As
usual I’ve been reading many different books, but today I’m going
to talk about only one: The Harder They Come by T.C. Boyle. This one has been next to my bed for many weeks. I found that this book deserved to be read
slowly and thoughtfully, even though it’s a compelling story. Now
that I’ve finished, I am recommending it to all and sundry,
especially to my liberal friends who believe we’re on the correct
“side” of an ideological divide and that people with opposing
views are somehow the enemy. The Harder They Come confirmed my
belief that it’s not that simple.
Retired
high school principal and ex-Marine Sten Stenson is vacationing in
Costa Rica with his wife Coralee when their tour bus is hijacked by a
trio of thugs. As the native gang threatens the group of senior
citizens with knives and a gun, Sten’s military training takes
over. On automatic, he grabs one of their attackers by the throat to
immobilize him, ultimately choking the other man to death. To his
fellow cruise passengers, Sten’s a hero, but all sorts of
unpleasantness follows as he is forced to deal with the local authorities
and make moral compromises.
Sara
Hovarty Jennings is a sovereign citizen. A forty-something divorcee
who struggles with her weight, she works hard at her job as a
farrier, takes meticulous care of her own personal property, loves
her shaggy dog Kutya, and just wants to be left alone. She doesn’t
pay taxes. She won’t register or insure her car just because the
government says she must. She sure as hell isn’t going to wear a
seat belt just because some law requires it. One evening she’s
stopped by the police on California Route 20. She refuses to get out
of the car as the officer demands. She ends up in jail overnight,
with her car impounded and Kutya in quarantine because he hasn’t
been vaccinated for rabies as the law demands.
Adam
Stenson, Sten’s son, has always been a problem child. Now in his
twenties, he’s living in a cabin in the northern California forest,
drinking grain alcohol, growing drugs and becoming progressively less
connected with reality. He identifies with, and takes the name of,
the legendary mountain man John Colter. He’s determined to be as
tough and crafty as his hero, to fight against the “aliens” who
want to control him, to live free in the wilderness no matter what
the cost.
When
Sara encounters Adam, she persuades him to help her free her dog from
the pound. They become lovers. Though Adam is peculiar, emotionally
volatile, maybe dangerous, a bond develops between them. Everything
unravels, though, when Adam, in the throes of his Colter-inspired
hallucinations, shoots and kills two local men.
T.C.
Boyle’s brilliant novel The Harder They Come revolves around
these three rather extreme characters. Their beliefs and their
actions should make them seem repugnant, or at least very foreign to
someone like me, who espouses rather liberal political views. It is a
measure of Boyle’s genius that he managed to make me feel sympathy
for and warmth toward all three of theme, even the homicidal lunatic
Adam.
In
the real world I might label these people as right wing kooks. Boyle
conveys their emotions with such conviction and their philosophies
with such apparent logic that I found myself actually agreeing with
them, at least to some extent. I admired Sara’s independence and
courage. I felt Sten’s frustration with his aging body and his
helpless despair in the face of his son’s psychological impairment,
and understood how these feelings could engender deadly anger. I even
could understand why Adam felt as he did, why he was so inspired by
Colter, in a world where true agency is so difficult to achieve.
It
took me a long time to finish The Harder They Come—more than
a month, though of course I was reading quite a few other books
concurrently. I found that I didn’t want to consume more than one
or two chapters at a sitting, not because the book didn’t pull me
in, but because I felt I needed a break to digest and to appreciate
what I’d just read.
Boyle’s
prose is so compact, so evocative, so precisely targeted, that one
cannot help but marvel. He’s an expert at conveying the natural
world as well as human emotions and behavior. The Harder They Come
is set well north of San Francisco, near Mendocino and Fort Bragg,
among the redwoods and the rednecks. The area used to be a thriving
center of the logging industry, but that prosperity is long gone. Now
Mexican gangs grow pot deep in the woods, the old rail line is used
for tourist jaunts, the locals struggle, and everyone wonders what
the future will bring.
The
book beautifully conveys the natural beauty of the area, the wildness
that still exists. It also evokes the quiet desperation of the people
who inhabit the region, a desperation that expresses itself in
prejudice and violence. Boyle focuses on Sten, Sara and Adam, makes
them real, living, breathing human beings, but he’s also clear that
they’re products of their time and environment. The Harder They
Come could be viewed as a microcosm of contemporary American
society, a cautionary tale on the consequences of extremism.
But
Boyle isn’t on a soap box. He never is. He’s just painting
pictures, encouraging us to draw our own conclusions. That’s why I
feel that this novel is important. It goes beyond the stereotypes,
probes more deeply into how these people—“these people” whom in
another context I might be tempted to label as the enemy, as alien to
me as the guys Adam murders—reason, think and feel. And my
conclusion is that ultimately, we’re not that different after all.
Maybe
more so-called liberal Americans should read this book.
