T.C. Boyle is the American writer formerly known as T. Coraghessan Boyle. (Well: someone must have had a word with him about that. According to his website, it was his British publisher, who felt that Coraghessan was such a forcefully Irish name that it might alienate his British readers. As a semi-Irishman it didn't even occur to me that Coraghessan was an Irish name, just that it was unpronounceable and clumsy, and how bad must the "T." be if he choose Coraghessan over it?)
He's one of those writers who has accumulated a hefty body of work - nine novels and five collections of stories - without ever really making it above the radar of publicity. I think the only time I had heard of him outside bookshops was when Anthony Hopkins starred in the film version of his fifth novel, The Road to Wellville, the story of John Harvey Kellogg, cornflake-inventor and nineteenth-century alternative health quack. Anyway Bloomsbury, his nervous British publisher, have otherwise kept faith with him and they were right about the name thing, as I finally bought The Tortilla Curtain recently with its jazzy new jacket and abbreviated author. (The type hasn't been reset though, so the reader is still left guessin' how you say Coraghessan on every verso page of the book.)
I thought to begin with that The Tortilla Curtain might be one of the worst titular puns of all time - up there with Middlesex - as a Tex-Mex play on Torn Curtain. But I'm not sure it is: the characters in the book refer unironically to "the tortilla curtain" as the nebulous border between Mexico and California where illegal immigrants swarm over to seek work and a better life. And this is what the book is about: the crossed lives of a Mexican immigrant and his wife (Cándido and the ironically named América), and a well-to-do Californian writer and his wife (Delaney and Kyra). The latter lives in an enclosed settlement, where the neighbourhood management group are always trying to get greater and better security systems installed, to prevent the Mexicans from breaking into their sanctuary. These are exchanges which could easily be heard about aslyum seekers and economic migrants in Britain today:
"This society isn't what it was - and it won't be until we get control the borders."
"That's racist, Jack, and you know it."
"Not in the least - it's a question of national sovereignty. Did you know that the U.S. accepted more immigrants last year than all the other countries of the world combined - and that half of them settled in California? And that's legal immigrants, people with skills, money, education. The ones coming through the Tortilla Curtain down here, those are the ones that are killing us."
And Boyle clearly wants to tug our heartstrings when he switches in alternate chapters to Cándido and América, as they struggle to find work illegally, simply because there is nothing for them back home. And when the neighbourhood manages to get the local 'labour exchange' cleared - the place where immigrants gather every day hoping for a few hours' black-market work doing menial labour - they are thrown onto the scrapheap, reduced to scavenging from KFC bins and stewing cats, although never - perhaps he doesn't want to risk our sympathy too much - to crime or prostitution.
The difficulty is that he overdoes it, and eventually I reached a sort of tipping point, where put-upon and shat-upon Cándido and América started a forest fire, and I found it hard not to view them from then on as accident-prone unintentional comic relief, a Laurel and Hardy pair, which weakened the whole moral thrust of the book terribly - the moral seeming to be that the measure of a society is how it treats its weakest members, and if you start hurting them then you reap what you sow. It escalates from there, and tragedy is heaped upon tragedy, and more tragedy, and then more.
I got through The Tortilla Curtain pretty quickly, as I did with the book many of the cover quotes have compared it to: Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. (Probably this comparison arises because both turn on a white-on-black (or -coloured) car accident, and pursue the disparate lives of their respective races.) And despite being described on the cover as having "zing" and "exuberance" - things Wolfe's book has in spades; it sings with zing - I didn't spot any of this in Boyle's book at all, nor of the comic invention it was also feted for. Nor were there any of Wolfe's Dickensian characters. It was well structured and carefully plotted and had its big heart in absolutely the right place; but for me, although The Tortilla Curtain is precisely half the book that Bonfire is in terms of page length (355 against 710, fact fans), in every other way it doesn't get anywhere near that far.
