WEEK SIX READING

You are going to start reading Tortilla Curtain this week. If you would like to read this book review, you can do that too.

The Pilgrim of Topanga Creek

Date: September 3, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - Final 
Byline: By Scott Spencer; 
Lead:

THE TORTILLA CURTAIN By T. Coraghessan Boyle. 355 pp. New York: Viking. $23.95.
Text:

VIKING has somehow got the idea it has another "Grapes of Wrath" on its hands. Then again, T. Coraghessan Boyle may have contributed to the delusion by using a few lines from Steinbeck's novel as the epigraph to his own meditation on the dispossessed and the American dream, California style. But while Steinbeck's tale of the Joad family was the very apotheosis of the proletarian novel, with its almost surreal emotional clarity and passages of nearly overpowering pathos, "The Tortilla Curtain" is, as the dust jacket would have it, about "the Okies of the 1990's." This apparently means that the narrative contains no real heroes or villains, and that the suddenly old-fashioned hopefulness of Steinbeck's book is nowhere to be found.

In "The Tortilla Curtain," Mr. Boyle deftly portrays Los Angeles's Topanga Canyon, catching both its privileged society and its underlying geological and ecological instability. But while the book has heft, its story is slight, and not unfamiliar: An undocumented Mexican couple struggle for survival in the interstices of society and in the canyon itself, even as an affluent Anglo couple live their fearful, selfish existence behind the dubious protection of a walled development called Arroyo Blanco Estates.

We first meet Candido Rincon when he is hit by a car driven by the male half of the novel's Anglo couple, a self-styled Annie Dillard disciple named Delaney Mossbacher. Candido is in California with his young pregnant wife, America, having recently braved another crossing of the border. Candido and America are part of California's unacknowledged work force, cogs in the vast human machine that does the state's brute labor and without whom (Proposition 187 to the contrary) the state could probably not survive.

Mr. Boyle is first-rate in capturing the terror of looking for work in an alien society, as in this passage describing Candido's experience at a parking-lot labor exchange: "The contractors began to arrive, the white men with their big bleached faces and soulless eyes, enthroned in their trucks. They wanted two men or three, they wanted four or five, no questions asked, no wage stipulated, no conditions or terms of employment. A man could be pouring concrete one day, spraying pesticide the next -- or swabbing out urinals, spreading manure, painting, weeding, hauling, laying brick or setting tile. You didn't ask questions. You got in the back of the truck and you went where they took you."

Mr. Boyle is convincing, and even stirring, in his telling of Candido and America's story, bringing to it an agitprop artist's perspective on both society's injustices and the cold implacability of the privileged classes, as well as a Brechtian vision of how those cast to the bottom of society blindly victimize one another. Indeed, the journey of the Rincons -- from their desolate Mexican village to the terrors of exploitation on the undocumented edge of American society and finally into the whirling, pyrotechnically presented catastrophe toward which the story builds -- more than confirms Mr. Boyle's reputation as a novelist of exuberance and invention, gained with such pop extravaganzas as "World's End" and "The Road to Wellville." It also adds to his fictional range an openhearted compassion for those whom society fears and reviles.

But Mr. Boyle was clearly not interested in merely writing a novel about illegal aliens scrabbling for a living. For he has divided his considerable narrative and stylistic gifts between the Rincons' story and that of Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher, the rather contemptible yuppie couple whose deeply unremarkable experiences are set in opposition to the Rincons'. It is here, alas, that Mr. Boyle undoes himself.

Delaney is described on the very first page as "a liberal humanist with an unblemished driving record and a freshly waxed Japanese car with personalized plates." It is a mode of portrayal that is characteristic of much of Mr. Boyle's earlier work, a kind of comedy that finds its roots in sarcasm. In Mr. Boyle's case, this sarcasm is often taken for buoyancy and even daring, but in "The Tortilla Curtain" it rings hollow. When a character is described in terms of his driving record and his vanity plates, the reader can only hope that character is a minor one, a walk-on. But when you realize that you are being asked to read on and on about someone the author obviously doesn't care deeply about (and has, in fact, just trashed with the flick of an easy laugh), your heart begins to sink. Even when the novel's plot begins to activate Delaney and sour his usually beatific goofy world view, our reaction to the transformation is interrupted by the necessity of coping with Mr. Boyle's persistent elbow in our ribs: "He was in a rage, and he tried to calm himself. It seemed he was always in a rage lately -- he, Delaney Mossbacher, the Pilgrim of Topanga Creek -- he who led the least stressful existence of anybody on earth besides maybe a handful of Tibetan lamas."

Like her nature-writer husband, Kyra Mossbacher is cut up and offered to us on a Lazy Susan of rude remarks. "Real estate was her life," the omnipotent narrator would have us believe, the moment Kyra appears on the scene. A bit later, we learn the following: "For Kyra, sex was therapeutic, a release from sorrow, tension, worry, and she plunged into it in moments of emotional distress as others might have sunk themselves in alcohol or drugs -- and who was Delaney to argue? She'd been especially passionate around the time her mother was hospitalized for her gall bladder operation."

Mr. Boyle's fictional strategy is puzzling. Why are we being asked to follow the fates of characters for whom he clearly feels such contempt? Not surprisingly, this is ultimately off-putting. Perhaps Mr. Boyle has received too much praise for his zany sense of humor; in this book, that wit often seems merely a maddening volley of cheap shots. It's like living next door to a gun nut who spends all day and half the night shooting at beer bottles.

The great risk of a novel with a dual structure is that the reader will fasten on one of the stories at the expense of the other. In "The Tortilla Curtain," the drama, feeling and stylistic bravado, the emotional reach that Mr. Boyle brings to the story of the Rincons so profoundly exceed what he brings to the Mossbachers that the book itself ends up feeling as disunited as the society Mr. Boyle is attempting to portray. And that's a pity, because there is life here and moments of very fine writing. ("The fire sat low on the horizon, like a gas burner glowing under the great black pot of the sky.")

A few months ago, Mr. Boyle was asked in an interview how he voted on Proposition 187. Perhaps anticipating being asked the same question over and over on his upcoming book tour, he replied, "I don't want to reveal that. I'm not running for office." It's hard to imagine John Steinbeck being quite so coy about the rights of migrant workers or the importance of unions, but, as they say on television, "Hey, it's the 90's!"

"The Tortilla Curtain" is a political novel for an age that has come to distrust not only politicians but political solutions, a modernist muckraking novel by an author who sees the muck not only in class structure and prejudice but in the souls of human beings. Yet where the socially engaged novel once offered critique, Mr. Boyle provides contempt -- even poor Candido, whose plight has been engaging our sympathies throughout this novel, is eventually seen "weaving his way through the scrub, drawn like an insect to the promise of distant lights." Contempt is a dangerous emotion, luring us into believing that we understand more than we do. Contempt causes us to jeer rather than speak, to poke at rather than touch. Despite his celebrated gifts, T. Coraghessan Boyle may be the most contemptuous of our well-known novelists.