T. C. Boyle’s The Harder They Come: Violence in America

Abstract

AbstractT. C. Boyle’s fifteenth novel The Harder They Come (2015) offers a fictional inquiry into the American propensity for violence and takes its title from Jimmy Cliff’s 1972 reggae song and its motto from D. H. Lawrence’s characterization of the “essential American soul [as] hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer” (1978: 68). The article investigates how Boyle creates a metafictional historiography by combining two unrelated historical events – the bare-handed killing of a mugger by an elderly American veteran in Costa Rica and the long police hunt for the schizophrenic murderer Aaron Bassler in the Mendocino Redwoods – with a fictional character who represents the paranoid fringe worlds of sovereign citizens. The article then shows how Boyle embeds his plot in a general atmosphere of menace and incorporates the legend of the heroic mountain man John Colter, thus adding historical depth and evoking the world of wilderness survivalists. It also examines the narrative techniques, such as the choice of a schizophrenic’s point of view, and the stylistic features employed in order to fuse these ingredients into a thrilling tale that reveals the hidden relations between American foundation myths and the threats of contemporary gun violence.