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A review by chrysemys
The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle, T.C. Boyle
3.0
Overheated and outdated... somewhat outdated, I think, even when it was published.
I read the first chapters of The Tortilla Curtain many years ago but I stopped (not because the book was so awful but because I didn't have time) and never picked it back up again. I guess I never felt the urge to immerse myself in the ugliness again... until now. I've been eyeing my dnf list where it's been staring at me for almost as long as E.O. Wilson's oft-assigned work The Diversity of Life which is dense but not inherently unpleasant. Because I don't like to feel defeated by a book I took another whack at this one.
Boyle has a great talent for populating his novels with characters that are terrible, terrible people. Even the characters who are merely flawed rather than monstrous do not have discernible redeeming qualities. Boyle is also proficient at writing terrible scenarios that the reader can see coming a mile away but the characters are inexplicably too naïve to predict. Don't they know they are creations of TC Boyle? Wouldn't a reasonable human at least suspect his strings are being pulled by a cruel deity and be perhaps a little more cautious and/or jaded?
This book was so full of terrible people doing terrible things I needed a break less than halfway through. Something light as a distraction from the nastiness, something really fluffy, maybe. But the other book I'm reading is a collection of stories by Flannery O'Connor which is decidedly the opposite of fluff. I looked through my enormous queue and realized I read very little mind candy and I'm all caught up on the works of the literary confectioners I do frequent. I had to scramble to find something else as a mental palate cleanser. A short story anthology, with zero stories by TC Boyle.
The Tortilla Curtain is the book of Job in SoCal and unfolds itself with an inevitable predictability. Set in Topanga? Gonna be a fire, maybe a landslide. Smug liberal protagonist? Gonna turn into a bigtime racist hypocrite. A character called América? Can't you smell the irony?
I read the first chapters of The Tortilla Curtain many years ago but I stopped (not because the book was so awful but because I didn't have time) and never picked it back up again. I guess I never felt the urge to immerse myself in the ugliness again... until now. I've been eyeing my dnf list where it's been staring at me for almost as long as E.O. Wilson's oft-assigned work The Diversity of Life which is dense but not inherently unpleasant. Because I don't like to feel defeated by a book I took another whack at this one.
Boyle has a great talent for populating his novels with characters that are terrible, terrible people. Even the characters who are merely flawed rather than monstrous do not have discernible redeeming qualities. Boyle is also proficient at writing terrible scenarios that the reader can see coming a mile away but the characters are inexplicably too naïve to predict. Don't they know they are creations of TC Boyle? Wouldn't a reasonable human at least suspect his strings are being pulled by a cruel deity and be perhaps a little more cautious and/or jaded?
This book was so full of terrible people doing terrible things I needed a break less than halfway through. Something light as a distraction from the nastiness, something really fluffy, maybe. But the other book I'm reading is a collection of stories by Flannery O'Connor which is decidedly the opposite of fluff. I looked through my enormous queue and realized I read very little mind candy and I'm all caught up on the works of the literary confectioners I do frequent. I had to scramble to find something else as a mental palate cleanser. A short story anthology, with zero stories by TC Boyle.
The Tortilla Curtain is the book of Job in SoCal and unfolds itself with an inevitable predictability. Set in Topanga? Gonna be a fire, maybe a landslide. Smug liberal protagonist? Gonna turn into a bigtime racist hypocrite. A character called América? Can't you smell the irony?