Rating: 
Summary: Self indulgent trash
Review: The book was so poorly done, with so very many flaws it will agravate any reader. I thought Steinbeck could be depressing, this guy had Steinbeck beat, with needless human suffering heaped upon tired metaphors and yet another helping of human suffering. And then, in a blinding flash of inspiration, the author just ends the book when each of the antagonists could make the story meaningfull.
Rating: 
Summary: US-Mexican border masterpiece
Review: In this award winning (Prix Medicis Etranger) masterpiece, T. C. Boyle paints the juxtaposed worlds of 2 families, one from each side of the Mexican border. Delaney and Kyra life in an affluent gated community in the San Fernando Valley - and are bored. Candido and America Rincon are illegal Mexican immigrants, barely eking out an existence outside that same gated community. Without pathos, melodrama, or over-writing, Boyle keep us hoping for some sort of redemption for both families.
An ecological side-thread runs through this book, dishing out numerous facts about the botanical life-forms that have crossed the border and that we now take for granted as members of our fragile ecosystem.
Read it. This is one of those books that's more than the sum of its parts.
Rating:
Summary: This Book Will Make You Rethink
Review: This book is a must for anyone living in CA or the Southwest. Beautifully contrasting the "good life" with the lives of those looking for it who journey to the US illegally. I've loaned my copy out many times and have gotten consistently positive feedback about this book. You won't be able to put it down once you start, and you'll see things differently when you're done.
Rating: 
Summary: As irritating as the unwarranted screaming of children...
Review: This book irritated me on so many levels, I don't know where to begin. Pompous, shallow, demanding, contrived, insipid, distracting - laden with incongruous, superfluous adjectives and pseudo-poetic description; I suppose that's a good start. Very few writers have the talent to pull off a masterful simile, and Boyle isn't one of them. Why is it then that every page has a combination of at least three or four "as ___ as" or "like a...."s? To say that this book is overwritten is an understatement. To say that the plot was under-engineered is fair. What he did manage to say within 350-or-so pages, could easily (and far more gracefully) have been said in 100 pages. Maybe then Boyle would have had room to add some dimension to these poor, single-minded, uni-purpose characters of his, running like rats on a wheel to a predestined fate. 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."
Rating:
Summary: lacked depth, has been done before better
Review: I consider myself a T.C. Boyle fan, and T.C. Boyle to be one of our best living writers. But this book struck me as so heavy-handed and even poorly written that I could not get through it. John Nichols covered much the same territory in "The Milagro Beanfield War" and the rest of the "Magic Journey" trilogy, but with more compassion for his characters, more depth and more control of his craft. Is this really the same author who wrote "Riven Rock", "World's End" and "Water Music"? What sort of contractual obligation was he under when he wrote this?
Rating:
Summary: Vaya con Albondigas.
Review: Muy bien, tre bon, very good. (Our clueless Delaney tries speaking in French to the undocumented worker, Candidio that he 'runs' into, but to be fair, unlike other immigrants to the U.S., Candido does not try to learn a word of English either. So, there we are...Stuck. Way stuck.) Nice job, Boyle. Read this book. Fun, sad, happy, goofy, always on target.
Rating:
Summary: a major disappointment
Review: tc boyle is one of the best living authors on earth. so, after reading East is East and Water Music, I was not impressed by this effort. The subject matter is just not as interesting as the two books i mention. His style is original, captivating, and enthralling,,,,but it is just a waste of talent this time.
Rating:
Summary: An Eye-Opener!! Everyone should read this book....
Review: This book is read in some college courses in California. I believe that anyone who is familiar with the immigration issue should read this book. I dound it to be challenging to my biases and it really opened a whole new door to the other side-of what it would be like to be an illegal immigrant. TC Boyle exaggerates his characters and their situations. He uses satire as his device in this book to make his points. And I found these things very useful in examining my world and myself. I highly recommend this book!!
Rating:
Summary: Uh...
Review: This was my first exposure to Boyle, and, frankly, I'm dumbfounded that he enjoys such a stellar reputation. I have to assume that the rest of his work stands up much better than this one. Others reviewers here have touched on the superficial nature of the characterization, so I won't repeat this observation, although I share it. I will say that most good/great writers without fail never underestimate their readership, but this is not the case with 'Tortilla Curtain'; Boyle does not make points subtly but instead clubs you over the head with his ideas, which makes the characters and the situations they inhabit little more than cheap stereotypes - it makes the dialog stilted and the scenes appear contrived. It's not a good sign when you audibly groan while reading a book, as I found myself doing repeatedly. Yes, I stuck it out until the end, hoping that the book might redeem itself, but that never happened. Maybe it's my morbid curiosity, but I want to read something else by Boyle in hopes of proving to myself that this book was a one-off sour note.
Rating:
Summary: A Better Sort of Unwashed Horde
Review: The Steinbeck epigraph that precedes this novel is apt; Boyle is a true heir of the Steinbeck tradition. It's all here: the slangy language; the hard luck; the jarring, ugly, inhumanity that pops up in lovely, fragrant California. But Boyle also adds an element not present in Steinbeck: the comical antics of those in L.A. who may be termed The Fortunate Ones. Here is the Realtor who treats dogs like people and vice versa. Here is the Realtor's husband, an effete Sierra Club type who, when not inflicting granola and fiber bars on his son, is typing precious essays on nature topics reminiscent of Boot's "Lush Places". Steinbeck didn't have a lot of empathy or sympathy for the Fortunate Ones, but Boyle wades right in and finds out what they're all about. Then he juxtaposes what they're all about with the endless struggle and misery of the Not-so-Fortunate Ones, achieving an effect that is often grotesque. One of the main themes of Tortilla Curtain is the unwashed hordes washing over California, both underpinning and undermining the society that has evolved there since Mexico "ceded" it to the U.S. The historical irony that a courtly and gracious society was overrun by unwashed hordes of mostly poor Americans in the 19th century lends color to this 20th century narrative. Here, where the camino real has been transmogrified into Camino Realty, vegetarians and activists eye the dirty people from the leather confines of their luxury vehicles and fret about property values and environmental degradation. The dirty people, neo-Joads, sleep on the ground at night John Muir style and loiter by day at the labor exchange, wondering how fate can be so lopsided. A young woman dreams for "one of those houses...a clean white one made out of lumber that smells like the mountains, with a gas range and a refrigerator and maybe a little yard so you can plant a garden...nothing fancy, no palaces-just four walls and a roof. Was that so much to ask?" Yes, it is, comes the answer from the owners of the palaces, the Arroyo Blanco Community Association. The answer to the threat of the unwashed hordes is a security wall and a security gate to keep out all unwashed hordes and wild dogs. It is to be built by contractors employing unwashed hordes. And they damn well better not loiter near the wall after they've finished building it. Of course this is fiction and one can't draw too many conclusions about the immigration problem from a highly entertaining story crafted by an artist whose mastery of his medium ranks with Berger and Updike. But one message is inescapable: sweet, gentle people who come illegally to the U.S. to work (and, yes, to eat and sleep and have babies, too) are not as great a threat as, for example, those who come to bring dangerous drugs or take flying lessons. They ought to be treated like people, whether one welcomes them or sends them back.
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