Downscale in Topanga Canyon The Tortilla Curtain will give pause to readers who might have been thinking they were having a bad day. Candido, the hero (or antihero) of this parable of North-South relations, is having a bad day. In the book's opening moment he is hit by a car on a California freeway. With a smashed face, arm and pelvis he must drag himself back down into the brush of Topanga Canyon where he and his wife, America, live in hiding. He couldn't go to a doctor even if he had money, for fear of deportation. Camped on the edge of starvation, he's now in no shape to work. And "work," when he can do it, means waiting at an unofficial labor exchange in a parking lot where gringos come to pick up day laborers for a feudal wage. Sometimes at the end of a day's rock hauling or post-hole digging Candido is paid even less than the promised pittance, or nothing at all. How can he argue? But he can't abide the thought of sending his beautiful, pregnant wife to the labor exchange, as she stands to be even more desperately abused. On the other side of this opening impact sits Delaney Mossbacher behind the wheel. He's a well-heeled suburbanite in a foreign car, speeding toward the recycling center with a week's worth of family discards. After he hits a man and stops, he finds he can't speak to his victim. In the back of his mind Delaney fears a lawsuit scam, so he talks himself out of calling the police. Instead, he limply offers a $20 bill before driving off with a dent on the fender of his Acura and a matching nick on his conscience, both easy enough to repair. The engine of this novel is ramrod irony: Delaney and Candido live next door to each other, one in a plush development overlooking Topanga Canyon, the other at a campsite within it. Their lives proceed along parallel courses, occasionally intersecting, but while Candido and America vomit in pain, reel with hunger, and are hunted like animals, Delaney's family counts calories and gets depressed over lost pets. T.C. Boyle has proved himself time and again a canny storyteller at home with the offbeat and borderline grotesque; he applies his same sly skills here to characters heavily soiled with the grit of real life. The novel gamely addresses what has probably always been the great American political dilemma: In a country that proudly defines itself as a nation of immigrants, who gets to slam the door on whom? Boyle cuts to the heart of this question by describing two different nations, rich and poor, which occupy the same space but are often invisible to each other. Delaney's wife, Kyra, a powerhouse realtor, presides over a world of empty, immaculate mansions waiting to be sold. She clicks on high heels through these great halls admiring the space, without thinking once of homelessness. Kyra has a bleeding heart all right-it really gets her dander up to see a poor overheated pet locked in a car. But with a wave of her hand she scatters the labor exchange that is Candido's lifeline, because the sight of those people hanging around is bound to affect property values. Meanwhile, Candido crouches on the other side of the class wall, seeming to accept the excesses of gabacho wealth as an outlandish inevitability as he tries not to starve. In one of the book's many moments of fierce black comedy, he ponders the ethics of stealing food and crockery from a dog. Walls stand everywhere as a metaphor for the growing divide. Delaney's family keeps raising the fence that separates their back yard from the untamed canyon, but coyotes sneak in anyway to attack their small, matching dogs. Meanwhile, Delaney's neighbors in the ritzy development of Arroyo Blanco vote to erect a wall with a guarded gate to keep out the perceived threats of rape, robbery and Mexicans. Delaney tries halfheartedly to oppose the wall. He doesn't see himself living in a guarded enclave for the rich; besides, he's a nature lover. His life's only labor (since he inherited wealth) is to write a flowery magazine column called "Pilgrim at Topanga Creek" He moved to Arroyo Blanco for the pleasure of walking out his back door into the canyon's wild tangle of chamise and manzanita. Now, if the wall goes up, he'll need a ladder to do it. The residents of Arroyo Blanco (approximately "White Alley") struggle to reconcile the verities of freedom and justice for all with the urge to protect wealth and privilege. At the neighborhood meetirg a proponent of the wall declares, "I'm as liberal as anybody in this room-my father chaired Adlai Stevenson's campaign committee, for christsakes-but I say we've got to put an end to this." Heads nod in unison in Arroyo Blanco. The neighborhood leaders invoke "liberal credentials" to soothe the onus of elitist actions. Their moral dilemma is comic when it isn't pathetic, but it never approaches anything so attractive as honesty. It's a bit of a chore to love anyone in this story. Delaney's wife, child and friends are blandly monstrous. Candido, for his part, is stoic beyond belief-but only because he lacks any other choice, and takes his frustrations out on his wife. America is a wide-eyed innocent who falls steadily deeper into a wordless depression as her hunger and pregnancy advance. She arrives at an honest vision when she lies in the woods surrounded by yellow-eyed coyotes, dreaming herself one with these wild creatures who are fed scraps and then despised by the rich folks on the hill. The pre-publication talk about Boyle's latest suggests that this novel is his most political, and will set the terms for the debate on the border crisis. The former it may be; the latter it does not do. No voice in this novel rises to the occasion of political resolution. The pilgrim Delaney is posed as a sort of Everyman who wants to do the right thing, but is forced by circumstance to participate in a breezy California apartheid. I could not find in my heart an ounce of sympathy for his mental distress. I live in a place where many people are upset about the predicament of undocumented workers; they relieve their angst by donating time and money to Legal Aid or the sanctuary movement. They risk arrest to help neighbors in need, or canvass the streets to stop Arizona's version of Proposition 187. Delaney would probably be too ambivalent even to sign a petition. This, of course, is not just a novel's problem but the U.S. problem: Our range of political debate occupies such an absurdly narrow band of the spectrum that our most conservative and most liberal public voices all lie somewhere to the right of what most of the world considers right-wing. I can't criticize The Tortilla Curtain for failing to include a Marxist analysis of U.S. Mexican border economics, or refusing to suggest mechanisms for redistributing a rich nation's wealth. I can only say it does not set the terms for any genuine debate. What Boyle does, and does well, is lay on the line our national cult of hypocrisy. Comically and painfully he details the smug wastefulness of the haves and the vile misery of the have-nots. It doesn't seem to dawn on anyone in this novel that opulence next to starvation is brutely immoral, but the reader can hardly escape that conclusion. Red-blooded Americans of every stripe will find themselves rooting for Candido and America, right up to the rip-roaring deus ex machina ending that screams out that we are all in this together. |