author: T.C. Boyle

name: Steev

average rating: 3.62

book published: 1995

rating: 3

read at: 2012/07/25

date added: 2012/07/26

shelves: border, novels, fun, own-it, politics

review:
The Tortilla Curtain is problematic to try to evaluate. If I could give this book 3.5 stars I would, because it doesn't deserve 4, and yet it's better than just 3. It's got some really interesting and thought-provoking ideas, but has a variety of formal flaws; I guess I should conclude that this is typical for T.C. Boyle, since I felt pretty much the same way about the other book of his I've read, A Friend of the Earth. Basically I felt like because of my interests I pretty much had to read the book, but the execution left a lot to be desired.

The story, briefly, is a neo-realist sort of tale about 2 couples, one gringo and one Mexican. The gringo couple is rich and privileged but liberal and nominally concerned about standard moderate-liberal concerns like recycling and animal cruelty, yet ultimately they're self-centered, racist, and selfish; meanwhile the Mexicans are desperately poor and cursed with bad luck at every turn. These four people go about their little lives in an exurban neighborhood north of Los Angeles, living separate but connected stories.

This seems like an interesting premise, with lots of possibilities for tricky moral and subjective ambiguity; but the way that Boyle crafts the narrative and characters is cartoon-like and clumsy. His method of piling on endless unlikely coincidences and stupid decisions made by characters to create a continuing downward spiral of disastrous plot points is just really hard to swallow. And while there's some attempt at complexity in the main characters, they're still for the most part pretty exaggerated stereotypes, with the minor characters being even more so. The way Boyle puts the lead, the white husband Delany, through his mental paces is almost embarrassing to witness, and I recall a similar inner dialogue from the main character of A Friend of the Earth: a hapless, weak-willed though concerned white guy, victim of his own cliched prejudices and knee-jerk reactions, tossed on the seas of fate, helpless to really come up with a complex or nuanced analysis of what is happening to him. It would be one thing if these personality traits were something the reader learned over the course of the book, gradually revealed from beneath some ambiguity, but Boyle's machinations are so overly transparent, one could almost see some convenient placeholders or headings in the book, such as: "Here we have another half-hearted internal moral struggle about immigration" or "insert here argument about coyotes eating pets as lazy metaphor for racialized criminals."

It's just all so... obvious. So easy. And yet, the issues Boyle is struggling with are too important to not wrestle with, and people should read the book. Just don't expect a classic of artful literature.