T. C. Boyle - A digital scrap-book about "The Tortilla Curtain"
- T. Coraghessan Boyle
- "The Tortilla Curtain": Reviews
TIME Magazine (September 4, 1995)
SNOBS AND WETBACKS
Sneering at the Class Divide
T. Coraghessan Boyle is an overpraised novelist with an unpleasant habit of sneering at his own cardboard characters. Some writers can carry this off, some can't. Aldous Huxley adopted a toplofty attitude toward his creatures, but he had the intellectual force to transform snobbery into satire. Among current novelists, Martin Amis lacks intellectual force but is well supplied with nastiness, which occasionally resembles humor. Boyle merely sounds as if he needs an antacid.
His new novel, The Tortilla Curtain (Viking; 355 pages; $23.95), botches a good theme: the shuddering distaste of California's patio-living Anglos for the Mexican illegals who perform the state's stoop labor. His pale hero is Delaney, a nature writer who has moved with his wife Kyra, a real estate shark, to a housing development above Topanga Canyon. Delaney is not just politically correct, he's politically exquisite, but when a Mexican man, Candido, blunders in front of his white Acura on a canyon road, his reaction is angry revulsion: the wounded wetback, to whom he gives a $20 bill, is an infiltrator.
That's true. Candido and his pregnant 17-year-old wife, decent folk down on their luck, huddle in a makeshift camp in the canyon and climb out every morning to find work at a labor exchange. But the sight of hungry Mexicans spooks Kyra's clients, and she sees to it that the exchange is shut. Delaney's liberal beliefs crumble, and he votes with other residents to build a wall, with a gate, around their development. The author, mistrusting his skill and the reader's acuteness, relentlessly flashes irony alerts. Candido gets work constructing the wall, knowing well enough whom it is intended to keep out. Coyotes eat the nature writer's lapdogs, Osbert and Sacheverell. And when a mud slide sweeps Delaney toward mucky death, let there be no doubt whose brown, work-worn hand reaches to pull him free. This is weak, obvious stuff, worth a raised eyebrow and a shrug. --J.S.
- from: TIME Magazine September 4, 1995 Volume 146, No. 10
- Copyright 1995 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
- NEWSWEEK-review: October 9, 1995
- "To Live and Cry in L. A.: A biting, brutal look at immigration in the U. S."
(P.S.: Much more positive than the TIME's review!)
THE TORTILLA CURTAIN
T. Coraghessan Boyle; Viking, 355 pages, $23.95
The Tortilla Curtain is a variant on the baffled-middle-aged-man novel; this time, Mr. Midlife is a liberal in crisis. And where better to have a crisis than Southern California, the Land of Paranoia?
The liberal in question is Delaney Mossbacher, a NYC transplant living in posh Topanga Canyon. His wife peddles expensive real estate while he writes a nature column, hikes in the wilderness surrounding their home and returns in time to pick her child up from school and fix dinner.
He gets up in arms against gating off their community, playing the token liberal at neighborhood meetings. Delaney swims through life unchallenged until he hits a Mexican on the road, buys him off with $20 and plunges into a spiraling resentment of immigrants with each successive assault endured by his white Acura (license plate: PILGRIM). His live-and-let-live philosophy becomes further twisted to the right with each immigrant incident, until his wrath and lack of understanding warp him beyond all sense. He can't be an old-school liberal and live his cozy life, so he chooses to protect his standard of living at the expense of other living things -- like the Mexican immigrants who seem to have gone unnoticed prior to their contact with his car.
Tortilla is also -- and primarily -- the story of Candido and Amrica Rincon, the man Pilgrim hits and his young wife, who are camping in the canyon. Candido and Amrica are poster children for every disaster that might possibly befall a pair of illegals, from the minute they pay someone to get them across the border and are attacked on the other side. The couple live amid a constant barrage of misfortune and physical hardship, and poor Candido has a number of run-ins with Pilgrim after the initial accident. In fact, he becomes the demon poster child of Pilgrim's wrath; to Candido, however, Pilgrim is just another of the many gabacho demons who make his life difficult.
Boyle takes a look at both sides of the curtain, juxtaposing white xenophobia against the illegals' desire to work their asses off just to survive in a hostile environment; his characterization of the Rincons makes them very human, while the Mossbachers are saved from our contempt only because they fall so far beneath it. This isn't a great book, but it holds a certain interest at a time when keeping the Other out is becoming an increasingly big business.
Maureen McClarnon
from: http://altx.com/io/tortillacurtain.html
Extract:
Boyle is particularly good on the ironies involved in the situation. Delaney is a nature writer, with a great interest in coyotes, which also inhabit the canyon. His love of wild animals however doesn't extend to the human animal - particularly the illegal variety. And Kyra, for all her liberalism, doesn't hesitate to call the authorities when she sees Mexican laborers gathering to be picked up for work by local farmers close to the exclusive housing development where she is selling.
Boyle has done his research well. His Mexicans are totally convincing, even though he seems to have more fun with his American characters. The Mexicans are real people with feelings, memories and fully described lives, not only their lives in America but the lives they left south of the border. One really feels their fear, their despair, their anger as they pursue the "American dream", which the Mossbachers are living to the hilt. At the same time one also feels the fear of the Americans about all these strangers appearing amongst them.
A couple of Californian friends found this novel "depressing", but I really think they meant it's a little too close to the truth. It is a tragedy but it's not without its satirical and comic moments and the pace never flags for a moment.http://www.mexconnect.com/mex_/travel/acogan/acbktortilla.html
Down and out in Topanga
from: University of Southern California Chronicle (September 9, 1995)There's nothing flat about The Tortilla Curtain. In his latest novel, T. Coraghessan Boyle spices up his famous barbed-wire wit with a picante splash of controversy.
by Carol TuckerT. Coraghessan Boyle has grown accustomed to ardent love letters from fans and critics alike. But his new novel is triggering unfamiliar reader reactions: anger.
"I've never had anything like the response for this book," said Boyle, an English professor in the creative writing program. "It's been very surprising to me. It's the white liberal men who feel the sting of this satire, when I thought it would be another element altogether who might disagree with my point of view."
Boyle's other books have appealed to a predominantly young male readership. But The Tortilla Curtain (published by Viking) has attracted a new demographic - women and older people.
On leave this semester to plug the book, Boyle is philosophical about early reactions. "I'm getting very passionate responses, pro and con, and nothing in between. It's a controversial subject, and that's kind of exciting."
The story juxtaposes the parallel worlds of two Los Angeles couples who are struggling with the realities of illegal immigration. Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher are environmentally correct, liberal yuppies living high at the top of Topanga Canyon in an exclusive gated community. Below, camping in the canyon, struggling to survive, are Cándido and América Rincón, who have illegally crossed the border to seek their fortune in the north.
From the moment Delaney, cruising in his plush, white Acura, accidentally collides with Cándido as the Mexican man crosses the road, their opposing worlds also collide in a series of events building to a powerful ending.
Shifting between the different characters' viewpoints, Boyle exposes the fears and prejudices of the affluent whites and paints a haunting portrait of the Mexicans.
The truth, said Boyle, is that The Tortilla Curtain may hit too close to home for many of his readers. Boyle's prose cuts close to the nerve as he describes Cándido and América enduring such hardships as starvation, a hit-and-run, rape and robbery. He pours liberal doses of satire on the Mossbachers, who freak out when their dogs are snatched by a coyote, their car is stolen and their neighborhood market parking lot becomes the loitering ground for illegal day laborers.
"Delaney is the perfect character if I'm going to show what racism means and how it might have evolved," Boyle said. "He means well. The other people in his circle have no pretensions about [being open-minded]. But he comes from New York with no prejudices - at least, he doesn't think he has any. As the book evolves, so does his racism - or scapegoating - until he's way over the line."
Boyle, who recently relocated to Montecito after living in Los Angeles for 16 years, said he is much closer to Delaney's character than he is to Cándido.
"I'm chastising myself, in a way, as well as people like me," he said.
The Mossbachers are flesh and blood. "Many readers find that Delaney and Kyra are very real," Boyle said.
"Yes, I'm poking a finger at them, and people like them may be uneasy with that, but satire has to have teeth, otherwise it's useless."
On the other hand, Boyle views the Rincóns as innocents at the moral center of his tale which should be read as a fable.
"Cándido, like his namesake Candide, has a lot of troubles thrown at him," Boyle said.
The Tortilla Curtain is a departure from Boyle's other work, which includes six novels and four collections of short stories. Although he has dealt with similar themes before, The Tortilla Curtain is probably his most compassionate and dramatic, and least comic, novel to date. It lacks the "laugh-out-loud" quality of his previous work, The Road to Wellville. Because it is satirical, however, Boyle insists that The Tortilla Curtain is comedy, by definition.
"This is a satire where maybe you chuckle and shake your head," Boyle said.
Like one of his literary heroes, Flannery O'Connor, Boyle likes to mix humor and drama to keep the reader off balance.
"You think this is a satirical comedy, and in comedy, everything always works out okay. But as you read on, you realize that's not the case at all," he said. "Right in the opening pages, you laugh at the character of Delaney, but his response [to the accident] is not totally acceptable. Then you see that Cándido is severely injured, and the laugh dies in your throat. Throughout the rest of the book, you may chuckle at the portrait of Delaney and Kyra, but I think it's a very grim humor."
Several new short stories by Boyle, slated to be published in a collection, share the same dark tone. One story is set at a Milwaukee abortion clinic.
"My wife calls these my angry stories," Boyle said. "This was something new for me, and I wanted to play with it dramatically."
Boyle said the idea for The Tortilla Curtain came from "reading the L.A. Times every morning and looking at the way people deal with problems of illegal immigration." The characters were based on his day-to-day observations.
Boyle's research for the book included traveling to Tijuana to take another look at the border and reading such books as Bill Mc- Kibben's The End of Nature and Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague.
The book is full of ironies. It's no coincidence, Boyle said, that Delaney is a nature writer (he pens a column called "The Pilgrim of Topanga Creek"). "Ecologists are generally very liberal people, except when it comes to this one issue of immigration. The enemy is people," he said, referring to the problems of overpopulation and human encroachment on the environment.
The book deals with the theme of encroachment on nature in many ways. For instance, Delaney moved to the canyon to be close to nature, but he must build a fence to keep the coyotes from attacking his pets. Meanwhile Cándido is living in the canyon and polluting it, but he tells his wife not to drink from the stream because it is polluted by those living above.
In The Tortilla Curtain, the forces of nature are, in the end, more powerful then prejudice. But human forces also are potent: the characters' actions trigger the disasters that ultimately turn their world upside-down.
Boyle wanted to expose the hypocrisy of liberalism. "I wanted to see what liberalism really means, whether people really mean what they say and whether they would act on it," he said.
The wall - as the title The Tortilla Curtain implies - is a central metaphor. It's the border between two countries and the physical barrier surrounding Delaney's community.
"People would like to think that we help the downtrodden, but we don't. We build walls, and we wall them out.
And we wall ourselves in," he said.
Boyle consciously set out to do something different with The Tortilla Curtain - to create a work that would make an impact and get people to think.
"I just wanted to illuminate these four characters. When you put an individual face on [racism], you can't say it's 'us' or 'them' anymore."
from: http://cwis.usc.edu/dept/News_Service/chronicle_html/1995.09.25.html/Down_and_out_in_Topanga.html
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