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The Tortilla Curtain
Author: T.C. Boyle
ISBN: 014023828X
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In this timely novel, T. Coraghessan Boyle explores an issue that is at the
forefront of the political arena, the controversy over illegal immigration. Tortilla
Curtain is the compelling story of people on both sides of the issue, the
haves and the have-nots.
In Southern California's Topanga Canyon, two couples live in close proximity
but are worlds apart. Nature writer Delaney Mossbacher and his wife, real estate
agent Kyra Menaker-Mossbacher, reside in an exclusive, secluded housing
development with their son, Jordan. The Mossbachers are agnostic liberals with a
passion for recycling and fitness. Camped out in a ravine at the bottom of the
canyon are Cándido and América Rincón, a Mexican couple who have crossed the
border illegally. They are on the edge of starvation and search desperately for
work in the hope of moving into an apartment before their baby is born. The
Rincóns cling to their vision of the American dream, which eludes their grasp
at every turn.
A chance, violent encounter brings together Delaney and Cándido. The novel
shifts back and forth between the two couples. The Rincóns' search for the
American dream, and the Mossbachers' attempts to protect it, comprise the heart
of the story. In scenes that are alternately comic, frightening, and satirical,
but always all "too real," Boyle confronts not only immigration but
social consciousness, environmental awareness, crime, and unemployment in a tale
that raises the curtain on the dark side of the American dream.
T. Coraghessan Boyle was born in 1948 and grew up in Peekskill, New York. He
is a graduate of the State University of New York at Potsdam, and received his
doctorate in nineteenth-century English literature from the University of Iowa
in 1977. Since 1977, Boyle has taught creative writing at the University of
Southern California. While in college, Boyle exchanged his middle name, John,
for the unusual Coraghessan, the name of one of his Irish ancestors.
Boyle is the author of 17 books including, Descent of Man (1979), Water
Music (1982), Budding Prospects (1984), Greasy Lake (1985), World's
End (1987, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction), If the River
Was Whiskey (1989), East Is East (1990), The Road to Wellville (1993), which was made into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins, Without a Hero (1994), After the Plague (2001), Drop City (2003), The Inner
Circle (2004), and Tooth and Claw (2005). His work has appeared in
major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, The Paris Review, and The Atlantic Monthly. Boyle lives with his
wife, Karen, and their three children near Santa Barbara, California, in a house
designed in 1909 by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
AUTHOR WEBSITE: http://www.tcboyle.com/
"PEN/Faulkner award winner and author of various novels, including The
Road to Wellville (1993), Boyle avoids any potential pitfall of his prior
achievement by veering in another direction and seriously examining social and
political issues in this timely novel. He establishes an obvious dichotomy by
interweaving the scrapping, makeshift, in-the-present lives of illegal aliens
Cándido and América Rincóns with the politically correct, suburban,
plan-for-the-future existence of wealthy Americans, Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher.
The Rincóns’ lives, though full of fear and hardship, contain far more
passion and endurance than the Mossbachers' mundane and materialistic
lifestyles. An initial, pivotal car accident briefly unites, and ultimately
separates, Delaney and Cándido, provoking question after question concerning
immigration, unemployment, discrimination, and social responsibility.
Surprisingly, Boyle manages to address these issues in a nonjudgmental fashion,
depicting the vast inequity in these parallel existences. This highly engaging
story subtly plays on our consciences, forcing us to form, confirm, or dispute
social, political, and moral viewpoints. This is a profound and tragic tale, one
that exposes not only a failed American Dream, but a failing America." -- Booklist
"Succeeds in stealing the front page news and bringing it home to the great
American tradition of the social novel." -- The Boston Globe
"Lays on the line our national cult of hypocrisy. Comically and painfully
he details the smug wastefulness of the haves and the vile misery of the
have-nots." -- Barbara Kingsolver, The Nation
"A compelling story of myopic misunderstanding and mutual tragedy." -- Chicago
Tribune
"Boyle is still America's most imaginative contemporary novelist." -- Newsweek
"The Tortilla Curtain qualifies as that rarest of artistic
achievements--a truly necessary book." -- The San Diego Union-Tribune
"Weaving social commentary into moving entertaining fiction is a job few
writers can handle. Boyle does so here, admirably. Readers should not miss this
latest work from an impressive talent.... Many generations of great satirists
come to mind when reading it--from Swift to Twain to Waugh to Woody Allen."
-- The Baltimore Sun
"A Grapes of Wrath for the 1990s." -- The Philadelphia
Inquirer
Q: What is the significance of the title of the book?
A: The title comes from a common phrase for the Mexican border, the tortilla
curtain, and I envision it in this way. We have the Iron Curtain, which as an
image is impenetrable. You picture this wall across Eastern Europe. Then we have
the Bamboo Curtain with regard to China. As I see it, that isn't quite as
impenetrable as an iron curtain. It shatters easily and has gaps in it. It's not
uniform. And now we have the Tortilla Curtain, which is the opposite of
impregnable. It's three strips of barbed wire with some limp tortillas hanging
on it. The central question of this, and of the images of walls that appear
throughout the book--the walls, the gates, walling people out, what do you wall
in, all of that--has to do with us as a species and who owns what. Do you really
own your own property? Do you have a right to fence people out? Do we have an
obligation to assist people who come over that border, that wall, that gate? How
is it that Americans are allowed to have this incredible standard of living
while others do not? All of these questions, I think, are wrapped up in my view
of our debate over immigration.
Q: What is your view on immigration?
A: I feel that, on the one hand, we do have a right to be a sovereign nation
and to protect our borders. Illegal immigration makes a mockery of legal
immigration, and no other country in the world allows this sort of thing to
happen. On the other hand, what I object to even more than that is this kind of
demonizing of a whole race and class of people, as in considering all Mexicans,
all Guatemalans, all Salvadorans to be bad because they're invading our country
as impoverished and ignorant individuals. The final gesture of the book, I
think, shows you that we are one species and we do have to understand and
appreciate that fact despite ethnic and national differences. But it's a small
gesture because I think that it's a very, very complex issue that people have to
work towards answering.
Q: As an epigraph to the book you use a quotation from The Grapes of Wrath.
Did you have John Steinbeck's novel in mind when you wrote The Tortilla Curtain?
A: I'm not trying to re-write Steinbeck in any way. I chose the epigraph
from him because I wanted to see how the ethos of the 1930s, and the traditional
liberal ethos of providing for everybody, is applied to today.
Q: The book is essentially set in your own backyard. Did this prompt you to
write it? Did the proposal and passing of Proposition 187 (a bill passed in
California that denies certain social benefits to illegal immigrants) factor in?
A: The book was somewhat misunderstood because it came out after the 187
vote, and people attacked the book or enjoyed it based on their own perspective.
The book was actually conceived and written prior to Proposition 187's even
being drafted, and I think it came from the fact that I lived in Los Angeles for
sixteen years. Reading about immigration in the newspaper every day and talking
to people at parties like the ones that Delaney and Kyra give, I began to get a
sense of something brewing that was akin to what happened here in Steinbeck's
day, but had the added element that the Okies of today are not American citizens
and they're of a different race.
Q: Do you see The Tortilla Curtain as a political novel?
A: I think obviously people will want to talk about 187, and the campaign to
draft a national bill like 187, but this book isn't a political novel in the
sense that it takes a position and is meant to have people agree or disagree
with that position. It's political in a different sense. I don't think political
novels work because they have "an ax to grind." If you have "an
ax to grind," then you have to sacrifice aesthetics and the discovery of
the book in order to make your point or to make people join your party or to see
your point of view. I write a book like The Tortilla Curtain from having
lived here and picked up on everything going on that finally resulted in 187,
and from trying to sort out my own feelings. I don't have a position when I
begin a book, any book. I write in order to put some hypothetical elements
together and see what will happen. I don't know what's going to happen even
chapter by chapter, and I don't know what's going to happen at the end of the
book. That's a process of discovery, which is why I write novels rather than,
let's say, a polemic, to discover how I feel about the issues, but particularly
about this issue.
Q: Critics and readers on both sides of the immigration issue had mixed
reactions to The Tortilla Curtain. Why do you think the book generated so
much controversy?
A: I'm not presenting any answers, and I think that's why the book was very
controversial. People want a polemic. They want to raise their fist in the air
and say, "Yes, you're on our side." Well, I'm not on your side. I am
presenting a fable, a fiction, so that you can judge for yourself. A lot of
people simply read the book and flew off the handle because it either accords
with what they want it to or it doesn't. People want things to be very
clear-cut. Here's the issue and here's how I stand on it. But I think it's much
more complex. I think it has to do with biology. You may notice that Delaney is
a nature writer. Well, nature writers are generally very liberal, even radically
liberal on all issues except one--the issue of immigration, on which they are
more reactionary than anyone. The reason for this is they argue that there are
six billion people on the planet now, and who is the enemy of the environment?
Who is the enemy of clean air, clean water, all the dwindling animal species?
Well, it's us. Us, human beings. Our species. And this is an element of the book
which is very important and has been overlooked. There is this population
pressure on the world in all the industrial nations, not simply the United
States. England, Germany, and France all have huge influxes of immigrants, and
I'm wondering, what does this mean and how are people going to deal with it? I
think ultimately, as you see in The Tortilla Curtain, it may simply exacerbate
racist tendencies.
Q: What research did you do to prepare for the writing of The Tortilla
Curtain?
A: It may sound silly, but I've always felt an affection for Mexico and
Mexican culture. I grew up in New York, as you may know, and the language I
studied from eighth grade on was Spanish. In fact, the only language I can speak
besides English is Spanish. I've always been attracted to the culture, and even
before I moved to California I had traveled in Mexico and Central America. When
I decided to write this book, I knew that I had to see one thing only. And that
was the fence at the border. So I went back to Tijuana, where I hadn't been for
some years, and spent the day there. I talked to people. I walked along the
fence. I saw people waiting to climb over the fence with little plastic bags
with everything they owned in them. I saw the border guards eyeing me
suspiciously from the other side. I saw the huge fence the U.S. is building out
into the water, and so on, just to get a feel for that again and see what it's
like. And it's a real war zone, it's a real disaster, Tijuana, let me tell you.
Q: The search for the American dream is a theme that resounds throughout The
Tortilla Curtain. Do you think there is such a thing as the American dream?
A: I've addressed this throughout all of my work, our material obsession,
all the stuff I've written about eating and how much we have and the surfeit of
things; my story "Filthy with Things," for instance. What is the
American dream? Well, the American dream is, "you pull yourself up by your
bootstraps, you make it, you have a house, you live in the suburbs, and you
drive a new car." What is that? That is a material dream. If you have
nothing, then you have material dreams. Presumably, if you have an education and
you have enough to eat, then you can have aesthetic dreams or humanistic dreams.
Easy for me to say. I have every material thing I could want. I didn't become a
writer to make money. I became a writer because that is my obsession and that's
how I view the world. As a novelist, my job is to try to inhabit people of any
culture, to be a person of another sex, or another race, or another ethnic
group. I think it helps me to understand them, and it helps the reader to
understand them, too.
Q: What writers do you admire? Have any of them influenced your work?
A: I admire hundreds of writers of the past and present and many, many of
them have influenced my work. A writer who has influenced me with regard to this
type of book is Steinbeck because I'm re-examining his ethos, as we said. In
terms of satire, people like Flannery O'Connor and Evelyn Waugh have been
influential on me, writers who are sort of angry about the way things are
happening in society, and so they hold up certain behaviors to ridicule.
