Issues of today are brought to life in 'Tortilla Curtain' Delaney Mossbacher is besieged. His yuppie life in suburban Los Angeles is under assault from recurring encounters with a bony, middle-aged Mexican who lives in a canyon beneath his subdivision. Candido Rincon is besieged. His life as an illegal immigrant is haunted by repetitious collisions with a redhaired gringo who lives in a big house above his canyon camp. They first meet when Rincon is struck by Mossbacher's car as he dashes across a busy road. From that point on, they keep separating and rejoining in what both feel is some cosmic conspiracy. Neither man is out to intentionally harm or harass the other. Yet both are intertwined in a symbiotic spiral of events that carries them through all the plagues and curses of life in California. T. Coraghessan Boyle's novel is a grim look at the timely issues of crime and immigration. Boyle has written about cultural clashes before in "East is East," but there is nothing the least bit humorous about his portrayal in "The Tortilla Curtain" of people incapable of comprehending one another. The themes he explores in the novel are as recent as the efforts in California to deny social services to illegal immigrants and as timeless as the lure of opportunity that has drawn foreigners to these shores for centuries. Candido and his wife, America, are the Okies of the '90s, and Boyle is their Steinbeck. They find California as inhospitable as did the Joads, but they still hang on to that immigrant faith in a better life built on perseverance and hard work. Delaney Mossbacher and his real estate agent wife, Kyra, have achieved the American Dream: a nice home, new car, good jobs-all secured a safe distance from the ills of the city. Mossbacher and Rincon appear on the surface to have nothing in common, but the events that keep tossing them together reveal their interdependence, an economic twinship between those with money and those who need money. As cities like Los Angeles periodically burst into riots, and the centrifugal force of white flights sends suburbs spiraling away from the center of the city, the gulf widens between the classes. But that chasm is no more a moat protecting the Mossbachers than a trench along the U.S.Mexican border is a "Tortilla Curtain" holding back the Rincons. Running through the book are Mossbacher's ruminations on the life of the coyote, an animal that is both a, native species and a displaced pest. In an argument with his wife over plans to build a wall around the subdivi-, sion to keep the coyotes from snacking on backyard poodles, Mossbacher sums up Boyle's themes: "This isn't about coyotes, don't kid yourself. It's, about Mexicans, it's about blacks. It's about exclusion, division, hate." "The Tortilla Curtain" takes an unflattering look at the politically charged issue of immigration from two divergent perspectives and comes, up with a compelling story of myopic misunderstanding and mutual tragedy. |