Review: ‘The Terranauts’

T.C. Boyle, one of the most acclaimed and prolific alums of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, has a long-standing interest in group dynamics under various kinds of stress. His 16th novel, 'The Terranauts,” takes us inside E2, an experimental environment populated by four men and four women who have committed to two years of literally living under glass in the Arizona desert. The motto of the effort: nothing in, nothing out.

While it's true that the members of the crew - to greater or lesser degrees - are committed to the purity of closure, there are still plenty of transactions between E2 and world outside. News (much of it spun to maximize positive publicity), gossip, secrets, schemes and more penetrate the glass enclosure. The pressures inside, outside and between the two worlds threaten the whole endeavor with figurative implosion.

Boyle selected three characters to tell his tale. Dawn Chapman and Ramsay Roothoorp are inside while Linda Ryu, who didn't make the cut for the mission, is on the outside looking in. Boyle has convincingly created three distinct voices for his characters; a reader of the first three chapters could easily identify which character is relating each subsequent section even if they weren't tagged and in a consistent order.

The tension ratchets up throughout the book, and Boyle handles the breakdown of esprit de core convincingly. As individuals start to succumb to various hardships, the cohesion of the group naturally frays, as well. Projects like E2 are designed to help create the future, but as Boyle's story shows, that future may well amplify all the problems of the past.