PositiveThe Atlantic...they aren’t sweeping, Planet Earth–style panoramas—melting ice, forlorn polar bears, inexhaustible tempests—but rather, tiny, satirical tragicomedies about individual people. Before climate change, the great subject of Boyle’s fiction was narcissism, explored in novel-length portraits of megalomaniacs (Frank Lloyd Wright; John Harvey Kellogg; Alfred Kinsey) as well as smaller tales of ego and insecurity. That focus hasn’t changed with his eco-fictions; if anything, focusing on navel-gazers is what makes them interesting to read ... In the past, his stories would sometimes shade into indulging the egos they purported to satirize. But in more ecological contexts they become bitter portraits of human folly: He uses male self-centeredness to explore species self-centeredness, showing how one almost always entails the other ... In Boyle’s satires, anthropocentrism is tenacious: Like a virus, it consumes the host; like a species, it adapts to change; like the voice of the devil, it feeds on doubt. Somehow it becomes stronger, not weaker, when climate change beats on the thin walls of human self-conception—or when a force of nature shows up at the door and says we are more responsible than we think we are; we are less different, less exceptional, less human after all. It is a universal, baseline prejudice, one that, in Boyle’s fictions, shapes the feelings of selfish consumers and selfless activists alike. But being able to recognize it, he suggests—to see human self-involvement with brutal clarity—might be the only way to get beyond it.
