The Tortilla Curtain
by T. Coraghessan Boyle

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Book Summary Information

• ISBN13: 9780140238280
• Condition: New
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Book Reviews of The Tortilla Curtain

Book Review: As irritating as the unwarranted screaming of children...
Summary: 2 Stars

Upon reading the first page I was struck by the imagery - not so much that of the author's intention, but more that of the intentional author - the poor little bearded, red-haired sap, at once full of himself yet painfully aware of his own literary aspirations and shortcomings, fighting off the demon writer's block with sword and cowl and an armory of adjectives. I could see him sitting there at his typewriter or computer, asking himself ad nauseum "How can I make this more lyrical, more poetic?" That little man was omnipresent in this book, slaving away to dazzle me with his prose and looking over my shoulder to gauge my reaction like a wide-eyed, insecure child watches his mother appraise the finger painting he made in school. Sorry, kid. I'm not disturbing a single refrigerator magnet for this one.

There is no room for this sort of pathetic pandering in good writing. Mr. Boyle seems to have forgotten that reading is an interactive adventure, requiring not just florid description from the author, but the imagination of the reader. Boyle is so heavy-handed in his descriptions that he actually distracts the reader from the images forming in his own mind. Here's an example from the very first page: "They infested his dreams, cut through his waking hours like a window on another reality." Mr. Boyle, I cannot recall the last time a window "cut" through anything. Windows don't cut. Page two: "There was the astonished look, a flash of mustache, the collapsing mouth flung open in a mute cry... ." I had to pause to think about that one. I spent several seconds trying to envision a mouth collapsing as it was flinging open. I had barely wrapped my brain around that one after running through several possible scenarios, when he nailed me again in the very same sentence with "... the brake, the impact, the marimba rattle of the stones beneath the car..." Marimba rattle? In my little sphere of reality, marimbas don't rattle. Besides, my brain has already assigned a very specific auditory description to the sound of stones under the tires of a skidding car, and the words "marimba" and "rattle" and the bizarre combination of the two intruded upon that, stopping me dead in my tracks and begging me to at least try to imagine what that sound was like - what it sounded like to that little wide-eyed, red-haired boy with the finger painting whose eyes were now riveted upon me in anticipation. And for what end? Did he really want me to reevaluate my perception of the sound of tires on stones, or was he trying to impress me with the artistry of his musical analogy to feed his own ego? This sort of descriptive intrusion was neither artistic nor musical. It was distracting - demanding - even arrogant; and I wished that little boy would go away. He never did.

It's a far cry from, say, Poe, who got a lot of mileage from "the bells, the bells, the bells, the bells..." and throwing in the word "tintinnabulation" for good measure. Evocative, unobtrusive - words drawn with great faith in the reader, whom he assumes already knows what a bell sounds like.

Boyle's characterizations are equally intrusive and, to my mind, unrealistic. The tone of the descriptions he uses to develop them are disturbingly incongruous - at one point, the immigrant drinks impure water from a stream and gets the "sh**s." Later he steps in dog "excrement." His wife has to "move her bowels." Then our antagonist liberal's (who sh**s just like the immigrant) two dogs (ostentatiously named "Osbert" and "Sacheverell") go out to "perform their matinal functions." The immigrant ponders his wife's pregnancy in "that secret place in her belly," then contemplated his own hip injuries, wondering "if there were a fracture in the socket or the ridge of bone above it. Or if he'd torn a ligament or something." Well, does he know about human anatomy or not? If there existed any matching of tone to character in this thesaurassic jumble, it was lost on me.

The only thing about this book that tickled me was that Boyle exposed the true nature of the dyed-in-the-wool liberal antagonist as an intrinsically narrow and bigoted man. When swaddled in his comfy yuppiedom-of-southern-California existence, it is easy for him to assuage his underlying fear and hatred to the strains of "We Are the World," but once the real world begins to seep in through the chinks in his armor (chinks which, incongruously, he seeks to maintain rather than to seal) and it actually starts to cost him emotionally and monetarily, he goes off in a blind rage of racist hatred. Zing! Right past "compassionate conservatism" to the extremes of fascist reactionary vigilantism in one fell swoop. Go figure. Hee hee...

For grins, I slogged through this toilsome book like wet Lassie through a bramble just to see where all this description-with-slow-moving-plot book was going, watching the rats run on their stationery little wheels of life on auto-pilot, when PLONK! In a deluge of Darwinian inspiration, at the very moment our characters are collectively reaping the harvest of their inadaptability to their environment, Boyle stops writing. Geez... Now I find myself wanting one or two more paragraphs of some kind of clumsy description or ham-handed, bizarre simile merely for the sake of putting a wrap on the scene. But no. There's that little boy again, and now he's saying "Nyah-nee-nyah-nee-nyahh-nyaaaah! GOTCHA!"

Quoeth the reader... "Nevermore."

Summary of The Tortilla Curtain

Comic Books

• Subjects > Literature & Fiction > Comic
• Literary