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.