THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 17, 1995 TAG: 9509150637
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
THE TORTILLA CURTAIN
T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE
Viking. 355 pp. $23.95.
It's hard to imagine better entertainment than watching the pompous get their comeuppance, or seeing the self-possessed choke on their indulgences and the self-righteous tripped by their hypocrisies.
The yuppie denizens of California's Topanga Canyon are treated to each of these tortures in T. Coraghessan Boyle's quirky sixth novel, The Tortilla Curtain. Good entertainment it is, but Boyle has proved with past novels - The Road to Wellville, East is East - that he can do even better.
In a social dialogue that presages a sure hot button in the 1996 presidential race, Boyle narrates the escalating clash of Southern California cultures, where the ``haves'' move higher into the hills above Los Angeles in advance of a flood of ``have-nots,'' most of them Mexican illegals looking to scratch out a living as day-laborers.
Two couples act as the foils: Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher live on the bluffs in a compound of lily-white well-to-do's named, not so subtly, Arroyo Blanco, or ``white gully.'' They are politically correct, macrobiotic, perfectly liberal children of the new age. Delaney, a stay-at-home husband with a fat inheritance, writes a painfully self-indulgent nature column for an obscure ecology journal. Kyra is a tsunami in local real-estate sales.
Subsisting, literally, under a lean-to in a gulch below Arroyo Blanco are Candido Rincon and his pregnant, young wife, America. Robbed by fellow countrymen at the border and scrambling each morning for day jobs, they are miserable enough before they cross paths with the Mossbachers: Delaney hits Candido with his car on a canyon road one afternoon, badly injuring him.
Rather than do what a good humanist should - load him into his car and hie off to a hospital - Delaney, fearful of higher insurance rates and more than a little piqued at the damage to his perfectly polished Acura, slips the dazed Candido a $20 bill and lets him stagger off into the underbrush.
Delaney calls his wife on the phone to explain:
``No, listen, Kyra: the guy's okay. I mean, he was just. . . bruised, that was all. He's gone, he went away. I gave him twenty bucks.''
``Twenty - ?''
And then, before the words could turn to ash in his mouth, it was out: ``I told you - he was Mexican.''
From that point, there is no stopping the downhill tumble of their personal moral code.
Boyle trades scenes, back and forth, of the Mossbachers and their yuppie neighbors taking progressively desperate steps to insulate their compound from the alien masses bubbling up from the valley, as the Rincons' plight worsens. Food is a frequent background metaphor: Candido and America heating beans over a twig fire for dinner, or stretching their larder by stealing kibble from the dishes of Arroyo Blanco show dogs; Delaney, meanwhile, whips up trendy nouvelle delights in his kitchen, and his wife trashes piles of brie, Danish soda bread and sushi that go uneaten at extravagant real-estate open houses.
The tension is at its sharpest as the two families prepare for Thanksgiving, and both find themselves overwhelmed by the cataclysm that ensues.
It is in the trading of scenes, though, that the weakness of The Tortilla Curtain emerges. Boyle treats the Rincons with sympathy and passion, the deprivations they suffer unwinding like something out of Dostoyevski. Their scenes have a gritty, real-world feel.
The Mossbachers and their neighbors, in contrast, come across as cartoon characters - hopelessly shallow, gluttonous and mawkish. Even when a reasonable defense is voiced for the yuppies on the hill defending what is theirs, it comes from the mouths of side characters who've been established by the writer as unlikable.
That aside, Boyle is one wicked social critic. No pretention goes unpunctured here, no false sentiment unexposed. His caustic send-ups of Southern California's uniquely weird form of humanist-snobbery are searing.
Boyle was much better, though, on The Road to Wellville, a cloudy little comedy set during the early 1900s cereal-fitness craze that swept Battle Creek, Mich. It was tarnished by a dreadful movie that reduced the story to a series of bathroom jokes. With the tone already out of balance in The Tortilla Curtain, it is hard to imagine what Hollywood might do to it on a movie screen.
And, given the subject matter, it's not likely they'd notice that the joke's on them. MEMO: Dave Addis is a staff writer. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
T. Coraghessan Boyle
by CNB