When plentitude meets penury In a year when race has' become the hottest card in America's deck, T. Coraghessan Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain is a thoughtful reminder of what the world might mean to nonwhites without recourse to money and the media, without a crew of millionaire lawyers - without, indeed, any 'protection From the law whatsoever. It is a harrowing, even horrific, tale of an ;immigrant couple's venture into California, and the shockingly brutish reception they receive from the indigenous settlers. While there is a whiff of Steinbeck in Boyle's depiction of the honest labourer and his travails, the book's opening potently recalls an incident central to Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. Delaney Mossbacher, a rich Californian with impeccably liberal values,. accidentally knocks down a Mexican immigrant named Candido Rincon. Having discovered his victim dazed and bleeding, Delaney tries to salve his conscience by giving Candido a $20 bill. The two men return to their homes - the former to Arroyo Blanco Estates,- a well-maintained enclave of Californian affluence, the latter into Topanga Canyon, where he and his pregnant 17-year-old wife America are living rough, desperate to scrape a living and avoid the men from La Migra- Immigration. The encounter continues to haunt Delaney, who also finds his environmental column "Wide Open Spaces" (whichcelebrates the wildlife of rural California) increasingly at odds with the security measures his fellow residents are advocating to ward off predators - and they do not just mean coyotes. "The ones coming in through the Tortilla Curtain down there," a neighbour informs him, "those are the ones that are killing us. They're peasants, my friend." Having established the divide between plenitude and penury, Boyle twists the knife quite savagely. In Candido and America he presents a very affecting portrait of humanity degraded by want and demoralised by a society whose own immigrant origins have been conveniently absorbed and forgotten. In Delaney he charts the withering of the white liberal's ideals - ambiva-lence congeals into hostility. Boyle switches his..narrative between both camps in a remarkable feat of imaginative empathy. The compassion is evident, but so too is the gift for acerbic social comedy: his eye for the faddishness and foolishness of privileged Californians is an unerring as Tom Wolfe's for the denizens of Manhattan's haut monde. In short, it is difficult to fault this novel-the combination of descriptive exactness, narrative sting and emotional engagement affirms its author's place as one of America's most valuable storytellers.
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