NO WAY HOME

A romantic triangle turns brutal in a dead-end Nevada desert town.

It all starts with the death of Terrence Tully’s mother. He’s a third-year medical resident in Los Angeles, working a brain-deadening schedule and barely aware of the world outside. He reduces the rest of humanity to symptoms and diagnoses. But the news of his mother’s death changes his life, and not for the better. He drives the four hours across the desert to deal with her affairs in Nevada. She’s left him a house. And a dog. He stops to get his bearings at a restaurant in town, where he encounters Bethany. She’s pretty, approachable, and apparently needs a place to live. He now has one, his mother’s house, though he isn’t about to open it to a stranger. But Bethany awakens something irresistibly sexual in Terry, and the house is soon all but hers. She’s recently experienced a hard breakup with Jesse, a biker with a jealous streak and impulse-control issues who teaches eighth grade. (You wouldn’t want him teaching your eighth grader.) It’s soon apparent that Bethany’s ex isn’t quite as much an ex as she’d indicated. Something’s gotta give. Something does, and then something worse. Revenge, retribution, retaliation—there are a series of attempts to balance the cosmic scales of justice. Do these characters get what they deserve? (Does anyone?) The narrative alternates among the perspective of each of these three, none of whom has much of an interior life. The plot pivots on pat coincidence, with some noirish cliché and riffing on sex and death. Each of the three characters wonders where their life is going. Though doctors tend to warn patients they’re not out of the woods, Bethany realizes that “we’re all in the woods all the time.” By the end of the novel, it’s plain that there is no possibility of redemption for these three, or even resolution.

The dark humor suggests Boyle is having more fun than his characters.