and serves the purpose of Twitter and Facebook for me as far as connecting with and providing information to the public. I like to disconnect and experience life outside the electronic media and other machines that control and limit our lives. I like to go out into nature, whether here at home where I am a short walk from the beach and a longer one to the mountains that frame Santa Barbara, or up in the Sequoia National Forest, where I spend several months a year, beyond the reach of cable, email and the internet. What I'm talking about is unplugging and enjoying some contemplative time, sitting by a waterfall deep in the woods with a book and the sights and scents of nature. I think people are "deep reading" less these days and it concerns me. We are so distracted that we've lost the habit of being idle. How can you engage with a novel if you're plugged in constantly?Thomas John Boyle changed his middle name to “Coraghessan” when he was 17, a nod to his Irish heritage and away from the less interesting middle name he had been given at birth. He stopped using it years ago and is now TC on his books, and Tom to friends.
Here is a nice piece on Boyle from the Encyclopedia of World Biography
An interview in the Paris Review
A wiki on the Redemption Theory that Sara is so taken with
A lovely review from Michiko Kakutani of the NY Times
Lest you think Sara Hovart Jennings is a purely fictional construct, this AP report on a woman arrested for invading the Capitol on Desecration Day, January 6, 2021, suggests otherwise - Capitol riot arrest of restaurant owner rattles hometown by Michael Kunzelman - July 28, 2021
November 3, 2022
What do you do when your delusional twenty-five-year-old son - who's paranoid about 'hostiles' (Mexicans, other foreigners, and especially 'the Chinese') - becomes destructive and violent? That's the problem faced by Sten Stensen, a retired high school principal and Vietnam vet, and Sten's wife Carolee.
Sten, a 70-year-old former Marine, is no shrinking violet himself. As the book opens, Sten, Carolee, and a group of golden age vacationers are about to embark on a nature hike in Costa Rica - an activity organized by their luxury cruise ship.
The tourists are mugged by three young thugs, armed with a gun and knives, who demand their valuables. Sten gets the jump on one of miscreants, puts him in a choke hold, and kills him.....while the other two punks flee.
Sten fears repercussions from the Costa Rican authorities, but instead is praised for dispensing with a trouble-maker. Moreover, when Sten gets home to Mendocino, California, he's hailed as a hero, and pursued by print journalists and television talk show hosts.
All this hoopla irks the Stensen's son Adam - a seriously troubled, mentally ill young man.
Adam reveres John Colter, the historical 'mountain man' from the Lewis and Clark expedition who - legend has it - ran hundreds of miles, naked, to escape from the Blackfoot Indians.
John Colter
In fact Adam has renamed himself 'Colter' and tries to emulate his hero, who lived off the land and battled hostiles (Indians in Colter's case).
Adam resides in his deceased grandmother's isolated house in a woodsy area of northern California, around which he's built a wall with no opening. Adam scales the wall, parkour-fashion, to get in and out. He also has a concealed hideout nearby, and a field where he grows poppies for opium.....his main source of income. Adam shaves his head, dresses in camouflage clothing, wears a backpack containing survival gear, and carries a rifle wherever he goes.
Adam doesn't get along with his parents, who've repeatedly tried to get the disturbed youth help over the years. The young man especially resents his father, who shows up one day to knock an opening into Adam's wall, in preparation for selling the house.
A few days after the wall incident, while thumbing a ride, Adam meets Sara Jennings, a forty-year-old divorcée with troubles of her own. Sara, who works as a farrier, doesn't acknowledge the authority of the government, which she calls the "U.S. Illegitimate Government of America."
To show her independence, in accordance with the 14th amendment (as she interprets it), Sara refuses to wear a seat belt, and - when she's pulled over by a police officer - won't present her licence, registration, and insurance.....as required by California law.
As a result, Sara is arrested, her car is impounded, and her beloved dog - who nipped the cop - is quarantined.....since (of course) the canine had no rabies shot. By the time Sara retrieves her vehicle and picks up a hitchhiking Adam, she's desperate to get her dog back.....and the two stage a rescue (illegal dognapping).
Afterwards, hiding from the police with her pooch, Sara temporarily moves in with Adam. The farrier becomes a mother figure/lover to the young man, who she finds irresistibly sexy. Adam is peculiar from the get-go, disappearing from morning til evening, then coming home for beer, food and sex. Later, when Sara invites her best friend for dinner, Adam sits at the table naked.
Eventually, Adam's behavior becomes completely unhinged, he commits serious crimes, and goes on the run.
Adam and Sara are a complementary pair in their disdain for authority. Nonetheless, Sara is sane, and - despite believing she can flout the law - fears the consequences of abetting a wanted felon.
Adam's parents are very concerned about their son's downward spiral, and Sten quietly considers cutting his son loose, since Adam won't cooperate with any form of treatment. When the police ask Sten to help capture the boy, though, he's torn.
To round out the action, Mexican gangbangers are using the Mendocino National Forest for a marijuana growing operation, and they're cutting down trees and poisoning wildlife to accomodate their needs.
Local citizens are furious, and Sten gets pulled into a vigilante scheme to stop the lowlifes, which adds danger and excitement to the novel.
The book is essentially a character study of Sten, Adam, and Sara, with Carolee in a supporting role. The writing is excellent, the landscape and environment are vivdly brought to life, and the characters are interesting and three-dimensional.
Sara is an especially intriguing character. Though the farrier's extreme 'libertarian' views are self-defeating - since there's red tape and a hefty fee to get her car out of impound, and the dog being 'in prison' leaves her overwhelmingly anxious - Sara sticks to her guns. You gotta admire that!
And Sara's weird opinions are interesting and a bit funny. I wonder if REAL people who reject taxes, government, vaccinations, and so on realize they would have no infrastructure, no roads, no emergency services, rampant disease, and so on. In short, chaos!
Carolee is also an amusing character (at times), as she mini-stalks Adam in an effort to find out what's going on with her son and Sara....the nefarious 'older woman.'
Though the book addresses serious subjects - dysfunctional individuals, drugs, violence, etc. - the story is lightened by a thread of humor that runs through the narrative. This is a good book that sheds light on important issues. I highly recommend it to fans of literary novels.
You can follow my reviews at https://reviewsbybarbsaffer.blogspot....
May 17, 2020
I only give 5 stars to books that either really touch me or really impress me. Of course, the book must also be well written. There is no doubt that TC Boyle is a master storyteller, comparable to Cormac McCarthey, in telling a tale that takes your breath away. This book definitely falls into the impressive category for me because it allowed me to look into the minds of individuals one is lucky enough not to be exposed to if one can help it. You hear about them and the shoot-outs involving them and you always wonder how they became what they are. Were they insane to begin with or did they become gradually such outrageous people who in the process adopted ideas that struck their violent fancy. I am talking about the likes of Timothy McVeigh or the Norwegian Anders Breivik and quite recently those people who had a shoot-out with the police in the woods of Oregon. There are supposedly quite a few of these people living in these forests. People who violently reject any state involvement. People who love their guns and who choose to see only phantom human specimens outside their trusted group. You know how delusional they are when they feel justified to shoot anyone who they perceive to be an enemy and that is about anyone to come near their proclaimed free empire in the woods.
There are no likeable persons in the book. The protagonist, Adam, is clearly raving mad. His occasional girlfriend, the much older Sara, is delusional in her perceptions about state involvement in her life. Her acts of rebellion are of the milder sort, such as refusing to drive with a seatbelt, having no car insurance and rejecting a whole range of perceived state intrusions into her personal life for which she was stupid enough to provoke attention to herself. She tries to ignore Adam's clearly insane actions and will not allow herself to realize that she is dealing with an extremely dangerous person. She even tells the cops who raid her house in search of him that she does not believe that he ever hurts anybody but, even if he did, whoever it was probably had it coming. Sara is the only person who ever defends Adam and the only person you feel halfway sorry for. But only halfway, because she is a very annoying woman.
So, I was impressed by this book and would recommend it to people who like a peek into this very strange sub-culture that you do not come across in a book very often. The book reminded me a bit of 'The Fourth of July Creek' but, then again, that book was revolving around quite a different mindset.
There are no likeable persons in the book. The protagonist, Adam, is clearly raving mad. His occasional girlfriend, the much older Sara, is delusional in her perceptions about state involvement in her life. Her acts of rebellion are of the milder sort, such as refusing to drive with a seatbelt, having no car insurance and rejecting a whole range of perceived state intrusions into her personal life for which she was stupid enough to provoke attention to herself. She tries to ignore Adam's clearly insane actions and will not allow herself to realize that she is dealing with an extremely dangerous person. She even tells the cops who raid her house in search of him that she does not believe that he ever hurts anybody but, even if he did, whoever it was probably had it coming. Sara is the only person who ever defends Adam and the only person you feel halfway sorry for. But only halfway, because she is a very annoying woman.
So, I was impressed by this book and would recommend it to people who like a peek into this very strange sub-culture that you do not come across in a book very often. The book reminded me a bit of 'The Fourth of July Creek' but, then again, that book was revolving around quite a different mindset.
April 1, 2015
Every punch and thrust and gasp in the opening of T.C. Boyle’s new novel demonstrates why he’s one of the greatest storytellers in the country. Despite his prestigious awards and his university job, he still writes like a man with no presumptions on our attention. He fights for it.
“The Harder They Come” begins with a tourist bus slamming through the Costa Rican jungle. The heat, the rising irritation, the scent of danger — everything signals we’re in Boyle country. Seventy-year-old Sten Stensen is on vacation with his wife. He’s an ex-Marine, a former high school principal, one of those hard, active men who submit to retirement like a muzzled pit bull. Just as he and the other tourists limp out of the bus to start a nature walk, three men jump at them holding knives and a gun. Suddenly, Sten’s age doesn’t matter; his headache evaporates. “What he’d learned as a nineteen-year-old himself, a recruit, green as an apple, wasn’t about self-defense, it was about killing,” Boyle writes in a voice spiked with Sten’s adrenaline. “That was what he’d been trained to do and he had no choice in the matter. It was beyond reason now, autonomous, dial it up, semper fi.”
This explosive opening burns for almost 60 pages as Sten gets caught in the conflicting currents of local politics and hometown fame. His actions in the jungle are clearly in justified self-defense, but did he go too far? Does he allow himself to be used by a corrupt police force? Those deadly questions are written in blood — and then, it seems, abandoned. This first section is merely prologue for a different story.
The novel proper takes us back to California and introduces us to Sten’s son, Adam. After a stormy, narcotic adolescence, in and out of trouble and therapy, Adam now lives in the woods, marginally in control of his delusional paranoia. A violent racist, convinced that aliens are taking over the United States, he grows poppies (not for their lovely flowers) and trains to defend himself against hostiles. “They’re everywhere,” he knows. His one abiding interest is the real-life mountain man John Colter, who worked for Lewis and Clark. Although eclipsed by the discoveries of those more famous explorers, Colter’s adventures in the early 19th century sound like a cross between those of Paul Bunyan and Indiana Jones. In fact, some of this novel’s most wonderfully outlandish episodes are the tales boiling in Adam’s brain about Colter defending himself from Indian assault.
Boyle clearly likes to write about Adam, camped out on the wacky right edge of the nation’s political spectrum. We spend a lot of time in his febrile mind, frantically rehearsing for attack, cataloguing his simple insights, rubbing old slights and offenses together for heat. Sten regards Adam with bitter disappointment, but the son is clearly a fractured version of his heroic father. Both men are fueled by rage; Sten just managed to channel that energy toward forms of killing that society celebrates, while Adam spins out of control like a bent lawn-mower blade.
Between these two alienated men, Boyle places a woman named Sara, who makes a living shoeing hoofed farm animals, some of which may be more sophisticated than she is. As an amateur anarchist, she rejects the U.S. Illegitimate Government of America the Corporate and regards herself as “a sovereign citizen” who refuses to “acknowledge anybody’s illegitimate authority over her.” She is, in some ways, a stock Boyle character: the strident woman inflamed with ideology. Stopped by a police officer for not wearing a seat belt, she attempts to bore him to death by chanting, “I have no contract with you.” To her apparent surprise, this is not an effective defense, which initiates a cascade of legal complications.
How simple Sara managed to reach the age of 40 with so little common sense is one of several mysteries that Boyle leaves unexplored. What matters in these pages is that she’s the perfect lover/mother for Adam, the cast-iron mountain man whose rejection of modern life is even more radical than her own. Does it trouble her that Adam wants her to call him Colter? That he lives in a woodland house completely surrounded by a high, solid wall? Alas, the sight of him with his shirt off renders those concerns irrelevant. Divorced and horny, she pretends — for far too long — that this anti-government fanatic has relationship potential, and they carry on like actors in a tea party porno.
“The Harder They Come” is never dull, but the body of the novel never reaches the peak of its prologue and feels somehow depth-resistant, which is an odd failing given its potential. Although the influx of Mexicans raises tensions in Sten’s white town, that theme — so effectively dramatized in Boyle’s classic “The Tortilla Curtain” — remains stunted in this story. And for the first time, Boyle’s dialogue — usually inflected with the timbre of real anger — sounds TV-corny. One police officer questioning Sara actually says, “You getting smart with me? Because if you want to get smart, we can continue this down at the station.” That’s fine if he’s about to rip off his uniform at a bachelorette party, but in the midst of a statewide manhunt, clichés like that are a mood killer.
What’s more troubling, the novel’s political fiber feels thin. Sara’s slogans sound merely silly, like a high-school affectation instead of the watered-down liquor of real anarchism. Adam’s paranoia, meanwhile, is the product of mental illness, the roots of which remain obscure, despite how many chapters we spend rattling around in his potted brain. The radiation of anti-government sentiments in American culture was portrayed more effectively and far more movingly last year in Smith Henderson’s “Fourth of July Creek.”
Boyle knows exactly how to tell an exciting story. But he usually knows how to do more than that, too.
This review first appeared in The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
“The Harder They Come” begins with a tourist bus slamming through the Costa Rican jungle. The heat, the rising irritation, the scent of danger — everything signals we’re in Boyle country. Seventy-year-old Sten Stensen is on vacation with his wife. He’s an ex-Marine, a former high school principal, one of those hard, active men who submit to retirement like a muzzled pit bull. Just as he and the other tourists limp out of the bus to start a nature walk, three men jump at them holding knives and a gun. Suddenly, Sten’s age doesn’t matter; his headache evaporates. “What he’d learned as a nineteen-year-old himself, a recruit, green as an apple, wasn’t about self-defense, it was about killing,” Boyle writes in a voice spiked with Sten’s adrenaline. “That was what he’d been trained to do and he had no choice in the matter. It was beyond reason now, autonomous, dial it up, semper fi.”
This explosive opening burns for almost 60 pages as Sten gets caught in the conflicting currents of local politics and hometown fame. His actions in the jungle are clearly in justified self-defense, but did he go too far? Does he allow himself to be used by a corrupt police force? Those deadly questions are written in blood — and then, it seems, abandoned. This first section is merely prologue for a different story.
The novel proper takes us back to California and introduces us to Sten’s son, Adam. After a stormy, narcotic adolescence, in and out of trouble and therapy, Adam now lives in the woods, marginally in control of his delusional paranoia. A violent racist, convinced that aliens are taking over the United States, he grows poppies (not for their lovely flowers) and trains to defend himself against hostiles. “They’re everywhere,” he knows. His one abiding interest is the real-life mountain man John Colter, who worked for Lewis and Clark. Although eclipsed by the discoveries of those more famous explorers, Colter’s adventures in the early 19th century sound like a cross between those of Paul Bunyan and Indiana Jones. In fact, some of this novel’s most wonderfully outlandish episodes are the tales boiling in Adam’s brain about Colter defending himself from Indian assault.
Boyle clearly likes to write about Adam, camped out on the wacky right edge of the nation’s political spectrum. We spend a lot of time in his febrile mind, frantically rehearsing for attack, cataloguing his simple insights, rubbing old slights and offenses together for heat. Sten regards Adam with bitter disappointment, but the son is clearly a fractured version of his heroic father. Both men are fueled by rage; Sten just managed to channel that energy toward forms of killing that society celebrates, while Adam spins out of control like a bent lawn-mower blade.
Between these two alienated men, Boyle places a woman named Sara, who makes a living shoeing hoofed farm animals, some of which may be more sophisticated than she is. As an amateur anarchist, she rejects the U.S. Illegitimate Government of America the Corporate and regards herself as “a sovereign citizen” who refuses to “acknowledge anybody’s illegitimate authority over her.” She is, in some ways, a stock Boyle character: the strident woman inflamed with ideology. Stopped by a police officer for not wearing a seat belt, she attempts to bore him to death by chanting, “I have no contract with you.” To her apparent surprise, this is not an effective defense, which initiates a cascade of legal complications.
How simple Sara managed to reach the age of 40 with so little common sense is one of several mysteries that Boyle leaves unexplored. What matters in these pages is that she’s the perfect lover/mother for Adam, the cast-iron mountain man whose rejection of modern life is even more radical than her own. Does it trouble her that Adam wants her to call him Colter? That he lives in a woodland house completely surrounded by a high, solid wall? Alas, the sight of him with his shirt off renders those concerns irrelevant. Divorced and horny, she pretends — for far too long — that this anti-government fanatic has relationship potential, and they carry on like actors in a tea party porno.
“The Harder They Come” is never dull, but the body of the novel never reaches the peak of its prologue and feels somehow depth-resistant, which is an odd failing given its potential. Although the influx of Mexicans raises tensions in Sten’s white town, that theme — so effectively dramatized in Boyle’s classic “The Tortilla Curtain” — remains stunted in this story. And for the first time, Boyle’s dialogue — usually inflected with the timbre of real anger — sounds TV-corny. One police officer questioning Sara actually says, “You getting smart with me? Because if you want to get smart, we can continue this down at the station.” That’s fine if he’s about to rip off his uniform at a bachelorette party, but in the midst of a statewide manhunt, clichés like that are a mood killer.
What’s more troubling, the novel’s political fiber feels thin. Sara’s slogans sound merely silly, like a high-school affectation instead of the watered-down liquor of real anarchism. Adam’s paranoia, meanwhile, is the product of mental illness, the roots of which remain obscure, despite how many chapters we spend rattling around in his potted brain. The radiation of anti-government sentiments in American culture was portrayed more effectively and far more movingly last year in Smith Henderson’s “Fourth of July Creek.”
Boyle knows exactly how to tell an exciting story. But he usually knows how to do more than that, too.
This review first appeared in The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
June 24, 2016
2.5 stars
Well, thiscould should have been a tour de force for TC Boyle. Most of his books (excluding his terrific short story collections) seem to be either slightly off-kilter historical fictions, or contemporary stories used by Boyle as an avenue to expand upon a hot-button sociopolitcal theme. None potentially hotter than The Harder They Come, in which Boyle endeavors to tackle the subjects of crime and violence (or Americans' perceived threat of same), only to have his message drowned in a sea of inanity.
The first few chapters were pretty great, and really set up the potential angst to follow. Protag Sten Stenman, a 70 year-old retired high school principal and Vietnam Vet, is on a pleasure cruise with his wife. Some of the passengers disembark in Costa Rica for a rain forest excursion, and are accosted by three bandits, summarily dispatched by the old man who kills one them with his bare hands. Fast forward a bit after the cruise, the Stenmans back at home in the heart of the redwood forests of Northern California, where (reminiscent of the xenophobia tackled in Boyle's two-decade prior The Tortilla Curtain) a fomenting foofaraw is boiling over, with a contingent of citizens upset that bands of Mexicans are overrunning their paradise in the redwoods, bringing their drug trade north of the border. At the same time, the Stenmans' 25 year-old son, Adam, is showing signs of losing his marbles, increasingly becoming antisocial and defiant, and hanging with a Tea Party-ish anti-Government woman named Sara who has some serious issues of her own.
You can probably intuit where the story's going from there, and that's where much of the problem lies. Boyle (who wrote this, I'm guessing, months before Donald "Let's Seal the Borders!" Trump declared his presidential candidacy) had a golden opportunity to eviscerate the backward right. He does, sorta, but doesn't go far enough. Instead, he focuses on his characters, which are (as is typical for Boyle) cartoon buffoons (particularly Stenman's son and his girfriend.) Going into any more detail will spoil things, but these characters (most all of them, really) don't really act like real human beings. They are amalgams of Boyle's design to move the story along, but their not-in-this-world-hell-no qualities serve to ultimately implode any meaningful message Boyle had to impart. With each passing page, this novel morphed from TC Boyle's most promising output to his most ridiculous.
Well, this
The first few chapters were pretty great, and really set up the potential angst to follow. Protag Sten Stenman, a 70 year-old retired high school principal and Vietnam Vet, is on a pleasure cruise with his wife. Some of the passengers disembark in Costa Rica for a rain forest excursion, and are accosted by three bandits, summarily dispatched by the old man who kills one them with his bare hands. Fast forward a bit after the cruise, the Stenmans back at home in the heart of the redwood forests of Northern California, where (reminiscent of the xenophobia tackled in Boyle's two-decade prior The Tortilla Curtain) a fomenting foofaraw is boiling over, with a contingent of citizens upset that bands of Mexicans are overrunning their paradise in the redwoods, bringing their drug trade north of the border. At the same time, the Stenmans' 25 year-old son, Adam, is showing signs of losing his marbles, increasingly becoming antisocial and defiant, and hanging with a Tea Party-ish anti-Government woman named Sara who has some serious issues of her own.
You can probably intuit where the story's going from there, and that's where much of the problem lies. Boyle (who wrote this, I'm guessing, months before Donald "Let's Seal the Borders!" Trump declared his presidential candidacy) had a golden opportunity to eviscerate the backward right. He does, sorta, but doesn't go far enough. Instead, he focuses on his characters, which are (as is typical for Boyle) cartoon buffoons (particularly Stenman's son and his girfriend.) Going into any more detail will spoil things, but these characters (most all of them, really) don't really act like real human beings. They are amalgams of Boyle's design to move the story along, but their not-in-this-world-hell-no qualities serve to ultimately implode any meaningful message Boyle had to impart. With each passing page, this novel morphed from TC Boyle's most promising output to his most ridiculous.
April 27, 2015
I had the opportunity to hear T. C. Boyle read and speak about this new novel in Seattle last week. I love to go to these events and then read the book immediately with the author's insight to his writing and his way of reading the characters' voices fresh in my mind. I have long been a fan of Boyle's work and this one is among the best. His writing is always good. It is clear and easy to follow, but sophisticated storytelling that goes to the depth of the issues, characters and themes. Boyle told us that he explores the line between freedom and anarchy inspired by a true story of a schizophrenic young man in California in this book. He writes about things that catch his interest and attention, and in this case, his interest was the solo shooter and what leads a person to that act of violence. I found it to be a novel with insight leaving the readers free to determine their own opinions about how we might address the issues of mental illness and the politics behind anarchist beliefs as a society. Great writing and an intriguing plot equals five stars for me!
December 24, 2020
I have not enjoyed Boyle's more recent books, but by and large I'm inclined to view this as nothing more than a matter of taste. "Harder," though, really grabbed me. The main characters had depth. We get hints about their back-stories (Don't worry, these are not spoilers): father Sten was in Vietnam, but we don't know what he experienced there; Sarah doesn't view the US government as having any legitimacy, but we don't know what brought her to this, etc., but in the end we have to simply accept them as they are, flaws and all. The language is muscular, bringing the land to vivid life. The story is a compelling one. It raises very interesting, complex questions about violence, anger, the bonds that tie us together -- or break us -- and the slippery nature of masculinity and heroism.
November 23, 2015
The Harder They Come revolves around three characters: Sten, a 70 year-old retired school principal and Vietnam vet; his mentally unbalanced son, Adam, 25 years old; and 40 year old paranoid libertarian Sara. Set in present-day Fort Bragg, California, the novel sees Adam’s mind slowly unravelling as he becomes more and more obsessed with historical figure John Colter, a scout on the Lewis and Clark expedition. Adam’s untreated schizophrenia, exacerbated by liquor and hard drugs, can only end one way once he grabs his gun and heads into the woods.
I’m going to avoid spoilers because it’ll be a more powerful read if you go into it blind. The Harder They come is a brilliant novel. Like many of TC Boyle’s books, this one explores a number of issues, though violent American culture is at the forefront. Not just the United States’ gun culture (and yes he is rightfully critical of it), but the legacy of violence that reaches back to the early days of the Republic.
The Colter flashbacks to the beginning of the 19th century remind us that Americans were once the underdogs and the Native Americans were dominant – a fact that would swiftly change as the century wore on. Sten is a veteran of Vietnam, a theatre of war that was an extension of American Imperialism from the last century, and Sara is extremely belligerent towards local and federal authority for, as she sees it, limiting her freedoms as a citizen. Adam, the youngest character in the cast, embodies all of those characters as a terrifying avatar of confused, but very real, carnage – a modern day wannabe mountain man waging his forest warfare on the government.
For a relatively limited cast, Boyle covers an enormous number of subjects, weaving them into his narrative effortlessly: Mexican drug manufacturers destroying rural California, contemporary mental issues and their treatment (as well as lack of), gun control, extreme right wing politics, as well as more broad, traditional subjects like the differences between generations, fathers and sons, and the complexities of love.
The chapters alternate between Sten, Sara and Adam, and the only part of the book I didn’t totally enjoy were some of Adam’s chapters once he loses it. Boyle writes these adopting the viewpoint of a paranoid schizophrenic off of his prescribed medicine and self-medicating with numerous illegal drugs (cocaine, meth, opium). These chapters are appropriately rambling, circuitous, and diverge at peculiar tangents, as this is supposedly Adam’s disordered mind, but it still made for some uninteresting passages. That and the ending – Boyle going on for just a few more pages than he should have.
Otherwise, Boyle’s writing, characterisations, set pieces? Superb. Boyle always produces outstanding prose and his storytelling is rich and gripping. Each character is their own person with their own voice and world and the plot unfolds beautifully and tragically. It’s a fantastic story – a real literary thriller - from a modern master. The Harder They come is another excellent addition to this tremendously gifted writer’s remarkable oeuvre.
(The novel is inspired by the 2011 case of Aaron Bassler however if you’re planning on reading this book, I would recommend not looking up his details until afterwards as Boyle parallels Bassler’s last few weeks with Adam’s very closely. For that matter, if you don’t know much about John Colter, I wouldn’t look him up until after either – the Colter passages will be much more exciting as a result.)
I’m going to avoid spoilers because it’ll be a more powerful read if you go into it blind. The Harder They come is a brilliant novel. Like many of TC Boyle’s books, this one explores a number of issues, though violent American culture is at the forefront. Not just the United States’ gun culture (and yes he is rightfully critical of it), but the legacy of violence that reaches back to the early days of the Republic.
The Colter flashbacks to the beginning of the 19th century remind us that Americans were once the underdogs and the Native Americans were dominant – a fact that would swiftly change as the century wore on. Sten is a veteran of Vietnam, a theatre of war that was an extension of American Imperialism from the last century, and Sara is extremely belligerent towards local and federal authority for, as she sees it, limiting her freedoms as a citizen. Adam, the youngest character in the cast, embodies all of those characters as a terrifying avatar of confused, but very real, carnage – a modern day wannabe mountain man waging his forest warfare on the government.
For a relatively limited cast, Boyle covers an enormous number of subjects, weaving them into his narrative effortlessly: Mexican drug manufacturers destroying rural California, contemporary mental issues and their treatment (as well as lack of), gun control, extreme right wing politics, as well as more broad, traditional subjects like the differences between generations, fathers and sons, and the complexities of love.
The chapters alternate between Sten, Sara and Adam, and the only part of the book I didn’t totally enjoy were some of Adam’s chapters once he loses it. Boyle writes these adopting the viewpoint of a paranoid schizophrenic off of his prescribed medicine and self-medicating with numerous illegal drugs (cocaine, meth, opium). These chapters are appropriately rambling, circuitous, and diverge at peculiar tangents, as this is supposedly Adam’s disordered mind, but it still made for some uninteresting passages. That and the ending – Boyle going on for just a few more pages than he should have.
Otherwise, Boyle’s writing, characterisations, set pieces? Superb. Boyle always produces outstanding prose and his storytelling is rich and gripping. Each character is their own person with their own voice and world and the plot unfolds beautifully and tragically. It’s a fantastic story – a real literary thriller - from a modern master. The Harder They come is another excellent addition to this tremendously gifted writer’s remarkable oeuvre.
(The novel is inspired by the 2011 case of Aaron Bassler however if you’re planning on reading this book, I would recommend not looking up his details until afterwards as Boyle parallels Bassler’s last few weeks with Adam’s very closely. For that matter, if you don’t know much about John Colter, I wouldn’t look him up until after either – the Colter passages will be much more exciting as a result.)
June 5, 2015
“The Harder They Come” is an intense novel. The subject matter is intense and T.C. Boyle allows all the ugliness of the human condition to prevail, without any comic relief. I’ve never read any novels by Boyle, and I’ll put him on my radar for other novels.
It’s told from three protagonist: Sten, who is a retired Principal and ex-Marine; his mentally ill son, Adam; and Sara, a woman in her late thirties who doesn’t take to authority figures “But she wasn’t a citizen of the USIGA (United States Illegitimate Government of America), she was a sovereign citizen, a US national, born and raised, and she didn’t now and never would again acknowledge anybody’s illegitimate authority over her…so no, she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt. And she didn’t have legal plates”. Sten is the sanest of the trio; all he wants to do is retire in peace with his wife Carolee.
Unfortunately for Sten, Adam is quickly deteriorating from sanity. The chapters from Adam’s point of view are difficult to follow, because Adam is nuts, although not diagnosed in the novel, most likely schizophrenic. He thinks he’s John Colter, the mountain man who helped Lewis and Clark. He’s delusional and sees everyone as aliens.
Sara and Adam lives collide and form a very unhealthy bond. Sara unwittingly harbors Adam, and allows his odd behavior.
Although Adam is over 18, and Sten and Carolee can do nothing to help him with his mental illness, the community blames them for the actions of Adam. The novel is an interesting study of community judgment, mental health problems, and the survivalists who want nothing to do with Governmental laws. It’s a brutally honest novel with no frivolity. It’s authentic and realistic fiction of the human condition.
It’s told from three protagonist: Sten, who is a retired Principal and ex-Marine; his mentally ill son, Adam; and Sara, a woman in her late thirties who doesn’t take to authority figures “But she wasn’t a citizen of the USIGA (United States Illegitimate Government of America), she was a sovereign citizen, a US national, born and raised, and she didn’t now and never would again acknowledge anybody’s illegitimate authority over her…so no, she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt. And she didn’t have legal plates”. Sten is the sanest of the trio; all he wants to do is retire in peace with his wife Carolee.
Unfortunately for Sten, Adam is quickly deteriorating from sanity. The chapters from Adam’s point of view are difficult to follow, because Adam is nuts, although not diagnosed in the novel, most likely schizophrenic. He thinks he’s John Colter, the mountain man who helped Lewis and Clark. He’s delusional and sees everyone as aliens.
Sara and Adam lives collide and form a very unhealthy bond. Sara unwittingly harbors Adam, and allows his odd behavior.
Although Adam is over 18, and Sten and Carolee can do nothing to help him with his mental illness, the community blames them for the actions of Adam. The novel is an interesting study of community judgment, mental health problems, and the survivalists who want nothing to do with Governmental laws. It’s a brutally honest novel with no frivolity. It’s authentic and realistic fiction of the human condition.
February 21, 2022
The Psychosis
A Boyle Masterpiece!
Boyle captures the setting of his story well. Some years ago, when our kids were young, we frequently ventured from the Bay Area up to the north coast----Mendocino, Willits, Fort Bragg. We took our young son on a ride on the Skunk Train, with open cars, that traveled through the Redwoods, along Pudding Creek. Lovely.
But for locals, the influx of visitors in the warmer months, while good for the economy, can seem ludicrous….
“The Coast Highway is the town’s main thoroughfare and lively with traffic this time of year, what with all the tourists either coming or going, even in the morning, especially in the morning, because tourists liked to get right up, gulp down their coffee, eggs over easy, three strips of bacon and hash browns and hit the road to invade the next charmingly decrepit coastal town before everybody else got there.”
I first read Boyle in the 80’s and loved his dark humor. But in this book he brilliantly shows what a strong grip he has on American psychosis. It’s always been there, as much as we may have wanted to pretend it wasn’t and tried to shield ourselves. Now it’s become more obvious because people who never bothered to vote came out of their hiding places in 2016 and did just that for someone just like themselves.
These are not just people living in survival bunkers in the Idaho Panhandle or out in the woods somewhere. There are many of these in the U.S. It could be the Facebook engineer who lives in your neighborhood, or the clerk at the grocery store, or the person who sells you postage stamps, or the “friend” at the gym who has not let on what he believes yet. And it’s certainly those who show up at state capitols in camo, bearing arms, to “protest,” who the police are reluctant to arrest, in part because some of them sympathize with them.
But what really got under my skin in this book is that two of the main characters, Adam and Sara, are a lot like my brother and sister. They have become part of The Psychosis. It’s scary. How did this happen? Didn’t every American have the opportunity to get rich, lead a life of leisure? What American Dream? They got the shitty end of the capitalist stick and have been left out. But they have been conned into blaming others who have nothing to do with it.
Boyle is a genius at getting inside the heads of these characters, their paranoia, their tendency to run the same grievances, real or imaginary, over and over in their heads. Their sense that they have no accountability to anyone but themselves; that they should be able to do whatever they want. That it’s all about them and their “freedom.”
Typical of Sara’s thinking…
“They had no right in any of this except the right of might, the right of their fraudulent and blatantly unconstitutional laws and their storm troopers in the shiny taxpayer-bought cars. And the judges and the courts and the DMV and all the rest of the parasitic bureaucracy they’d imposed on the American public. It was a house of cards just waiting for somebody to blow it all away. The leeches. The bloodsuckers…There was no way she was going to bow down to them because that would just make
her a slave like everybody else.”
As for Adam, some might imagine they’re Steve Jobs, he imagines he’s John Colter, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, who moved on and became what many historians consider the first real mountain man. Every day, Adam heads into the woods, armed with a knife and rifle, ready to take on any Blackfoot Indians that might cross his path.
Some of these folks might think that they are part of something bigger, something important but, in fact, like Sara and Adam, they’re isolated, alone. Many are seeking connection through bizarre Internet conspiracy sites that are part of and creators of The Psychosis. (All hail QAnon!)
And you find, as the parents in the book, Sten and Carolee, have found out, over and over, is that these folks, not even your own son, can be helped, rescued, because they are part of The Psychosis and want you to be part of it, too, or get lost. And as much as you have wanted to help, it has never worked. And the leader of The Psychosis can’t save them. In fact, he doesn’t even care.
video evidence of The Psychosis....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/...
This is what experts call a "superspreader event" For example, in the UK and Germany earlier this year, when they did not fully realize what Covid was, they were still allowing large crowds for soccer matches and horse races. The virus spread like wildfire, so they shut things down. Now we have all these people in the U.S. who consider the shutdown over and are going back to crowded events.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/sp...
===========
More on QAnon....
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
===========
A Boyle Masterpiece!
Boyle captures the setting of his story well. Some years ago, when our kids were young, we frequently ventured from the Bay Area up to the north coast----Mendocino, Willits, Fort Bragg. We took our young son on a ride on the Skunk Train, with open cars, that traveled through the Redwoods, along Pudding Creek. Lovely.
But for locals, the influx of visitors in the warmer months, while good for the economy, can seem ludicrous….
“The Coast Highway is the town’s main thoroughfare and lively with traffic this time of year, what with all the tourists either coming or going, even in the morning, especially in the morning, because tourists liked to get right up, gulp down their coffee, eggs over easy, three strips of bacon and hash browns and hit the road to invade the next charmingly decrepit coastal town before everybody else got there.”
I first read Boyle in the 80’s and loved his dark humor. But in this book he brilliantly shows what a strong grip he has on American psychosis. It’s always been there, as much as we may have wanted to pretend it wasn’t and tried to shield ourselves. Now it’s become more obvious because people who never bothered to vote came out of their hiding places in 2016 and did just that for someone just like themselves.
These are not just people living in survival bunkers in the Idaho Panhandle or out in the woods somewhere. There are many of these in the U.S. It could be the Facebook engineer who lives in your neighborhood, or the clerk at the grocery store, or the person who sells you postage stamps, or the “friend” at the gym who has not let on what he believes yet. And it’s certainly those who show up at state capitols in camo, bearing arms, to “protest,” who the police are reluctant to arrest, in part because some of them sympathize with them.
But what really got under my skin in this book is that two of the main characters, Adam and Sara, are a lot like my brother and sister. They have become part of The Psychosis. It’s scary. How did this happen? Didn’t every American have the opportunity to get rich, lead a life of leisure? What American Dream? They got the shitty end of the capitalist stick and have been left out. But they have been conned into blaming others who have nothing to do with it.
Boyle is a genius at getting inside the heads of these characters, their paranoia, their tendency to run the same grievances, real or imaginary, over and over in their heads. Their sense that they have no accountability to anyone but themselves; that they should be able to do whatever they want. That it’s all about them and their “freedom.”
Typical of Sara’s thinking…
“They had no right in any of this except the right of might, the right of their fraudulent and blatantly unconstitutional laws and their storm troopers in the shiny taxpayer-bought cars. And the judges and the courts and the DMV and all the rest of the parasitic bureaucracy they’d imposed on the American public. It was a house of cards just waiting for somebody to blow it all away. The leeches. The bloodsuckers…There was no way she was going to bow down to them because that would just make
her a slave like everybody else.”
As for Adam, some might imagine they’re Steve Jobs, he imagines he’s John Colter, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, who moved on and became what many historians consider the first real mountain man. Every day, Adam heads into the woods, armed with a knife and rifle, ready to take on any Blackfoot Indians that might cross his path.
Some of these folks might think that they are part of something bigger, something important but, in fact, like Sara and Adam, they’re isolated, alone. Many are seeking connection through bizarre Internet conspiracy sites that are part of and creators of The Psychosis. (All hail QAnon!)
And you find, as the parents in the book, Sten and Carolee, have found out, over and over, is that these folks, not even your own son, can be helped, rescued, because they are part of The Psychosis and want you to be part of it, too, or get lost. And as much as you have wanted to help, it has never worked. And the leader of The Psychosis can’t save them. In fact, he doesn’t even care.
video evidence of The Psychosis....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/...
This is what experts call a "superspreader event" For example, in the UK and Germany earlier this year, when they did not fully realize what Covid was, they were still allowing large crowds for soccer matches and horse races. The virus spread like wildfire, so they shut things down. Now we have all these people in the U.S. who consider the shutdown over and are going back to crowded events.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/sp...
===========
More on QAnon....
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
===========
April 8, 2015
I liked it but...
...but I have burned my memory thoroughly looking for characters as distasteful and contemptuous as this lot. Stem and Carolee? What a couple of annoying cliches. Adam, okay, see of him I get (as a career high school teacher, I've known several Adams although none ever ended up like this), so I enjoyed him the.most.
Now for the worst ass I've read about in years: Sara! What an absolute idiot. What a cliche she became. Knowing Adam was bad made her hot? If she gave him a hot meal, maybe she could tame him? Leapin' lizards, what YEAR is this? I wanted to reach through the pages and shake her really hard.
I have no contract with Sara.
...but I have burned my memory thoroughly looking for characters as distasteful and contemptuous as this lot. Stem and Carolee? What a couple of annoying cliches. Adam, okay, see of him I get (as a career high school teacher, I've known several Adams although none ever ended up like this), so I enjoyed him the.most.
Now for the worst ass I've read about in years: Sara! What an absolute idiot. What a cliche she became. Knowing Adam was bad made her hot? If she gave him a hot meal, maybe she could tame him? Leapin' lizards, what YEAR is this? I wanted to reach through the pages and shake her really hard.
I have no contract with Sara.
March 22, 2017
Hart auf Hart war mein erstes Buch von T. C. Boyle. Schon ab dem ersten Kapitel war ich mitten in der Geschichte und konnte kaum aufhören zu lesen. Es ist sehr flüssig geschrieben und toll zu lesen. Ich freue mich auf meinen nächsten Boyle.
June 20, 2016
A Worthy Examination of the Ironies in Americans' Reactions 2 Violence
The novel centers on a massive manhunt deep in the California woods sometime after 2001 for a young man who has committed 2 inexplicable murders.
The father is a 70ish retired high school principal, who's just returned home from a cruise during which he choked to death a 20-year-old gangbanger trying to rob at gunpoint a group of his fellow senior citizens on a junket into the Costa Rican mountains.
His son Adam is a mid-20s schizophrenic who at most times believes himself to be John Colter, an early 1800s mountain man who was part of the Lewis & Clark expedition, and under attack from tribes of Blackfoot and Crow Indians. In Adam's semi-lucid intervals, he meets and has carnal connections with a 42-year-old former teacher's aide (at the local high school), a right-wing nutter herself.
This is a good book, most effective in revealing contradictions and ironies in Americans' reactions to violence (primarily the juxtaposition between the father's killing, arguably justified but no doubt an excessive reaction under the circumstances, versus the son's murders, committed while unquestionably insane).
The book left me with an empty feeling, so I cannot necessarily recommend it unless you have a special interest in the subject matter or you're a right-wing fanatic who'd like to add some fuel to your fire.
The novel centers on a massive manhunt deep in the California woods sometime after 2001 for a young man who has committed 2 inexplicable murders.
The father is a 70ish retired high school principal, who's just returned home from a cruise during which he choked to death a 20-year-old gangbanger trying to rob at gunpoint a group of his fellow senior citizens on a junket into the Costa Rican mountains.
His son Adam is a mid-20s schizophrenic who at most times believes himself to be John Colter, an early 1800s mountain man who was part of the Lewis & Clark expedition, and under attack from tribes of Blackfoot and Crow Indians. In Adam's semi-lucid intervals, he meets and has carnal connections with a 42-year-old former teacher's aide (at the local high school), a right-wing nutter herself.
This is a good book, most effective in revealing contradictions and ironies in Americans' reactions to violence (primarily the juxtaposition between the father's killing, arguably justified but no doubt an excessive reaction under the circumstances, versus the son's murders, committed while unquestionably insane).
The book left me with an empty feeling, so I cannot necessarily recommend it unless you have a special interest in the subject matter or you're a right-wing fanatic who'd like to add some fuel to your fire.
June 25, 2016
no.
the story is nicely paced and relatively fun, i mean, if you are into that kind of stuff, but here are two big problems (the second way bigger than the first):
1. lots of language. a million adjectives. please move the story along.
2. i have no idea why i read about these three people. none. the story had all the potential of being a good exploration of about 150 different themes, but focused instead on the action (with a ton of words to wade through to get to the next bit), and one had no idea what we were being told, and why.
the story is nicely paced and relatively fun, i mean, if you are into that kind of stuff, but here are two big problems (the second way bigger than the first):
1. lots of language. a million adjectives. please move the story along.
2. i have no idea why i read about these three people. none. the story had all the potential of being a good exploration of about 150 different themes, but focused instead on the action (with a ton of words to wade through to get to the next bit), and one had no idea what we were being told, and why.
April 28, 2015
THE HARDER THEY COME
T. C. Boyle
Four stars because I love T.C. Boyle and his insights into the American psyche in fantastic prose and narrative. He is the keeper of the flame in helping us understand human nature, some of the origins of violence and the often tragic results.
The four characters in the book are not necessarily people I care for, but most especially Sara who is unbelievably set in her ways and most of them are anti everything except a lover who is fifteen years younger and exceptionally mentally handicapped.
Mr. Boyle always challenges us to a greater understanding of ourselves, our values and the values of our country. I champion him and his deep commitment to looking at the greater issues. He brings them out into the light and lets you form your own ideas and to mull over the way you feel.
By way of the highest praise, I don’t know if THE TORTILLA CURTAIN will ever be topped in his large repertoire.
Always thought provoking and a good read, Mr. Boyle, thank you.
T. C. Boyle
Four stars because I love T.C. Boyle and his insights into the American psyche in fantastic prose and narrative. He is the keeper of the flame in helping us understand human nature, some of the origins of violence and the often tragic results.
The four characters in the book are not necessarily people I care for, but most especially Sara who is unbelievably set in her ways and most of them are anti everything except a lover who is fifteen years younger and exceptionally mentally handicapped.
Mr. Boyle always challenges us to a greater understanding of ourselves, our values and the values of our country. I champion him and his deep commitment to looking at the greater issues. He brings them out into the light and lets you form your own ideas and to mull over the way you feel.
By way of the highest praise, I don’t know if THE TORTILLA CURTAIN will ever be topped in his large repertoire.
Always thought provoking and a good read, Mr. Boyle, thank you.
Read
May 26, 2015I am not going to rate this because I am only 35% in the book and though I never thought I would say this about one of his books, but I cannot connect at all with this story.
March 26, 2016
For the 30 years that I've been reading the works of T. C. Boyle, he has never let me down. His unbridled curiosity has led him to write clear, unsentimental, non-cliched books that go down so smoothly, I'm usually surprised that I've reached the end. Whether it's the Kinseys, 1970's era hippies, settlers on islands rearing sheep or the wives of Frank Lloyd Wright, he imbues his well researched books with characters who find themselves dealing with unexpected situations in unexpected ways. This latest, a contemporary examination into lives that are complex, exasperating, and horrifying, held me from page one until the end.
May 8, 2015
The Harder They Come is a near perfect fiction. The characters are believable. The subject matters. The themes are solid and not in your face. Boyle explores an America that is compared to an America that was. We look at Viet Nam, the new right, old age, mental instability, immigration, crime, tourism. All are found wanting in the four main characters. Adam, the environmentalist warrior, is a totally believable character cut out of the full cloth of disaffecting and disaffective contemporary youth. Following him is like watching a Greek tragedy unfold. Yes, we know the ending already, but watching how we get there never fails to thrill us. His father represents the failure of rage that made the Viet Nam war and which now fuels the golf links. Adam’s mother is a study in subtleness of expression and living.: the life not well led. That could be applied to them all. Sara, the most interesting of the bunch, is a slipped wing nut who is a large bosomed combo of Lucy Ball and Emma Goldberg. Never once does Boyle lose control of some very complex structural devices. Never once is he at odds with his language. T.C. Boyle has written a very important work.
April 8, 2015
THE HARDER THEY COME, by T.C. Boyle is a realistic character driven plot centred around three main characters; Sten, Adam and Sara. This is a compelling tale about the relationship between these flawed damaged people, and touches on some complex often contradictory moral issues from various perspectives.
Seventy year old ex-marine, Vietnam veteran Sten is reluctantly hailed a hero when, on vacation to Central America with his wife, he disarms and kills a mugger, one of a gang that has been menacing elderly tourists during group tour stops made in Costa Rica.
Sten is uncomfortable at first with the praise and hero status he receives from his fellow holiday makers and from people when he returns home to Northern California.
Inevitably Sten accepts the complimentary drinks and praises, but then faces the polemic emotional extreme when his own son Adam kills two people.
Sara, a 40 something divorcee, is a believer in the anti authoritarian movement and manages to get herself into trouble with the law on a pretty minor issue, refusing to wear a seat belt. In the process her much loved dog is impounded and she is taken into cells. Upon release she picks up a young hitchhiker, Adam, and rants about the law and how she's going to get her dog back.
Adam, a loner and self trained survivalist in his 20's has serious mental health issues. He calls himself Colter and has adopted the lifestyle of his role model.
Sara's paranoia and Adam's schizophrenia is a volatile mix and as Adam becomes increasingly more unstable and loses his grip on reality. It's only a matter of time before events spiral to an explosive and violent tragedy.
Highly recommended. 'The Harder They Come' left me thinking about things long after turning the final page. I thoroughly enjoyed this read and learned a little about John Colter the original mountain man in the 19th Century. This is my first T.C. Boyle novel but most certainly not my last.
Disclaimer: I received a digital copy from the Publisher for an honest, unbiased review.
Seventy year old ex-marine, Vietnam veteran Sten is reluctantly hailed a hero when, on vacation to Central America with his wife, he disarms and kills a mugger, one of a gang that has been menacing elderly tourists during group tour stops made in Costa Rica.
Sten is uncomfortable at first with the praise and hero status he receives from his fellow holiday makers and from people when he returns home to Northern California.
Inevitably Sten accepts the complimentary drinks and praises, but then faces the polemic emotional extreme when his own son Adam kills two people.
Sara, a 40 something divorcee, is a believer in the anti authoritarian movement and manages to get herself into trouble with the law on a pretty minor issue, refusing to wear a seat belt. In the process her much loved dog is impounded and she is taken into cells. Upon release she picks up a young hitchhiker, Adam, and rants about the law and how she's going to get her dog back.
Adam, a loner and self trained survivalist in his 20's has serious mental health issues. He calls himself Colter and has adopted the lifestyle of his role model.
Sara's paranoia and Adam's schizophrenia is a volatile mix and as Adam becomes increasingly more unstable and loses his grip on reality. It's only a matter of time before events spiral to an explosive and violent tragedy.
Highly recommended. 'The Harder They Come' left me thinking about things long after turning the final page. I thoroughly enjoyed this read and learned a little about John Colter the original mountain man in the 19th Century. This is my first T.C. Boyle novel but most certainly not my last.
Disclaimer: I received a digital copy from the Publisher for an honest, unbiased review.
September 8, 2020
I read many books by the same authors growing up, but the first writer whose style ever made me think "this is the thing that I love about fiction" was T.C. Boyle. If you check my rating history for him, you will see that there have been times I failed to connect with the story he wants to tell. That is fine, not every book is for every reader. But Boyle's propulsive, wordy, colorful style is unmatched for me when I do connect with his story.
And wow, was this one hell of a story.
Judging by friends reviews, it appears that some people found the characters (probably Sara and Adam) cartoonish. Having worked in the government for nearly a decade, I've interacted at length with (multiple) Sovereign Citizens and spoken with folks suffering from the sort of dissociation with reality that Adam faces. My personal opinion is that Boyle drew these characters accurately. Although I certainly have no love for right-wing extremism and its oft violent ends, I appreciated the way he allowed us to form our own judgment of them and their actions, rather than laying on the snark with a heavy hand. It's the benefit of fiction that we can read about characters we might find despicable or who might exist on the margins of society - people we probably would not want to know in real life.
That being said, I think the greatest pleasure of this book was the writing. We have three different characters who are alike yet different, and who sound like three different people. A pressure cooker of a plot that mirrors real life events, attempting to show the perspectives that move people to do things most of us could never understand. All of it stitched together by Boyle's wonderful verbosity.
I'll be an outlier, but this book was 100% made for me. I loved it.
And wow, was this one hell of a story.
Judging by friends reviews, it appears that some people found the characters (probably Sara and Adam) cartoonish. Having worked in the government for nearly a decade, I've interacted at length with (multiple) Sovereign Citizens and spoken with folks suffering from the sort of dissociation with reality that Adam faces. My personal opinion is that Boyle drew these characters accurately. Although I certainly have no love for right-wing extremism and its oft violent ends, I appreciated the way he allowed us to form our own judgment of them and their actions, rather than laying on the snark with a heavy hand. It's the benefit of fiction that we can read about characters we might find despicable or who might exist on the margins of society - people we probably would not want to know in real life.
That being said, I think the greatest pleasure of this book was the writing. We have three different characters who are alike yet different, and who sound like three different people. A pressure cooker of a plot that mirrors real life events, attempting to show the perspectives that move people to do things most of us could never understand. All of it stitched together by Boyle's wonderful verbosity.
I'll be an outlier, but this book was 100% made for me. I loved it.
May 1, 2015
TC Boyle needs to explore some new terrain. In "The Harder They Come" Boyle yet again explores the American character and independent spirit in their relation to the harsh beauty of nature and the soft easy times we live in. It really seems as if half his books tread this same ground and at this late stage in his career he seems to have run out of interesting things to say about it. Boyle also writes with a measure of disdain for his characters. I get the impression he thinks he understands people better than he actually does. He creates characters that are cliches, like the grumpy old man retiree and ultra-libertarian here, and then writes mockingly about them. It's hard to feel at all invested in characters that feel so artificial. I'd love for Boyle to hook up with an editor who could excise all mentions of food from his writing. 20 or so pages could easily be shaved off this book if we removed all the tiresome stuff about this character eating fish rolled in flour and fried or that character eating fresh picked spinach.
September 29, 2015
This is the second Boyle novel I've read that is set in California. He is masterful at portraying tensions between various sectors of California society - Anglos, Mexican immigrants, survivalists and assorted "loonies", law enforcement etc. There are few "normal" undamaged characters in Boyle's landscape. Sten, a Vietnam vet, is father to Adam who calls himself Colter, a self-made survivalist. Colter is increasingly delusional which leads to violence. His father is also guilty of recently killing a would-be robber when traveling south of the border. Colter crosses paths with a woman,Sara, 15 years his senior, who subscribes to far-right politics that refuse to recognize the state, and all its representatives including law enforcement. The novel never sinks into proselytizing which could quickly bore the reader, but relentlessly gains momentum. Another good read from TC Boyle.
August 17, 2016
It is a biblical theme, the disagreement between the father and the son. Nevertheless there is love at father. Sten was marine in Viet Nam, which in 70 years still succeeds in behaving like a hero at the beginning of the book. The fragile, paranoiac, unstable son takes himself for a trapper of XIX °. The meeting with an older woman is going to transform him. He radicalized himself. The end can be only tragic.
I thought of this painting of Rembrandt, " The return of the prodigal son ". This one who got angry with his father returns and he is kindly welcomed with love by him. His expression on the face is incredible, quite different than the rigourous carachter on the right, somewhere his double. But here no return. Sten remains alone, with his suffering and his guilt.
It is solid, written well.
I hesitated between 4 or 5 stars.
I thought of this painting of Rembrandt, " The return of the prodigal son ". This one who got angry with his father returns and he is kindly welcomed with love by him. His expression on the face is incredible, quite different than the rigourous carachter on the right, somewhere his double. But here no return. Sten remains alone, with his suffering and his guilt.
It is solid, written well.
I hesitated between 4 or 5 stars.
December 5, 2014
I don't need flash, irony, literary tricks and deceptions. I just want a great story told by a master storyteller and Mr. Boyle is one of our best. I liked his last one, flew through this one, and will wait (mostly) patiently for the next.
July 8, 2023
לסקירה מפורטת בעברית ואנגלית, קישור לבלוג שלי -
https://sivi-the-avid-reader.com/the-...
https://sivi-the-avid-reader.com/the-...
May 19, 2015
I'm not even sure I would give this two stars if it were not T.C. Boyle, but I have loved just about every other book of his that I have read. The first chapter lived up to expectation for me; it read well, I felt I was gaining insight into the main character (of that chapter only it turns out) and feeling his moral dilemma as he experienced it. But it goes down hill from there. The writing is engaging and entertaining - maybe that is the reason for the second star - but the characters are all unlikeable and the overall story dark in a way that makes it seem almost silly. It follows three main characters (counting an elderly couple as one character) who all fall along a different point on the spectrum of political outsiders, or really more radical individualism and anti authoritarianism. But the lead is truly mentally ill, which I think did little for Boyle's overall theme. If it had been purely a book about looking into the mind of a mentally ill/schizophrenic youth, I may have ended saying that I think he probably did a decent job capturing that mindset, but that is not how the book presents. Overall I wouldn't recommend it.
January 5, 2016
This is my first novel by Boyle and it won't be the last. Once I began reading I could barely put it down again. This is especially surprising because none of the characters are very likable. The plot moves slowly, the characterizations are subtle, and Boyle takes his time unfolding everybody's motivations, fears, beliefs. Alternating points of view present this intriguing story from different angles and it is as thrilling as it is devastating to watch the events being puzzled together over many chapters.
So, long story short - loved it. Another new (to me) author I'll explore more closely this year.
So, long story short - loved it. Another new (to me) author I'll explore more closely this year.
August 15, 2017
This was my first T.C. Boyle book and it was excellent! Rich characters, gripping story. I was inspired to do much Wikipedia research afterwards. I think we all knew someone like Adam in high school. He reminded me of Christopher McCandless in Into the Wild, except psychotic and dangerous. My family owns a forestry property in Fort Bragg so this was of particular interest to me. Definitely like T.C. Boyle's writing style and look forward to reading more from his library.
February 9, 2018
Not my favorite T C Boyle book, but he drew me in as he usually does. Interesting, though told in third person, each section is from a different character's point of view. If you are a fan of T C Boyle, definitely worth the read. If you are new to this author I would suggest World's End or Road to Wellville.
April 12, 2016
As 'The Harder They Come' begins, characters Sten Stenson and his wife Carolee are on a South American cruise. An incident on a day trip ashore establishes 70-year-old Sten has not lost any of his skills or wits acquired while a soldier in Vietnam despite that he has been a high school principal for decades before he retired. His personality as a practical man who has embraced the reality the world is a violent place seems to me very heroic in the American 'quiet cowboy' style. Sten is not seeking such a role, but he accepts he is one able to handle ne'er-do-wells when necessary. He is intelligent, but he finds foolish behavior unacceptable. Now that he is elderly, he no longer has much patience with the more stupid forms of officialdom, especially the ones which appear to demean a person, either, but he conforms where he must with the rules of governance, creaky and slow as the levers may be. He is a 'hard man', but not unreasonably so.
Unfortunately, his mentally-ill son, Adam, has embraced one of the other American-style 'hard man' mentalities. His son's hero is not the fictional cowboy hero that movie star John Wayne played, but the historic John Colter, one of the first well-known American 'mountain men'. Colter helped the Lewis and Clark expedition explore 'the Louisiana Purchase' - the American West beyond the Mississippi River, in 1804, but he was famous for another incident called 'The Colter Run' by admirers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_...
Sara Hoverty Jennings is a farrier. It doesn't pay much, but she is a single lady of 40 who enjoys her life. Or, she would if it wasn't for the United States of Illegal America! She thinks all government is illegal, thus all of their laws are to be ignored. When she is pulled over by police for not wearing a seatbelt, she escalates the encounter until she is arrested. Shocked, she is appalled by the powers of the police-state! Worse, they take her dog Kutya, her baby, to the animal control compound because he must be held for 30 days after biting one of the officers. AND her car has been impounded!
Sara is a member of the 'Redemption Movement. Frankly, it is an insane anti-tax, anti-government, white-supremist philosophy, but that hasn't stopped people from believing it is true.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redem...
Sara picks up Adam when she sees him walking along the highway. Despite his obvious peculiar behavior, she is immediately in love with him, or perhaps it is his hard body which thrills her most. He has been living in the woods periodically, and because he wants to be John Colter, he has been doing everything he can to become a mountain man in actuality. He is unable to track what is happening around him between fits of paranoia and delusion, but Sara misreads his anti-social psychosis as a sympathetic soulmate.
Hang on to your emblematic man-hat of choice, gentle reader, whether it be cowboy, coonskin or police. The tourist 'Skunk Train' of northern California is about to leave the station...
'The Harder They Come' is an extremely interesting book, and the fact it is based on a real incident adds a 'shiny thing' fascination for this reviewer.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/artic...
Unfortunately, his mentally-ill son, Adam, has embraced one of the other American-style 'hard man' mentalities. His son's hero is not the fictional cowboy hero that movie star John Wayne played, but the historic John Colter, one of the first well-known American 'mountain men'. Colter helped the Lewis and Clark expedition explore 'the Louisiana Purchase' - the American West beyond the Mississippi River, in 1804, but he was famous for another incident called 'The Colter Run' by admirers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_...
Sara Hoverty Jennings is a farrier. It doesn't pay much, but she is a single lady of 40 who enjoys her life. Or, she would if it wasn't for the United States of Illegal America! She thinks all government is illegal, thus all of their laws are to be ignored. When she is pulled over by police for not wearing a seatbelt, she escalates the encounter until she is arrested. Shocked, she is appalled by the powers of the police-state! Worse, they take her dog Kutya, her baby, to the animal control compound because he must be held for 30 days after biting one of the officers. AND her car has been impounded!
Sara is a member of the 'Redemption Movement. Frankly, it is an insane anti-tax, anti-government, white-supremist philosophy, but that hasn't stopped people from believing it is true.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redem...
Sara picks up Adam when she sees him walking along the highway. Despite his obvious peculiar behavior, she is immediately in love with him, or perhaps it is his hard body which thrills her most. He has been living in the woods periodically, and because he wants to be John Colter, he has been doing everything he can to become a mountain man in actuality. He is unable to track what is happening around him between fits of paranoia and delusion, but Sara misreads his anti-social psychosis as a sympathetic soulmate.
Hang on to your emblematic man-hat of choice, gentle reader, whether it be cowboy, coonskin or police. The tourist 'Skunk Train' of northern California is about to leave the station...
'The Harder They Come' is an extremely interesting book, and the fact it is based on a real incident adds a 'shiny thing' fascination for this reviewer.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/artic...
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