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melanie_page 's review for:
The Tortilla Curtain
by T.C. Boyle
I think Boyle has managed to capture the various feelings, concerns, and misunderstandings between the citizens in the U.S. and the Mexican immigrants who go there. Both sides make assumptions, get angry, do things they normally find unacceptable as the novel intensifies. By the end of the audiobook, which is read beautifully by the author, I was emotionally in tangles.
Boyle also cleverly adds in moments that shows the hypocrisy of the characters. Coyotes function as metaphor for immigrants. They're invasive and kill house pets, but Delany, the white male protagonist who is a nature writer, pens an article about how humans are encroaching on the coyotes' land and need to respect that. But when Mexican immigrants are found in the U.S., he can't see the parallel. Delany's wife, Kyra, makes a huge scene in public and pulls out all the stops to save a dog that has been shut inside a car on a temperate day. However, she makes calls to the authorities when she sees "too many" immigrants gathering outside a store to get work. It's interesting that husband and wife have more respect for canines than humans.
One thing that peeved me to no end is how Boyle lazily uses "fat" to signify greedy and bad. When he says the word, he emphasizes it as if it were in bold and italics (again, this is the audiobook version), meaning there is no mistake in the author's intentions with "fat." I am repeatedly disappointed by the cliched use of a fat villain.
That ending is going to irk loads of readers, and probably has, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. It's unclear exactly what happened or what will happen, which the ending leads readers to think this is a large slice-of-life novel instead of a fully arced plot.
Boyle also cleverly adds in moments that shows the hypocrisy of the characters. Coyotes function as metaphor for immigrants. They're invasive and kill house pets, but Delany, the white male protagonist who is a nature writer, pens an article about how humans are encroaching on the coyotes' land and need to respect that. But when Mexican immigrants are found in the U.S., he can't see the parallel. Delany's wife, Kyra, makes a huge scene in public and pulls out all the stops to save a dog that has been shut inside a car on a temperate day. However, she makes calls to the authorities when she sees "too many" immigrants gathering outside a store to get work. It's interesting that husband and wife have more respect for canines than humans.
One thing that peeved me to no end is how Boyle lazily uses "fat" to signify greedy and bad. When he says the word, he emphasizes it as if it were in bold and italics (again, this is the audiobook version), meaning there is no mistake in the author's intentions with "fat." I am repeatedly disappointed by the cliched use of a fat villain.
That ending is going to irk loads of readers, and probably has, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. It's unclear exactly what happened or what will happen, which the ending leads readers to think this is a large slice-of-life novel instead of a fully arced plot.