A Family Drama Unfolds as Ecological Disasters Mount

“Blue Skies,” by T.C. Boyle, considers life in a coastal America made increasingly untenable by climate change. Credit…Gabriel Alcala When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. BLUE SKIES , by T.C. Boyle “Blue Skies,” T.C. Boyle’s 19th novel, opens with Cat, a would-be social media influencer living on the imperiled Florida coast, buying a pet Burmese python as a piece of “living jewelry” she hopes will boost her Instagram account. Having been denied her other hoped-for adornments (a baby or a dog or even a cat), she makes her reptilian purchase from the owner of a store regrettably named Herps, who promises, “Nothing’ll make you happier than having a snake in your life.” Across the country in California, Cat’s mother, Ottilie, also seeks a capitalistic solution to her own emotional dilemma: the climate guilt laid on her by her son, Cooper, an entomologist who hectors her about “the death of the planet … the Anthropocene, our species a curse, et cetera.” Ottilie buys a countertop cricket reactor, planning to farm “high-fiber, low-fat protein” that she’ll gently slaughter in her freezer, lulling the insects “to their deaths in the most humane way possible.” Many other striking and sometimes dangerous interactions with the wild and the barely domesticated follow, as the characters navigate a series of escalating ecological disasters. Willie, Cat’s Burmese python, is quickly lost and replaced by the even bigger Willie II, who, after the first Willie is found again, is forced to cohabitate with his smaller namesake. Cat, separated by a continent from her family for most of the novel, navigates a Florida downpour while being stalked by the “dull corrugated” shape of an eight-foot alligator. The morning of a funeral, she witnesses a pod of dolphins offshore, an “omen” that precedes her first new mosquito bite after a sudden, inexplicable die-off of insects around the world. In the wake of a devastating court date, Cat swims in the Atlantic, plunging underwater to imagine breathing “water instead of air, dissolving into the blackness like the jellyfish and the octopi and […]

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