There’s something about a three-hander. The term, which comes from the theater, refers to a drama—or, more broadly, a narrative—involving three characters, each in some sense at odds with both of the others, like a triangle with an open side. The tensions, or conflicts, among them build and spiral the further the plot moves along. A key component is what I think of as the agent of chaos: the provocateur, willing to do anything to get what he or she desires.
Desire, of course, is only an illusion. Or perhaps we should call it a moving target, since it is impossible to fulfill. Just consider Jesse, one of the figures of triangulation at the center of T.C. Boyle’s vigorous and chilling new novel, No Way Home: a middle school teacher and would-be writer whose personality is marked by an unruly temper and a problem with impulse control. “He still had it for her,” Boyle writes, “which was the reason he couldn’t seem to restrain himself whenever he saw her with him—not an excuse, not at all, not even close, but there it was.” The “her” and “him” of whom Jesse is thinking are his ex-girlfriend Bethany and a young medical resident named Terrence, with whom she has taken up.
They represent the other two points of the triangle.
No Way Home begins simply enough. Terrence is at work in a Los Angeles hospital when he learns his mother has died. For him, this is merely one more burden in a life constrained by them: “As always, he was sleep deprived,” Boyle writes, “and the lukewarm latte he’d chugged on his way down the hall didn’t seem to be having much effect. If the sun was shining, which it was, he barely noticed.” Complicating matters is the fact that his mother had relocated from Woodland Hills, California, to Boulder City, Nevada, a desert town 30 miles or so outside Las Vegas, where Terrence has no desire to be, but where he must go to handle the estate. “People who claimed to love the desert always talked about the uncluttered vistas,” Boyle suggests, “but to his mind it was like looking at the bottom of an old running shoe, nothing there but dirt and worn-out tread.”
Nothing, that is, until he encounters Bethany, who picks him up his first night in town and spins a sob story that ends with a request to stay at his mother’s house. After saying no, he believes the matter settled, but a month later, after he has returned to Los Angeles, he receives a call from his mother’s neighbor.
“You do know there’s somebody in your house,” she asks him, “don’t you?”
She is speaking, of course, about Bethany.
Does this make Bethany another agent of chaos? In a sense, every character here plays something of that role. She, for one, masquerades as Terrence’s fiancée, using his mother’s car—which she justifies by caring for the dog the dead woman left behind—while eating and drinking her way through house and home. And Terrence brings his own disruptions. He is incapable of seeing another person without diagnosing them. “He noticed everything, of course,” Boyle writes, “every human being out there a laboratory of conditions and maladies.” It’s a clinical approach to living, and it leaves him unable to reckon with emotion or to respond accordingly. His relationship with Bethany offers a prime example: After going back and forth, he agrees to let her stay, although their relationship remains loosely defined. Then there’s Jesse, always lurking in the distance until, in a shocking act of violence—only the first, as it will turn out—he raises the stakes for everyone.
“A doctor,” he fumes, thinking about Terrence, “was just a science nerd with a degree who’d got used to the sight of blood (and all the rest of it, bile, lymph, piss, shit, pus, scum), a mechanic of the body.… But a novelist—a novelist was something else. Cooler. A whole lot cooler. Cooler by a factor of ten.”
Here we see what Boyle does so deftly, which is to escalate. He recognizes not only how we misunderstand each other but how we misunderstand—and lie to—ourselves. Such a dynamic centers many of his novels, starting with the first, 1981’s Water Music, about the misadventures of the real-life 18th-century Scottish explorer Mungo Park. I think of The Harder They Come (2015), another three-hander, where a Vietnam veteran, his mentally ill son, and a member of the so-called sovereign citizen movement form their own toxic triangle in Mendocino County. Or The Tortilla Curtain, published in 1995, which pits an environmentalist against an undocumented couple squatting in Topanga Canyon—with devastating results. What makes these dynamics work is that none of the mayhem is intentional, exactly, but rather evolves out of a back-and-forth of bad behavior, in which everyone feels aggrieved. Sound a lot like daily life? Boyle understands that also, which is why both the humor and the drama in the books are shot through with a healthy dose of rage.
No Way Home operates on similar terms. Like The Harder They Come, the novel shifts perspective between its three primary characters. The effect is that, at various moments in the narrative, one or another of the trio remains a little bit in the dark. This lag, this literary stutter step, offers a vivid reminder that we never know the full story, not even close, just our little piece of it. And even that may be inaccurate or compromised. “Okay? You got it? Are you satisfied?” Bethany asks Terrence after he learns of another assault by Jesse. “Or do you need the details?”
The irony—or, perhaps, the tragedy—is that we already know what’s happened, which only highlights further the disconnections, the divides, among the characters.
In the end, none of them make it through the novel happy. This, though, is not to say they remain unredeemed. There is an edge of acceptance here, though not in the sense of the Serenity Prayer. It’s something hard and flinty, a recognition that, in order to survive, we must put certain incidents and individuals behind us, even if we remain unreconciled.•
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