C. Boyle has entered the climate fiction arena before—A Friend of the Earth (2000) comes to mind—but I suspect that Boyle doesn’t see any of his work as primarily climate fiction, even while his latest, Blue Skies, published in 2023 by Liveright Publishing Corporation (W.W. Norton & Company, in the U.K.), is the most obviously climate change-focused of any of his work. T. C. Boyle writes first and foremost about people, even while climate change may be ravaging the world around his characters.

There’s a type of good news/bad news issue with Boyle’s focus on people over climate change. The good news is that this makes the book a work of literature more than a textbook on climatology. The bad news is that Boyle’s view of humanity is dark, so his focus on people can be a bit of a challenge to a reader’s own sense of humanity. It isn’t that Boyle is off target in his opinion of his fellow man, but it is a difficult read at times. One thing that should be clear to anyone reading Boyle is that the guy is a fine writer, so poor writing is not the difficulty a reader encounters. The difficulty for some readers may be that his characters are hard to like, and that goes double even for those characters most positively presented.

First, though, let’s talk about climate change and what role it plays in Blue Skies. Climate change consequences are throughout the book, and incessantly so, although you shouldn’t approach Blue Skies as a primer on climate change. Instead, climate change is a through character that is not well-developed or much explained, much like a murderer whose motive is never developed nor the plot or technique as the killer carries out the crimes. In a book about human characters living through often severe effects of climate change—heat waves, rising seas, droughts, fires, and entomologists’ desperation—the mere reference to the conditions being wrought by a warming globe suffices. Climate change as the new steady state background of human lives.

Unfortunately, at least for this reader with his fancypants knowledge of climate change, distraction awaits those who strive to place Blue Skies’ within relevant timelines. The sense in the book is that the story exists in the near future that is more or less indistinct from today, where the lives lived by the characters are pretty much what life is like for us Americans, except that the consequences of climate change have been turned up to the proverbial 11 on the volume dial. On the other hand, some incidents reflect actual events, such as the burning of a significant part of a significant city in California, so Boyle’s climate change effects sometimes hits the mark. But most often, the scale and scope of the climate change consequences here in America suggest that the timeline should be 2050 or 2100, even while the rest of society, culture, and technology is stuck in 2023.

Does it matter that Boyle exaggerates climate change relative to the suggested (through details) year of now? Not really.

What may be more problematic for the reader is that the ostensible normal characters tend to be either maddening in their shallowness and poor decisions or otherwise simply shallow. Chapters alternative among three characters’ POV, and I found myself alternately taken by the characters and disgusted by their selfishness and self-centeredness, but then one might rightly suggest such is the way to describe humans, or, at least, Americans. Nonetheless, while not a wide reader of T. C. Boyle, I often think that his view of humanity is dark. One does not come away from Blue Skies (or other T. C. Boyle books, I’ll wager) feeling good about any character, even when offset by an ambivalence derived through sympathy.

In the end, Blue Skies is a well-written but dour view of man (and quite likely somewhat accurate, unfortunately), with the “character” climate change ham-fisted in its presentation. But then, a hammed fist may be exactly right for the sort of club with which to beat shallow and ineffective Americans marching along in their middle-class steps toward apocalypse.