David Lynch meets Fight Club in T.C. Boyle’s No Way Home, an obsessive psychological study that illuminates the darkness that lurks inside all of us.
Terrence Tully, work-obsessed and a naif in the arenas of sex and love, is at work when he receives news that his mother has died. A third-year medical resident in a gritty community hospital in downtown Los Angeles, he sees death daily, but the news that his mother has passed away, delivered to his cell phone by the voice of a stranger, jolts him like no other, even as he is in the act of trying to save the life of a patient undergoing cardiac arrest.
Turn the page and he’s heading north on I-15 though a lifeless desert to the small Nevada town where his mother has retired. Overwhelmed with grief and the burden of having to sort out the remnants of his mother’s life, including the house and car she has left him, he stops at a café and has a chance encounter with a pretty young local girl in a turquoise minidress. What seems to him a chance meeting like so many we all experience daily will come to upend his life and morph into a fatal obsession.
For Bethany, a receptionist at the local hospital, who, like many twenty-somethings, is trying to sort out her options in life while haunting the local bars and clubs, this chance encounter is anything but trivial. Down on her luck after breaking up with her boyfriend and surreptitiously living out of her storage unit, she finds Terrence attractive on a number of counts, not least of which is his status as a doctor and, by default, a homeowner.
What follows becomes the heart of No Way Home, a propulsive narrative with cinematic overtones in the tradition of Mulholland Drive and the cold hard lyricism of Cormac McCarthy and Robert Stone, as Terrence is drawn into a toxic love triangle with Bethany and her former beau, Jesse. No longer in control of his ordered and once-predictable life, Terrence becomes hostage to a world where shots of tequila and violent brawls puncture the daily grind of nowhere jobs, aimless sex, and recreational highs—a rootless existence from which there appears to be no escape and no fixed refuge.
Stylistically shimmering and unraveling under a harsh desert sky crenellated by the peaks of the Nevada mountains, T. C. Boyle’s narrative explores what it is, on an animal level, to fight over a woman and what retribution really looks like. Can sexual jealousy breed a thirst for vengeance that becomes desperately pathological? In the hands of “one of America’s greatest living novelists” (Los Angeles Review of Books), No Way Home is a chilling tour de force by an American master at his very best.
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