Editorial Content for No Way Home
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Terrence Tully is a third-year medical resident in a gritty downtown Los Angeles hospital. As he tries to save an emergency room patient from a suspected heart attack, he receives a call from an unknown source giving him the horrible news that his mother has died. This necessitates a road trip down I-15 to the deadbeat town in Nevada where she retired.
Upon his arrival, Terrence meets Bethany, an attractive café waitress who is hiding a bevy of dark secrets. She recognizes Terrence --- who is there to inspect the house and car he is inheriting from his mother --- as a good chance to stop living in a storage unit and finally enjoy some life, post-deadbeat boyfriend. However, as willing as Terrence is to explore a relationship with Bethany, he does not realize that this twosome is actually a threesome, with Bethany’s ex, Jesse, never far behind them.
"With his trademark cinematic invention, NO WAY HOME becomes one of T.C. Boyle’s most exciting books. You will savor every word of this perfectly enthralling vacation read."
Drinks, fights, drugs and sex get the better of Terrence in NO WAY HOME, the latest adventure from American provocateur T.C. Boyle, as he investigates the kind of bewitched and confused world that we see in David Lynch films.
The desert is forlorn, a place where things that would seem weird even for Los Angeles lifers come to light in the darkest hours of the day. Bethany pulls Terrence into this nightmare hellscape with her feminine wiles, of which she clearly has many. Terrence, the do-gooder, strains against the chaos of her life for a while but then falls prey to its oddly charming rhythms. As NO WAY HOME moves him closer to Bethany’s wild ride of a life, there is a strange electricity pulsating below the main story. His love of movies gives the book a sheen of unreality, just enough for the reader to know that his descent into the farthest reaches of hell is going to be difficult to watch but even harder to turn away from.
Boyle is a master storyteller who rates alongside Louise Erdrich and Willa Cather for finding a way into the American diaspora but carving out their territory from its most banal pieces. As Terrence deals more directly with Bethany’s low-rent, high-danger world, he has to rationalize the pathological vengeance that she and Jesse take out on each other. Is this a natural human instinct, or is it particular to just this place itself? Inside the small town, Boyle finds a deeply felt explanation and a record number of weird things. How will Terrence survive this craziness? Did his mother know how bizarre this place was? Or is this the only way he knows how to put behind him all the things he had always just chalked up to “family”?
Bethany, Terrence and Jesse each get sections of their own in which Boyle digs further into their perspectives on all this insanity. By doing so, he raises more questions than he answers, all to the benefit of the psychological thriller nature of the story. Worn-out lakes, homemade tequila and curving roads muster up that echoing cavernous cicada chant of the American Dream, the desert west appearing that it will go on forever, adding to the fear and manipulation that humans foist on themselves and others, and the age-old question of when enough is enough. Is there really a winner at the end of all of this roundabout anger and hostility?
With his trademark cinematic invention, NO WAY HOME becomes one of T.C. Boyle’s most exciting books. You will savor every word of this perfectly enthralling vacation read.
Teaser
Terrence Tully is at work when he receives news that his mother has died. A third-year medical resident in a gritty community hospital in downtown Los Angeles, he sees death daily, but the news that his mother has passed away jolts him like no other. Turn the page, and he’s heading north on I-15 through a lifeless desert to the small Nevada town where his mother had retired. Overwhelmed with grief and the burden of having to sort out the remnants of his mother’s life, he stops at a café and has a chance encounter with a pretty young local girl in a turquoise minidress. What seems to him a chance meeting like so many we all experience daily will come to upend his life and morph into a fatal obsession.
Promo
Terrence Tully is at work when he receives news that his mother has died. A third-year medical resident in a gritty community hospital in downtown Los Angeles, he sees death daily, but the news that his mother has passed away jolts him like no other. Turn the page, and he’s heading north on I-15 through a lifeless desert to the small Nevada town where his mother had retired. Overwhelmed with grief and the burden of having to sort out the remnants of his mother’s life, he stops at a café and has a chance encounter with a pretty young local girl in a turquoise minidress. What seems to him a chance meeting like so many we all experience daily will come to upend his life and morph into a fatal obsession.
About the Book
David Lynch meets Fight Club in T.C. Boyle’s NO WAY HOME, an obsessive psychological study that illuminates the darkness that lurks inside all of us.
Terrence Tully, work-obsessed and a naif in the arenas of sex and love, is at work when he receives news that his mother has died. A third-year medical resident in a gritty community hospital in downtown Los Angeles, he sees death daily, but the news that his mother has passed away, delivered to his cell phone by the voice of a stranger, jolts him like no other, even as he is in the act of trying to save the life of a patient undergoing cardiac arrest.
Turn the page, and he’s heading north on I-15 through a lifeless desert to the small Nevada town where his mother has retired. Overwhelmed with grief and the burden of having to sort out the remnants of his mother’s life, including the house and car she has left him, he stops at a café and has a chance encounter with a pretty young local girl in a turquoise minidress. What seems to him a chance meeting like so many we all experience daily will come to upend his life and morph into a fatal obsession.
For Bethany, a receptionist at the local hospital, who, like many twenty-somethings, is trying to sort out her options in life while haunting the local bars and clubs, this chance encounter is anything but trivial. Down on her luck after breaking up with her boyfriend and surreptitiously living out of her storage unit, she finds Terrence attractive on a number of counts, not least of which is his status as a doctor and, by default, a homeowner.
What follows becomes the heart of NO WAY HOME, a propulsive narrative with cinematic overtones in the tradition of Mulholland Drive and the cold hard lyricism of Cormac McCarthy and Robert Stone, as Terrence is drawn into a toxic love triangle with Bethany and her former beau, Jesse. No longer in control of his ordered and once-predictable life, Terrence becomes hostage to a world where shots of tequila and violent brawls puncture the daily grind of nowhere jobs, aimless sex and recreational highs --- a rootless existence from which there appears to be no escape and no fixed refuge.
Stylistically shimmering and unraveling under a harsh desert sky crenellated by the peaks of the Nevada mountains, T.C. Boyle’s narrative explores what it is, on an animal level, to fight over a woman and what retribution really looks like. Can sexual jealousy breed a thirst for vengeance that becomes desperately pathological? In the hands of “one of America’s greatest living novelists” (Los Angeles Review of Books), NO WAY HOME is a chilling tour de force by an American master at his very best.
Audiobook available; read by Jonathan Todd Ross, Samara Naeymi and Eddie Lopez
