Jane Ciabattari in Literary Hub:
T.C. Boyle lives in Santa Barbara, an area in California that has been steadily ravaged by extreme weather in recent years. His 2011 novel When the Killing’s Done is set there and on the nearby Channel Islands and tracks a conflict set off by an environmental conundrum—the killing off of a predator species in order to preserve an endangered one—which triggered a real-life conflict in 2002.
In his satiric and provocative new novel, Blue Skies, which mirrors Santa Barbara’s drought, wildfires and windstorms, he is once again skewering a contemporary environmental standoff modeled on real life events. Does he continually update the environmental crises around him to inspire his work?
“I do,” he says. “If I feel helpless living a baffling existence on an unfathomable planet in an indifferent universe, my being cries out for redemption, for purpose, for hope, but climate change just compounds the uncertainty and existential misery of day-to-day life lived in this deteriorating shell of an animal body.
More here.