Ms. Hen reviews The Harder They Come

The Harder They Come

T.C. Boyle

Harper Collins

2015

Ms. Hen discovered this book at the Little Free Library that’s a block from where she lives. She has always been aware of T.C. Boyle, and even went to a reading he did once, but she has never read any of his books until now. She decided to read this because it is about Northern California, not San Francisco in particular, but somewhere near there.

This novel contains three main characters. It starts with Sten, a retiree on a cruise with his wife when their tour group is held up at gunpoint, and Sten kills one of the men attempting to rob them. He has a difficult time handling the notoriety. Sara is a member of an anti-government group and gets into a fight with a police office over her car registration, and eventually picks up Sten’s son, Adam, while he is hitchhiking. The two become lovers, though she is about fifteen years older than him.

This novel is about violence and anger. Sten is a Vietnam veteran and a recently retired high school principal. He has a temper and does not know how to handle retirement. Adam has schizophrenia and has always given his parents problems. Sara is angry at the world and does not want to follow the rules of society, which gets her in trouble.

The beginning of the book has an epigraph by D.H. Lawrence from STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE, “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” To Ms. Hen, this brings MOBY DICK to mind, which is considered the great American novel, a book about obsession and violence. Ms. Hen thought of THE HARDER THEY COME as violent, but inherently male, similar to Moby Dick. Ms. Hen doesn’t think the essential American soul is like this, but possibly the American male soul. The American soul is not completely male, there is a female part to it, and most females do not have violent tendencies. Seeing America as angry and full of killers is just looking at the male side. The female side is primarily something else. The female side might be tortured and depressed as evidenced in THE BELL JAR, by Sylvia Plath, which Ms. Hen thinks could win the prize for the female great American novel. But she digresses.

After reading this book, it brought to Ms. Hen's mind MOBY DICK and violence and school shootings, and she has come to the conclusion that the majority of the young men who have done the shootings recently (and they have almost all been young men) have most likely not read MOBY DICK, but they are living its principals: violence, obsession, not stopping until getting what they want will kill them and others. This is a version of the male American soul, as also displayed in THE HARDER THEY COME.

This novel made Ms. Hen think a lot about other things that were not in this novel. Ms. Hen didn’t love the characters, and she would not want to hang out with any of them, but she understands they are realistic. Ms. Hen doesn’t know anyone like these characters, but she enjoyed this book. A book that makes us look at the wider world and how it might fit in has done its job.HHH