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chelseamartinez 's review for:
The Tortilla Curtain
by T.C. Boyle
You know how "Crash" won Oscar accolades, and in the fullness of time even more than in the moment, that's embarrassingly on-the-nose about how rich people in LA think that revealing their white or economic guilt absolves them AND is good enough to help them maintain primacy in the industry?
Ok maybe you don't (don't get me started on "La La Land"). Anyhow, this is like the 1990s book version of that (a more logical film comparison might be American Beauty) The plot twist (guess who the real graffitos are!) are not twisty and the internal monologue waits a little too long to contort itself into hatefulness than it really needs to, since you know it's coming.
That being said, there is a specificity to the book that I appreciate, having grown up in South LA and only in the last year gained an understanding of what the Valley and the Hollywood Hills are like demographically (it's also funny to think about an era when a dude newslettering his wildlife constitutionals would consider that a calling, but that was shit was real!). If I had read this book before... 2016 I would have thought the characters even more unbelievable. The only frame of reference I had before living in the north part of the City was how my father would explain to me "yuppiness" and "Santa Barbara" when I was a kid, but these characters are a very specific flavor of exurban... who could have guessed 25 years later that Kanye West would be a public figure of that ilk?
Ok maybe you don't (don't get me started on "La La Land"). Anyhow, this is like the 1990s book version of that (a more logical film comparison might be American Beauty) The plot twist (guess who the real graffitos are!) are not twisty and the internal monologue waits a little too long to contort itself into hatefulness than it really needs to, since you know it's coming.
That being said, there is a specificity to the book that I appreciate, having grown up in South LA and only in the last year gained an understanding of what the Valley and the Hollywood Hills are like demographically (it's also funny to think about an era when a dude newslettering his wildlife constitutionals would consider that a calling, but that was shit was real!). If I had read this book before... 2016 I would have thought the characters even more unbelievable. The only frame of reference I had before living in the north part of the City was how my father would explain to me "yuppiness" and "Santa Barbara" when I was a kid, but these characters are a very specific flavor of exurban... who could have guessed 25 years later that Kanye West would be a public figure of that ilk?