Rating: 
Summary: Political commentary Boyle style.
Review: Boyle presents and contrasts the lives of two couples in the California hills while discussing whether the great American melting pot is bottomless or full. With his extensive vocabulary and typical descriptive mastery, Boyle intertwines the lives of these couples, leaving the reader with the impression that they interact much more than they actually do. One couple consists of a yuppie California real estate whirwind and her tree hugging, flower child husband, living a comfortable existence. The second is a pair of illegal aliens from Mexico, convinced that their hardships are only temporary obstacles on a path to prosperity. Boyle excels at relating the perils of the second but is only mediocre in sarcastically sneering at the first. If you like to read in color, try Boyle's Tortilla Curtain, even if this isn't his best effort. Gary Taylor, Houston, TX
Rating: 
Summary: Tremendously funny and moving multicultural tragicomedy
Review: Tortilla Curtain simultaneously evokes the fragmented and contorted lives of the commodity culture of the US and the desire to embrace its values from those who are denied its luxuries. It concludes in an hallucinatory apocalyptic vision not unlike Dante's Inferno. Compassionate, wicked, brutally funny and thrilling.
Rating: 
Summary: Keep It Simple, Stupid
Review: Mr. Boyle preserves the classical unities in appearance, but underneath, it's an MTV video, bopping here, bopping there. He gives us flashes of insight into a character, then long reams of cardboard. **** Like GOW, this book strives to portray the tragic immigration situation. But Boyle is cleverer than that. This cleverness works in bits and spurts, so TC is not as preachy as GOW. But it distracts the reader and detracts from the story. When I finished this, I felt a moral emptiness, not in the LA Mr. Boyle describes, but in the story itself. *** This would have been much better as a shorter, leaner book. Even so, it's not awful - the prose is, at times, beautiful - and the characters are interesting. Plus, the hardback version I bought (for $6 at a used book store, so don't feel too sorry for me) has a lovely cover.
Rating:
Summary: This story stays with you.
Review: I read this novel in a day. I liked it, though I never knew who to root for, I never knew who was a hero. This would have been a 10, but the ending was a let down. It seemed the author just wanted to wrap things up.
Rating:
Summary: Read without knowing book, author...liked it lots
Review: I drove past my destination to continue listening to this engrossing book-on-tape. The listener/reader is drawn more and more into the story as it unfolds. And I could relate to every character on some level. I can easily visualize the LA areas described. Because of it's strong, but compact, composition the book remends me of Of Mice and Men. He did a fine job of reading his own book, too, which doesn't always work. I'm eager to read (not listen) to another Boyle book.
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: Thought-provoking and entertaining. Couldn't put it down. The ending was unnecessarily abrupt for my taste.
Rating:
Summary: The two worlds of the Tortilla Curtain
Review: An excellent novel proppelled forward by rich irony and humor. It tells of the Haves and the Have-Nots in the LA area, and deals with some big problems (environment, immigration, the closing off of our open spaces with fences, the difficulties of maintaining ones ideals in the face of adversity) where there are no easy problems, but it is also very gripping as a work of fiction. The narrative fluctuates back and forth among two families, the Mossbachers, affluent liberals who find their neighborhood becoming a Gaited Community, and the Rincon's, illegal aliens struggling for survival in a make-shift camp in a ravine below, and how their lives collide. It gives one a clear window on two very different worlds, with characters who are neither good nor bad (hence far more human) and I recommend it alot. Review by Rolf Semprebon
Rating:
Summary: Weak, a writer in love with himself
Review: Disappointing, political correctness run amuck, another writer thinking he's God's gift to the world and small-minded enough to lance people who it is fashionable to lance, and praise people of a minority skin color. Utterly predictable, a peon to stereotypes and one-dimensional characters
Rating:
Summary: The 90's version of "The Grapes of Wrath."
Review: I finished "The Tortilla Curtain" a couple of nights ago and can't get it out of my mind. This morning I brushed my teeth and it dawned on me that at that very moment there is a Candido and America
living in a ditch somewhere wondering where their
next meal will come from let alone fresh water. Like
the Joads, Candido and America are images of American
culture that upper middle income people like myself
relegate to fiction. Similar to that rotting head
of lettuce in the produce drawer in the refridgerator
we choose to ignore them, hoping someone else will
take care of it. We attempt to rationalize their
plight by saying to ourselves 'well if they had
only stayed put they wouldn't have these problems.'
"The Tortilla Curtain" is more than a book, it's a
mirror which Boyle holds up to our faces and it's up to us the reader, to decide if we like what we
see.
Rating:
Summary: Faulkner/Cormac McCarthy/Steinbeck/Leonard Cohen/Springstein
Review: Boyle is all of these men, and writes in celebration of the cult of "Beautiful Loosers."
Something is happening in Norte America... Read these authors, read about Chris MacCandless-- the loss of innocence, the loss of life
as celebration of life-- the valorization of frailty against the world.
Boyle writes like an narcisist who thinks he understands pain and the roots of confusion and the cult of loss. He is truly a talecrafter to be read critically.
My head applauds his synthetic thinking, my heart prays he sleeps for a month in a ditch in Juarez. What one finds there is not beautiful. Life has not been lost--only the rich can think this. It is something
else--something yet to be captured by contemporary writers.
Perhaps it lies outside the bounds of words, the bounds of books.
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