The Tortilla Curtain

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing, dark look at society
Review: The extremes of the reach for the "American Dream" are both depicted in this novel. I found the stereotypical, new-age American family to be quite disturbing, and equally so the abundant struggles of the illegal aliens. The twists and turns of the plot and the interactions of the characters kept me interested for the most part. I would recommend it to those who wish to see a different point of view of how the so-called "American Dream" affects those who believe they already have it and those who wish to attain it. It requires an open mind.

Rating:
Summary: Could he have added one more disaster???
Review: I was so dissapointed in this book. The characters were all completely stereotypic and uninteresting. There were so many disasters that befell the hapless Mexican couple that it was hard to take after awhile. The premise was an interesting one but was VERY poorly executed.

Rating:
Summary: Change of perspective
Review: This was the first book I ever read by TC Boyle, but certainly not the last. His ability to weave the life experiences of seemingly disparate characters is amazing. This book is difficult to read because what happens to the characters is so true and poignant, I had to put it down several times as I was reading it. As a third generation native Southern/Central Californian I had seen many recent immigrants but never did I give a second thought as to what they had to go through to get to this country. This book changed my perspective and made me more sensitive to their situation, and thankful for the comfort of my own. "The Tortilla Curtain" is a worthwhile book to read and I recommend it highly.

Rating:
Summary: Better Than Most Current Fiction But...
Review: I heard about the hub-bub over fellow Santa Barbarian T.C. Boyle. I picked up the book and was a bit disappointed. Perhaps the premise just didn't grab me. The writing style is ok, but not particularly deep or fluid.

Rating:
Summary: Gritty, Brutal, Honest...but Boring
Review: "The Tortilla Curtain" was assigned to me as summer reading before entering my Freshmen year of college. After seeing the cover, and reading the back..I already knew it was going to be a challenge for me to enjoy. Just a sixth sense I guess

It's not a very long book, but for me it dragged. I can't explain it, but for some reason I just could not connect to the story. It's a completely universal theme, something everyone can relate to...and yet it didn't pull me in...it was just flat.

I make it my goal to find something to like in every book I read, call me an optimistic. This book was no exception. The subject matter, theme, and structure were all quite good, the writing was well done, characterization though description and action especially good...

It was just the story didn't appeal to me, it was too dark and blunt for miss melissa in her fairy tale land of hope and inspiration, I guess....I was expecting something more on the lines of finding inner strength and the dispelling of some racial conceptions and misconceptions...

"The Tortilla Curtain" on the other hand, took a more realistic approach, and covered the more outward aspects of life...sort of a "This is life, don't deny it's there.." feeling as opposed to the usual "This is life, what can we do to change."

I sense that this book wasn't meant to be a lesson, but more of a look at life, a life that some of us dont see, or that we just avoid...it makes you feel gulity, even if your not a "yuppy" or a hater...because the transformation of Delaney could be any of us, we are all capable of it...and thats the point of the novel, to scare us, to get us thinking..about ourselves, our world...to see life for what it is, not just want we want it to be.

Overall, a well written book, that I believe many people would enjoy...I feel bad i couldn't be one of those people.

(I wrote a review of this novel once before, but this is an edited, and updated review...the last one I wasn't very proud of...ack!)

Rating:
Summary: a modern classic
Review: I read this book for the first time in my high school English class, and it was the one book that caused the most discussion all year. Almost everyone did their senior thesis on it and I think that's because this book manages something unusual: it is able to be both nuanced and provocative while really grabbing the reader by the throat with the immediacy and tragedy of the choices these people make in the situations they find themselves thrust into. I've since re-read the book many times and recommended it to my friends. While it never fails to bring up heated debates, in my experience this book has been universally praised by both those who agree with Boyle's characters and those who can't stand them. This is a book of extremes, but I think if you approach it with an open mind, you will come away changed. Plus, it's a really well-written and exciting read. I swear to god, he's like a more accessible Steinbeck. Sometimes people might not want to hear what he has to say, but you're better because of it if you do.

Rating:
Summary: How to Hate being a Southern Californian
Review: Boyle has the makings of a most interesting story, if he would just tell it straight.

He focuses almost exclusively upon 2 S.California couples and how their lives ironically intertwine. One couple is an upper middle class/lower upper class pair of social snobs who can't help but be miserable no matter how much money and social prestige they have. The author spends more time obsessing about how the two feel about the deaths of their very small dogs than about how they feel about their son - a character developed barely at all. The other couple is an unmarried pair of illegal aliens from Mexico. The two struggle to get along with each other and struggle even more to survive (yet they actually can save money) on sporadic, day-temp, jobs. The man has been severely crippled due to what happens in chapter 1 and the woman is not only pregnant from another man but continues to be victimized in the story. Yet the Mexicans seem to be happier than the Americans.

The author narrates and quotes the Mexican couple as speaking in English, yet he occasionally throws in a few Spainish terms and phrases that do little more than suggest the author knows a bit of spainish.

The biggest flaw in this book, however, is that the author has a very annoying habit of writing it in soap-opera style. He builds up the drama in each chapter and then ends the chapter before the climax. You eventually come back, several chapters laters, to the character(s) involved but the most dramatic event has come and gone as he starts to build the drama all over.

Rating:
Summary: The "Gating" of the American heart, mind and soul examined.
Review: As is the norm for Boyle, this is a very complex work.

The gist of this novel emerges right from the start. Delaney Mossbacher is driving home to his pristine gated community in Southern California and hits a Mexican immigrant walking along the road. His reaction? Concern that he might have seriously damaged his car. Oh, he does "come to his senses" and check on the man he hit. The man is obviously injured. What does Delaney do? Gives him 20 bucks and leaves.

Ok, so Delaney is just a lousy jerk-a bad guy with no conscience, right? Not exactly, at least from Delaney's point of view. A left wing "naturalist" type, Delaney is the perfect parody of the "Socially and Environmentally" conscious Yuppie urban American. He's the sort with "important" cares. That he has hit and injured a human being gives him but passing concern-that his dog can be killed by wild animals in his own yard is an outrage.

This world view is counter posed against that of the accident victim, Candido and his young wife, illegal immigrants living in the ravine behind the Delaney's gated community. Candido and his wife struggle with how to find even one decent meal a day. Kyra, Delaney's wife, struggles with the escalating emptiness and lack of fulfillment she feels from closing 6 figure commission deals on her sales of multimillion dollar homes. And so it goes.

At heart, this is a book about how people are desperate to connect with one another while systematically shutting themselves away from everyone. The Delaney's spend their lives shutting themselves away behind an array of both actual and metaphorical walls. Candido and his wife are shut away by poverty and fear and racism.

Boyle is a craftsman with words, and he definitely knows how to construct a well-designed story. I appreciate his work but I can't really say I like it. On the one hand, his characters too often strike me as too much a caricature-complex and well developed caricatures, to be sure, but not characters one can empathize with. In this case, neither of the Delaney's amount to what I would call a genuine character, they are both come across caricatures developed to represent a wide swath of American stereotypes rather than as real people. This is sad, as their counter points-Candido and his wife, are just the opposite. They may "represent" an immigrant stereotype, yet are developed a real characters. On the other hand, there seems to me to be something oppressive about Boyle's style-I always feel like I have an anvil on my shoulders when I read his books. I suppose some would interpret it as a sense of "suspense", but it feels different to me, more like you are carrying the weight of all the points he wants to make all throughout the reading experience.

Interestingly, I still come back to Boyle. His books weigh on me, but I can't seem to walk away from him. I may not like them, but I do appreciate them, and they seem to have a power to attract. It's all very odd, yet compelling.

I say give him a try and see what your reaction is.

Rating:
Summary: Ambiguity Need Not Apply
Review: Certainly well worded(Boyle is undoubtedly a strong practitioner colorful descriptions and witty metaphors), and occasionally funny, this novel falls short of success on many levels (in my estimation, a book's success is predicated on certain tangible factors such as character, breadth of ideas, manner of execution of said ideas, prose aptitude... the intangible factors include such things as how the book feels or the manner in which the work excites me, tickles my imagination, gives me a rise). I'll spare the plot summation and get right down to it. The themes, all worthy include, the psychosis of white enclaves and the psychosis of the American dream, entitlement and despair, contradictions of self and societal contradictions... there are more, but this is the gist. Taking these strong themes into account, Boyle's delivery is rather flaccid. First, he takes a clear dogmatic approach by rendering the immigrant family with full depth and pity whilst constructing our white, wealthy suburbanites with a distinct air of flatness, two dimensionality, obvious archetypes. This relieves the novel of its potential for moral ambiguity(the reader, or certainly I, don't want my moral hand held throughout a novel). Instead, we're presented with a work that's clearly a treatise on the dark and often hypocritical nature of wealthy, comfortable, deluded liberals, the white upper-middle class, our white collared cultural elite. With this being clear, a reader really can only agree or disagree with the novel... my estimation is that those offended by Boyle's stance would likely dismiss the work as leftist tripe, while those in accordance with its views would feel validated in their mutual concern with immigration issues and the ignorance of privilege. Where's the literary excitement in that? Worse, this polarizing novel achieves its ends through the means of blatant, nearly trite symbolism such as the coyote and its representation of the American idea of illegal aliens. I don't wholeheartedly disdain the book, for it was written well and structured creatively, revealing much direct mirroring and negative mirroring between the immigrant family and our bountiful American family. But, to be frank, Tortilla Curtain is ultimately an insult to the intelligence of its readers, not allowing us to grasp the density of its themes and moral implications on our own. Boyle does that all for us. For lovers of disengaging narratives, this is your book. Otherwise, save your time.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful blend of comic Voltaire and tragic Steinbeck
Review: T. C. Boyle's "The Tortilla Curtain" is a well-told and impressively written story that approaches some of the most difficult and pressing questions facing Americans today, questions involving who we are and want to be, and how open we are and want to be. Because it succeeds to a large degree in its provocations and plot, "The Tortilla Curtain" is a great read, and I recommend it.

The key words here are migration and assimilation, in this case of Mexican itinerant laborer Cándido and his young, pregnant wife, América. Boyle cleverly and effectively frames their story and the story of the Southern Californians, Delaney and Kyra, within assimilations of older migration stories: Voltaire's "Candide" and Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath." The alternately ironic and literal invocation of these two older works allows Boyle to infuse "The Tortilla Curtain" with both the black-comic tendencies of Voltaire's novella and the portrayal and condemnation of social injustices so central to Steinbeck's masterpiece.

Nicely paced and well-written, Boyle permits the chapters to alternate between the Americans and the newly-arrived Mexicans until, in a powerful narrative moment towards the end, once it has become apparent that the two worlds are inextricably intertwined, the chapters begin to deal with both halves of the novel's world at once. Not only does the plot start to move even more quickly at this point, but the tensions are doubled, and the sense of too many people and not enough room that dogs the thinking of many of the American characters in "The Tortilla Curtain" makes itself starkly felt.

Strangely, it's at precisely this point that things start to feel less tight. The carefully plotted earlier sections of the novel make it all the more apparent that Boyle seems to be throwing things in during the last few chapters (where did Delaney's gun suddenly come from, for example?) in a sort of hasty authorial clean-up. Likewise, the nuance and complexity begin to devolve into a preachiness that is hammered home in the novel's final line; Boyle seems to have tired of the legitimate difficulty of the situation, and instead finally delivers us a hero.

Still, this novel is well worth the time. It is an often funny, often heartbreaking read. Even some of the less likable characters are rendered in a friendly manner, and this makes the whole world of "The Tortilla Curtain" feel very real. But even more real than the novelistic world of Boyle's creation are the painful political and social problems to which he rightfully draws our attention.