Editor’s note: This review contains spoilers for No Way Home by T. C. Boyle.
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LATE IN T. C. BOYLE’S new novel No Way Home, Jesse Seeger, an eighth-grade English teacher and aspiring writer, comments on Lake Mead, the setting of his novel in progress:
The lake hadn’t been full since 1983, long before his time. Since then it had been steadily receding in the face of the unremitting drought, the drought from hell that was going to last a thousand years, already exposing all sorts of artifacts, secret things, hidden things, from staved-in boats to the shell of a Cessna airplane and the remains of what everybody said was a Las Vegas mobster cemented in a rusting barrel. That would be a story to tell, and he wondered if he could work it into what he was writing now.
We never know if Jesse follows through with this idea. His project, a narrative about his great-grandfather, the last resident of St. Thomas before the dam-created Lake Mead flooded the town, remains incomplete at the end of No Way Home.
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