Review by New York Times Review
IN SEPTEMBER 1991, amid great flashbulb fanfare, eight people in jumpsuits stepped into an eight-story, glass-and-steel greenhouse complex occupying three acres in the Arizona desert. The complex, called Biosphere 2, was (and remains) the world's largest closed ecological system - a scaled-down replica of Earth (a.k.a. Biosphere 1) replete with a desert, a savanna, a rain forest and a wave-machine-rippled ocean, as well as its own sealed and calibrated atmosphere. The mission for the four men and four women was to inhabit this Earth simulator, for two locked-in years, to test the feasibility of colonizing Mars with similar systems - as a dress rehearsal, that is, for a Noah's Ark-like scheme to reseed the planet's flora and fauna, including humans, in outer space. It flopped. Just 12 days in, an injured crew member was evacuated, dispelling any pretense of a "closed," Mars-ready system, and thanks to respiring soil bacteria, a glut of carbon dioxide threw the atmosphere out of whack. Most of the animals and insects went extinct. The Biospherians, as they were called, fared only slightly better - "We suffocated, starved and went mad," as one would later describe their plight - and the poisonous infighting inside spread to the $150 million project's management team outside, eventually resulting in an invasion of federal marshals armed with restraining orders. Eight years later, with the complex reduced to a dingy shell, Time magazine deemed Biosphere 2, along with New Coke and plus-size spandex, one of the 20th century's 100 worst ideas. The project's cultural influence would seem to back up this designation: Biosphere 2 inspired "Bio-Dome," a 1996 comedy starring Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin that you won't catch much flak for calling the worst movie ever made. And as the acknowledged inspiration for the original Dutch version of "Big Brother," which triggered a seismic shift in television programming following its 1999 debut, it's fair to call it the genesis of reality TV. This is a boozy late-night argument, to be sure, but the lines are there to trace the ascendance of the reality-TV star Donald J. Trump back to the legacy of Biosphere 2 - to see good intentions, as the saying goes, recycled as paving stones. The bar is low, then, for T.C. Boyle, whose latest novel, "The Terranauts," is a reimagining of the Biosphere 2 melodrama with a few details shifted sideways (Biosphere 2 is rechristened E2, E for Ecosphere) and with one significant plot twist. Why Biosphere 2 would have exerted a magnetic force on Boyle isn't hard to see. In his 15 previous novels he has shown a deep and abiding interest in messy utopias ("Drop City"); ecological fervor ("When the Killing's Done"); grandiose guru figures (his fictional portraitures of John Harvey Kellogg, Alfred Kinsey and Frank Lloyd Wright); isolated, stranded lives ("San Miguel"); and, more generally, in ideas so overinflated that their only fate is to pop. As Barbara Kingsolver once wrote of Boyle's fiction: "His disparate characters inevitably get twisted, often grotesquely, around a persistent longing for a reconstructed world." As reconstructed worlds go, you don't get much more literal than a biosphere in the desert. The novel is divided into four sections - "Pre-Closure," then years one and two of "Closure" and finally "Re-entry" - and narrated by three Terranauts. When we meet them they're jockeying to be selected for the mission, which only two of them are: Dawn Chapman, the 29-year-old "manager of domestic animals" and resident naïf, and Ramsay Roothoorp, the project's communications officer and unofficial Lothario. The third narrator, Linda Ryu, Dawn's ostensible best friend, is excluded from the mission and consigned to support staff because, by her wounded reckoning, "I'm Asian....And I'm fat." Her bitterness, like the back-stabbing it foments, cuts a corrosive streak through the novel, a chemical burn of resentment. "Screw them," she says of her fellow Terranauts and the mission's leaders, "if they think they can look down their noses at me." The word "screw" has another connotation, and Linda, like most everyone else on the E2 project, engages its full spectrum. Ramsay, for instance, is fixated on mostly one thing: "the irresistible fantasy of sex under glass." From the novel's opening scenes, when Dawn's final interview with the project's management begins and ends with questions about her sex life, this is Boyle's fixation too - the erotic potential of men and women thrown together in a locked environment, utopia as a wet dream. Even Linda, the disgruntled outcast, falls prey to this pelvic tingle: "But they're stuck," she says to Dawn's boyfriend on the outside, after she's slept with him. "I mean, don't you find that fascinating? Or sexy? Or whatever?" For this reader, the answer tilted less toward sexy and more toward whatever. There's erotic potential anywhere humans are stranded or sequestered: the Downton Abbey estate, a remote scientific base camp, Gilligan's Island. The overlay of glass, steel and messianic zeal doesn't necessarily heighten the sexual tension; pheasant under glass, after all, is still just pheasant. And the sex, for that matter, isn't all that sexy - the couplings never rise above the level of drab workplace affairs, despite a few wan declarations of love that get scattered about. One of Ramsay's justifications for his constant tumescence goes like this: "You want a space colony? You can fill it with all the species you can manage to net, trap or dig up and you can balance out the O^sub 2^/CO^sub 2^ ratio to a nice clean earth-friendly 20.9 percent to 0.03 percent, but if the humans don't mate, don't reproduce, what good is it?" It's probably for the best that Ramsay keeps this to himself; it's a belly-flop of a seduction line. Boyle drapes his novel with enough Christian symbolism - the project's founder, Jeremiah Reed, is called G.C., for God the Creator; his full-time aide and part-time lover Judy Forester is known as Judas; of Ramsay, Linda says, "he's the serpent"; and late in the novel we meet an integral character named Eve - to suggest, or at least nod toward, a pious allegory: the Augustinian notion that libido was what spoiled the Garden of Eden, just as, in a sense, it makes a big hot mess of the E2 mission. But Boyle is too agile and feisty a thinker to hew to this line. The search for Eden (or any utopia) is essentially comic because every vision of Eden is a private fantasy, a fingerprint of desires. Humanity, for Boyle, never suffered a fall; we've always been this petty and cutthroat and grubby and absurd. And as "The Terranauts" makes clear, wherever we go - so long as we're trapped together, in this atmosphere or any other - we always will be. 'If the humans don't mate, don't reproduce, what good is it?' JONATHAN MILES is the author of the novels "Dear American Airlines" and "Want Not."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 13, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* An avid, droll, and Darwinian-minded observer of nature both human and at-large, Boyle (The Harder They Come, 2015) loves pressure-cooker situations, whether it's life on a small island or in a hippie commune or an architect's studio. His latest closed-systems drama is a masterful variation on the infamous 1990s Biosphere 2 experiments during which scientists lived in a large terrarium under the Arizona sun, seeking new ecological understandings with an eye to long-term space missions. Boyle's glassed-in, three-acre world, Ecosphere 2 prison for some, paradise for others engenders science theater and theater of the absurd. Three intriguing, often surprising narrators provide opposing perspectives on the arduous experiences of eight terranauts struggling to survive in the bubble for two years. Linda reports from the outside, enraged by her relegation to support staff. Dawn, her friend, becomes the most zealous of the terranauts. Mercurial Ramsay, Dawn's lover, counts the days to liberation. The group endures near-starvation, dangerously low oxygen levels, sexual complications, and betrayals under the constant scrutiny of the project's cultish mastermind, hordes of tourists, the voracious press, and baleful Linda. As Boyle raises the stakes to see how his lab humans react, he also suggests disquieting questions about our strengths and weaknesses, ourdeleterious impact on the planet, and our ability to address environmental concerns. A virtuoso storyteller and a connoisseur of hubris, Boyle mesmerizes and provokes. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Boyle is a literary star, and an all-points publicity campaign and author tour will launch this shrewd and irresistible novel of ambition and folly.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In his 16th novel, Boyle (The Harder They Come) weaves a sprawling tale of achievement, yearning, pride, and human weakness. On March 6, 1994, eight "Terranauts" from different scientific backgrounds enter E2, a sealed three-acre world within a world outside Tillman, Ariz., to embark on the grand hundred-year vision of billionaire futurist Jeremiah Reed (known portentously as "God the Creator"), "one of the first to recognize that our species... was well on its way to destroying or at least depleting the global ecosystem and might just need an escape valve." Narrated by Dawn Chapman, the affable, telegenic darling of the crew; Linda Ryu, the book's id and a spurned Terranaut whose close friendship with Dawn sours as the project wears on; and Ramsay Roothoorp, the sexually adventurous man-child whose incessant rationalizing, political plays, and mercurial personality provide much of the story's humor (and twisted psychological insight), the two-year mission exposes the fragility of interpersonal relationships and tests the limits of the human body. In a multilayered work that recalls the tragicomic realism of Saul Bellow and John Updike, Boyle observes his characters with scientific rigor and a good deal of genuine empathy as they struggle to maintain their identities in the most communal of settings. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt Literary. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Set in 1994, this book offers a fresh take on an old conceit: assemble a disparate group of people, put them in a secluded environment, and see what ensues. In this case, the setting is E2, a sealed, Biosphere-like artificial ecological system. In a project led by -Jeremiah Reed, part ecological visionary and part huckster, the eight scientists, or "terranauts," as they've been dubbed, picked for Mission Two will live for two years in a three-acre artificial earth. The story is told through the divergent perspectives of three participants: Dawn Chapman, the attractive young ecologist and animal keeper; Ramsay Roothoorp, the slick-surfaced communications officer and ladies' man; and Linda Ryu, Dawn's presumptive best friend, who was left off the project and is constantly scheming to get inside-generally at Dawn's expense. What begins in the throes of ecological idealism eventually devolves into petty squabbles and infighting, especially after Dawn becomes pregnant by Ramsay and decides to have her baby inside E2. VERDICT Beneath the high-tech sheen is a rather old-fashioned theme: how idealistic enterprises can crumble owing to the foibles and fragility of human nature. This is one of Boyle's best-and quite possibly one of the best of the year. [See Prepub Alert, 4/3/16.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Soap opera, satire, and religious allegory find an uneasy balance within this earthbound version of a space colony.Theres a lot of back story in the latest from the prolific, eclectic Boyle (The Harder They Come, 2015, etc.). As a scientific experiment in the ecology of closed systems, with lessons learned for when wed have to seed life elsewhereon Mars, to begin with, four men and four women are chosen by Mission Control (from 16 finalists) to live in a sealed compound in the Arizona desert for two years. They are designated Mission Two after an unfortunate accident aborted Mission One. Ultimately, the grand design calls for 50 such two-year missions, a full century of data collection. Three different first-person narrators provide alternating perspectives in separate chapters that advance the plot. Dawn and Ramsay have both been chosen, like the rest, because of media attractiveness to bring public support to an enterprise that relies on it, while Linda, a Korean-American also-ran who remains behind as a monitor on those under glass, feels like her looks and ethnicity have unfairly deprived her. Ramsay maintains that there are winners and losers in life and that Linda was one of the losers. Dawn and Linda have bonded throughout the training and selection process, but Linda now finds herself transitioning from best friend to frenemy. Though the plot also involves a God and a Judas in Mission Control, and eventually an Eve as well, the focus throughout these 500-plus pages rarely shifts from its central obsession: who among what our species has come to consider prime breeding stock will pair with whom? Those on the inside gossip and speculate, as does Mission Control, as does the public at large. Since we were all unmarried, there was endless speculation in the press about which of us might pair up, one rag even going so far as to post odds, writes Dawn. Amid the changing allegiances and alliances, sex eventually has consequences, though the reader wearied by two years of this might not much care. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
