The Tortilla Curtain by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Torture your protagonist. It’s not enough for him to be stuck up a tree. You must throw rocks at him while he figures out how to get down. ~Allen Guthrie

The Tortilla Curtain would make a great Coen Brothers movie.  There are a number of put upon people doing their best to get by in a world that doesn’t understand them or even want them in it.  It is A Tale of Two Cities set in L.A. and follows the adventures of two men who live in very different worlds only a few miles away from each other.

The Tortilla Curtain opens with a well off white guy hitting an illegal alien on the highway.  The man hit by the car survives and the man driving the car is haunted by the accident.  From this moment on their lives are subtlety intertwined and interconnected.

I liked The Tortilla Curtain, right up until the non-ending.  I listened to the audio book where T.C. Boyle does the reading himself.  He has an interesting voice, and he does his best to give the different characters some minor shading, but his talents clearly lay in writing books and not in reading them.  I found it  bit annoying when he felt the need to give every Spanish word a Spanish pronunciation.  I find this annoying in newscasts as well.

Our two heroes are almost comically diametrically opposed.  The rich man makes a fat living writing one article a month-about his random walks through the woods.  The poor man has to work all day to make $35, which he is overjoyed to make-and he is occasionally cheated and robbed.  The rich man has insurance and all the money he needs for anything he wants.  The poor man lives in the wilderness and can barely feed himself and his pregnant wife.

As the story moves forward we leave the realm of simple wealth and poverty and reach for Job-like punishment of the Mexican National as he faces not just hunger and homelessness, but the literal wrath of nature, and we have to believe, the Wrath of God Himself.  What little touch with reality the story may have had is lost long before the finial pointless passages.

T.C. Boyle hates the Mexican with a Zeus-like zeal, never giving the man a moment’s happiness without following it up with life threatening horrors.  He is not too found of the Yuppie living in his gilded house in the hills either, but nothing much happens to the Yuppie until the very end of the book.  And the ending of The Tortilla Curtain is the most grievous flaw in the novel, and it is a damned huge flaw.

I mentioned the Coen Brothers because The Tortilla Curtain brought to mind A Simple Man, the story of a poor sap that never gets a break, which ends with several of the characters about to be killed by a tornado.  But we don’t know if they are killed or not.  The story stops right in the middle of the action.  And so it is with The Tortilla Curtain, it stops with all the balls in the air and the juggler walking off the stage.  This feels like The Wizard of Oz ending right after Dorothy picks up the bucket of water or Close Encounters ending right before the Aliens show up at Devil’s Tower.

Does a bad ending ruin the whole book?  Pretty much so.  I’m one of those old fashioned sort of guys that likes a beginning, a middle, and an end to my novels.  I hate the stories that just stop and leave it up to the reader to decide what happens.

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