It’s the end of the world, and T.C. Boyle’s characters feel meh

Review 'Blue Skies' By T.C. Way back in 2000, when we were all looking ahead to the post-Y2K era with wary optimism, Boyle sent out a warning flare in the form of “ A Friend of the Earth,” a novel whose story takes place in 2025, by which point a rapid depletion of biodiversity has forced Boyle’s harried characters to take extreme, often loopy measures to sustain themselves. Instead, Boyle’s smug characters function within the new “shifting baseline” of climate change, where “a new normal … superseded the normal before it,” and everyone learns to live with a lot less. Boyle’s entertaining if somewhat bloodless novel circles around an affluent Santa Barbara family that includes Cooper, a biologist who loves bugs to the extent that he nearly loses his life observing them; his mother, Ottilie, who uses farm-raised crickets to make grillions poèlês rôti and other haute cuisine, thereby doing her part, among other things, to cut down the methane footprint of the cattle industry; and Ottilie’s daughter, Catherine, a lost soul living on the Florida coast who has a drinking problem and an unhealthy lust for social media stardom. Then, the new new normal: a mass extinction of insects, a “bug apocalypse” that causes Ottilie’s crickets to die in droves and untold numbers of damselflies and moths to blanket the ground like “beige snow.” All the while, unrelenting rain pounds Catherine’s home on Florida’s coast, while in California, Ottilie braces for yet another in a series of drought-induced mega firestorms.