---
product_id: 39610589
title: "The Harder They Come Paperback – March 1, 2016"
brand: "t.c. boyle"
price: "€ 29.60"
currency: EUR
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 8
url: https://www.desertcart.de/products/39610589-the-harder-they-come-paperback-march-1-2016
store_origin: DE
region: Germany
---

# The Harder They Come Paperback – March 1, 2016

**Brand:** t.c. boyle
**Price:** € 29.60
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

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- **What is this?** The Harder They Come Paperback – March 1, 2016 by t.c. boyle
- **How much does it cost?** € 29.60 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.de](https://www.desertcart.de/products/39610589-the-harder-they-come-paperback-march-1-2016)

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Engrossing, topical novel of realism
  

*by L***A on Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2015*

I finished reading this engrossing novel a few weeks ago, just before two inmates from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora staged a daring escape through a maze of steam pipes.  Even as authorities in hot pursuit claim daily (as of this writing) that they are closing in on the fugitives, the dangerous duo’s whereabouts are  anybody’s guess. Residents near the facility are locking themselves in their homes, fearing for their lives and property.  Boyle’s latest novel about a murderous renegade in Northern California spares residents this torment. There are many resonances of the Dannemora prison escape in T.C. Boyle’s latest novel, including the involvement of a woman.  I enjoyed the twist and turns of the novel, thanks to Boyle’s, easy-to-follow and straightforward narrative despite switches in points of view among the three main characters. The first is Sten Stensen, a 70-year- old former Marine who had fought in Vietnam and is now a retired school principal. On a trip to Costa Rica, Sten, with his bare hands, saves his wife and their group of vacationers from gun-wielding locals out to rob them. It is a great opening, wonderfully and vividly rendered; it is vintage Boyle. We are immediately drawn to Sten’s action and the ensuing events it foreshadows, and to this gentle, ‘aw-shucks’ elderly American who tries to deflect the attention he has garnered for his heroic deed.The novel then focuses on his crack-crazed son, Adam, who should be in the care of a psychiatrist or taking psychotropic drugs for his mental illness. Boyle instead sets him loose him in the wild, where he carries out his fantasies of being a modern-day John Colter, the intrepid scout for the Lewis and Clark expedition hailed as the first Mountain Man in America for eluding a mob of Blackfoot Indians through what is known as Colter’s Run.The ensuing chapters go back and forth between Colter’s actual adventures and Adam’s latter-day copycat escapade which sees him kill two men, setting off an epic manhunt. Some readers may find those passages disorienting as Boyle switches between Colter's consciousness and Adam’s rabid musings.  Adam’s love interest, a farrier, named Sara, is some 15 years older than he; she is a renegade in her own right who despises authority and government; in a way  Boyle makes us identify with her because who hasn't at one time or another, fantasized about living in unfettered freedom, free of restrictions from the laws and government? But the novel also makes clear the high cost of unruliness: Sara’s life is a string of chaos, she can’t even retrieve her beloved dog from the pound by paying the fine without putting up a protracted and fruitless fight.  She and Adam strike a co-dependency relationship, but Sara’s character is not believable; it is not clear what motivates her to live the way she does, full of bitterness; after all she works for a living, caring for animals, and so has to attract and interact with customers.In Sten, Adam, and Sara, Boyle explores the role of violence in American life. Some of this ferociousness is praiseworthy, even necessary, if wielded to save other people’s lives, to fight in a war for one’s country, or in in self-defense.More worrisome has been gratuitous violence triggered by mental illness, a belief of being above the law or a victim of society’s laws.In this highly satisfying novel, Adam, who drives most of the narrative, clearly suffers from autism and is an indictment of the system's failure to deal with the growing problem of mental illness exacerbated by use of illegal drugs.This is a novel of realism, based on actual events in Northern California not too long ago and so the plot is not that original. But through his vivid and imaginative writing Boyle puts a human face on violence in America. His rendering of the seasons on the California coasts is inimitable: “The winter rains came and buried everything. They swelled the streams scoured the ravines, drove deep to refresh the roots of the big sentinel trees that stood watch over the forest and climbed steadily up into the greening hills.”Boyle’s novel doesn’t offer any solution to the violent aspect of our society, only shows that it has frustratingly become part of its landscape. The point seems to be that the goal of controlling gun ownership, wanton killings and bombings of innocent people by misguided and unstable people will remain aspirational, like Sten Stensen vowing once in his youth to master golf but, as he painfully realizes after several decades, fails to follow through.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    The Mountain Man
  

*by M***S on Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2015*

The explorer John Colter, a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition and widely considered the first Mountain Man in America, famously once escaped a murderous mob of Blackfoot Indians through a series of maneuvers which is known now as Colter's Run. This legendary gauntlet, outlined in T.C. Boyle's novel, The Harder They Come, is just one the heroic feats which guide one of its main character, Adam Stensen, through his cracked existence. Adam identifies so much with the mountain man, he christens himself with his  champion's surname; Colter: evocative not only of the explorer himself but of guns or horses or of the plow wheel it describes; an instrument used to cut through the earth. It seems the real John Colter lived his life in a far different environment, in a more brutal, less sensitive world; one which celebrated violence and aggression as much as it is misplaced today.Adam is the son of Sten Stensen, a seventy year old Vietnam vet and retired High School principal. The outset of Boyle's tale finds Sten and his wife, Carolee, vacationing down in Costa Rica where they find themselves on a "nature tour" traveling for too long over rough jungle terrain in a rickety bus full of their fellow slightly hungover tourists. When they finally arrive at their destination, the bemused travelers are set upon by a gang of three local thugs, one of whom brandishes a gun. In the confusion, Sten's military training prevails. Boyle tells us: "What he'd learned as a nineteen-year-old himself, a recruit, green as an apple, wasn't about self defense, it was about killing, and does anybody ever forget that?" Ineluctably, Sten is able to overcome the gun-toter, putting him in a choke hold and keeping him there, perhaps a bit too long, until the boy goes limp in his arms.The third character Boyle chooses to closely follow is Sara, a disaffected anarchist in her late thirties who just happens to cross paths with our anti-hero, Adam. She allows him first into her car, then into her life or should we say he allows her into his life. Either way it is a believable pairing given the age gap (15 years). Sara is perpetually at odds with the authorities, refusing to acknowledge their control over her sovereign self, not buying in to the contract with civil service (the police or the DMV). She cites the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment which allows for the principle of freedom of contract, the basis of laissez faire economics. This philosophy, however altruistic in her own mind, quickly leaves her life in chaos. Sara's embrace of Adam's free range lifestyle, which to her seems to emulate some sort of extreme off-the-grid survivalism, is at first blush a perfect fit. But sadly it becomes all too apparent just how little reality is a part of Adam's psyche.The Harder They Come, based on real events which transpired in Northern California a few years back, examines the interplay between these three deeply flawed characters, yet only by revealing their own decisive and responsible behavior; how one may affect or dissuade the other is really subtextual. Boyle lets the reader work that out. The tone of this work is somewhat somber and pessimistic. There is not much room for humor here as the author continues to ignore comically eccentric figures as he'd employed in the past (Mungo Park, John Harvey Kellogg); once again he eschews the biting satire which was so much a part of his early work (World's End, The Road to Wellville) in favor of more weighty material. In the case of The Harder They Come this is good news; for the veteran novelist and for his readers. It allows him to more thoroughly mine the quarry of human condition; to reveal the profound effect which society can impose on individuals, especially ones who happen to be mentally ill; Adam, though he fancies himself Colter, a modern Mountain Man, though his limbs are hard as stone from his incessant work in the deep woods beyond his home, and because of his condition, cannot impose himself in the real world without escaping from it. With this work, Boyle shows how guilt and shame can lead to rage or violence or perhaps most consequentially, inaction.~ 4.7 Stars

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    questionable rugged role models and legends of the usa
  

*by C***R on Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2022*

boyle’s archetypes, a take on ralph waldo emerson’s Representative Men, are usually surrounded by acolytes, disciples and apprentices. here, the two models are dead and their disciples follow after their deaths.  john colter, real life u.s. american, is a figure from the past, a mountain man hired as a scout by lewis & clark. after his contract with them was finished, instead of returning to civilization, colter continued living in the wilderness. his legendary exploits become the blueprint for a young man living in mendocino county, ca, rifle toting adam who spends much of his time in the forest growing marijuana and toughening himself as a self-styled mountain man. hitch-hiking one day, he’s picked up by sara jennings, a middle-aged woman, who earns her living as a local farrier. sara, like adam, has her deceased role model, the real-life jerry kane, founding member of the sovereign citizens, an anti-government group with beliefs that if citizens state they have no contract with the u.s. government they are absolved from paying taxes and following many laws, such as using seatbelts, resulting in an infraction that entangles sara jennings with local law enforcement.  after a simmilar run in with local enforcement, kane and his son were killed during a shootout with the police.  adam and sara hook-up forming an alliance of human needs, tolerant of and irritated by each other’s alienated obsession, obsessions with separate outcomes. a grim story of disaffected people that with each passing day reflects segments of our society. a book highly recommended for book groups.

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*Product available on Desertcart Germany*
*Store origin: DE*
*Last updated: 2026-02-05*