View from Santa Cruz Island at sunset over Santa Rosa Island © by Nancy Crowley/courtesy: The Nature Conservancy

Throughout his prolific career, in novels such as The Tortilla Curtain and the National Book Award finalist Drop City, as well as in countless works of short fiction like the title story in last year’s collection Wild Child, Boyle has repeatedly returned to the intersection of man and nature, always with a unique insight into what it means to be a human animal.

Recently, in the wake of Japan’s devastating earthquake, PLANET spoke to the author about his new novel and the state of the world:

Given what’s happening in the aftermath of the earthquake in Japan, and with you being someone who has a lot to say about our place on the earth, what sense can you make of what we’re seeing? I can’t make any sense of it whatsoever. That’s like asking Nietzsche to make sense of God’s absence from the universe and what we’re doing here. What happened in Japan is just a natural occurrence. You might recall my story “Chickxulub” in Tooth and Claw, which deals with the asteroid strike that wiped out most of life in the Yucatan 65 million years ago. We are just at the mercy of the elements.

But in this case, we’ve added to the complications with the nuclear situation. You grew up in Peekskill, New York in the shadow of Indian Point. That’s right, the first working nuke was right there. And I also address that in an early sort of autobiographical story called “The Fog Man,” which opens with a kid like me in a development like where I grew up, not far from the atomic power plant. They’re spraying DDT,