Boyle’s slice of US life

TC Boyle

Bloomsbury, £8.99;

Kindle, £4.63 

On New Year’s Day, 1888, when the tubercular Marantha Waters arrives on San Miguel with her stubborn and brutish Civil War veteran husband, Will, and their adopted daughter, Edith, the notion of the Wild West is already in recession. San Miguel, a small island situated across California’s Santa Barbara channel, seems like the last gasp of a bygone era.

This is the sort of novel that TC Boyle writes better than almost anyone else, a sprawling multi-generational slice of life that fixates on a largely ignored corner of history. All the expected traits that make this author such a must-read are in rich evidence: vivid descriptions, sculpted characterisations, voices brimming with authenticity, invariably delicious prose style.

For him, the island of San Miguel is, in a Steinbeckian sense, symbolic of America as a whole, a place that offers shelter and hope to the vulnerable and the dreamers, but with a darker side to its nature, too, and a certain arbitrary cruelty.

Skilled construction keeps the story moving, splitting the text into three sections. The first, narrated by Marantha, recounts in vivid and often painful detail the crumbling of a life.

Her husband has deluded her into thinking that the climate will help her consumption, and that the sheep business is a good use of her remaining money, but the reality is very different and the island itself becomes an inevitable Death Row.

From here, we step forward two years, and take up the story with Edith, at a moment when she is forced from the freedom of her mainland boarding school and has to return to the hated San Miguel. Immediately, she is put to work by her father as a servant. It is a soul-destroying existence, especially for someone of an artistic and cultured bent. Edith is a young woman out of step with her era, and is willing to use any means necessary, including seduction, to escape the island.

The third and final section is arguably the most compelling. Set in the 1930s, it concerns Elsie and Herbie Lester, a newly-wed couple full of the frontier spirit, who settle down here to raise a family, and who earn media celebrity for their free-living brand of self-sufficiency at a time when America is in the grip of Prohibition. But just when the island seems to have delivered on its idyllic promises, disaster strikes.

For more than 30 years, with books like World’s End, The Road to Wellville and The Tortilla Curtain, Tom Coraghessan Boyle has occupied a place in the vanguard of American literature. San Miguel will probably rank slightly below his very best work but still presents a thoroughly satisfying read.