No Way Home by T C Boyle
About this book
No Way Home tells the haunting story of Terrence Tully, an LA medical resident who is abruptly informed that his mother has died. Arriving at her home in a forlorn Nevada desert town, the naive doctor finds himself "like a swimmer caught in a riptide," drawn into a love triangle involving the manipulative, margarita-swilling receptionist Bethany and her ex-boyfriend Jesse, a vengeful middle-school teacher cocksure about his sexual prowess. There is indeed no way home for Tully, who cannot extricate himself from this aimless, post-twenty-something world where motorcycle races and violent brawls puncture the daily grind of nowhere jobs, aimless sex, and recreational highs. Is retribution, Boyle asks, a natural human instinct? Can sexual jealousy bring on a level of vengeance that is downright pathological? With its depiction of a desiccated town struggling in the dark shadows of a luminous, mountainous horizon, No Way Home is a tour de force by an American master at his finest.
