Coyote Eats Dog 'They ain't human,' John Steinbeck of the vagrants in The Grapes of Wrath, 'a human being wouldn't live like they do, A human being couldn't stand to be so dirty and miserable: The passage is, significantly enough, quoted by Coraghessan Boyle at the outset of his new novel, one whose title is itself borrowed from Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat, published exactly sixty years ago, With literary loyalties thus expressed, Coraghessan Boyle revisits Steinbeck's rural California, its poverty and politics. But there is a twist: with the Great Depression now receding into American folklore, dehumanization is portrayed as the result of depraved decadence. The book begins with a cultural encounter, or rather collision, as Delaney Mossbacher's freshly waxed car. complete with personalized number plates, ploughs into the illegal immigrant Candido. Mossbacher hands over twenty dollars and goes on his way, leaving the Mexican to limp back to the canyon where he lives with his pregnant seventeen-year-old wife, ironically named America, The narrative alternates between the twin extremes of these existences; the ,tortilla curtain' of the title represents the dividing line between America and Mexico, between rich and poor. Each day Candido and America go to the labor exchange in search of work, only to suffer the ignominy of physical and financial abuse, Meanwhile, Mossbacher and his wife live in the exclusive district of Arroyo Blanco, where they attempt to hold nature, and immigrants, at bay with the good old greenback. He, the naturalist, writes pious weekly newspaper columns on mule deers and red-tailed hawks, whilst simultaneously erecting ten-foot fences to keep them off his land. The result is an entirely sanitized existence of air-conditioned cars, odorless supermarkets and Nintendo warfare. Here is a depiction of a society that has cleansed itself of all impurities, and there is little left. Amidst the cornucopian abundance, the essence has been misplaced; here is America at its most antiseptic. Coraghessan Boyle is a great stylist, evocative and amusing, but, given the vacuity of Mossbacher's lifestyle, even he struggles to maintain interest. Much better are the raw descriptions of Candido and his wife. In the depths of the canyon there is at least an intimation of humanity, where lives are lived rather than processed. He is also guilty of a certain hat-stand symbolism: Mossbacher's wife buys and sells real estate, whilst his stepson fights off invaders from space in his life of virtual unreality. Names are equally loaded; the inhabitants of the preened Arroyo Blanco are called `Cherrystone' and 'Jardine'. But then the curtain of the title is a fragile one; in Coraghessan Boyle's California nothing is quite stable, even his own symbolism. Nature, in the form of floods, fires and earthquakes, literally moves the earth under his characters' feet. It is the escaped convict, Dominick Flood, who evades his captors (during a forest fire) and begins to blur Boyle's carefully crafted construction. Nature, he suggests, can't be bought off. Dog will eat dog; or, as actually happens, coyote eats dog, and starving Mexican eats cat. Coraghessan Boyle has written a political novel that is both funny and serious; he hits his targets with venomous prose and parody, whilst his humor always pulls him up short of sentimentalism. He sketches the whole panorama of animalistic activity and, above all, he shows what happens to liberal humanism when the `human' is forgotten. |