Why There's No More Dreamin' For California's Chardonnay Socialists
Stephen Amidon
Esquire 11/95

For over a decade, T Coraghessan Boyle has been the nearly man of American fiction . Despite regularly churning out novels of great scope and surging energy, there has always been something missing in his work. From the writing colony farce of East is East to the bran-soaked satire of The Road to Wellville, Boyle's output has been marred by a whiff of whimsy, a weightlessness that has kept him from attaining the front ranks of contemporary writing.

With The Tortilla Curtain (Bloomsbury, £15.99), it looks like Boyle has finally arrived. This time around, the author has focused his bountiful skills on a subject worthy of them - the social turmoil caused by illegal immigration in southern California. With admirable audacity, he has successfully revisited the same moral and geographical turf John Steinbeck worked 60 years ago in The Crapes of Wrath.

The novel opens when Delaney Mossbacher, a 39-year-old nature writer, runs over the illegal immigrant Candido Rincon when the latter ill-advisedly tries to run across a suburban Los Angeles freeway. Both men are on their way home when the mishap occurs, the big difference being that the yuppie's home is a $300,000 luxury dwelling, while the Mexican's is a tattered blanket under the stars. Although Candido is badly shaken, nothing is broken, and Mossbacher satisfies his addled conscience by slipping the wetback a $20 greenback.

But this is not the end of the matter. Gradually, the two men's lives become fatefully interlinked. Mossbacher, a weak-willed
liberal who cares more for the environment than those troublesome brown people who increasingly occupy it, continually crosses paths with Candido, who roughs it with his pregnant wife in a canyon near Mossbacher's house. The yuppie begins to see the illegal as the root of all the social evils afflicting his once idyllic LA existence.

For his part, Candido cannot understand why the prosperous Anglo is so keen on thwarting his attempts to scrounge a living from the rich California soil.

The Tortilla Curtain is a big, bold novel that convincingly renders a once secure society in a state of upheaval. What makes Boyle's book so good is not only its juggernaut plot, but also the author's keen eye for satire. Mossbacher is a memorable comic creation - a blinkered yuppie who feels it is his right to camp out because he owns a house, yet refuses Candido that same right because he does not. He lives in a community whose street names are Spanish yet whose complex security system is designed to keep out Spanish speakers. Mossbacher cannot see that his life is shot through with bigoted irony.

Boyle's satire remains keenly focused even when he opens it up to include California's Anglo society at large, for whom immigration is becoming an increasingly nightmarish dilemma. He deftly shows how quickly liberal platitudes can be cast aside when the tortilla curtain parts to let in undesirables, culminating in such entities as the grotesque Proposition 187, a recently enacted measure denying illegal immigrants health and educational benefits. With Mossbacher and his fellow Chardonnay sippers, Boyle has created a memorable portrait of the almost imperceptible slide from decency to intolerance that occurs when ordinary people feel threatened by alien forces. In doing so, he has achieved that rarest of literary doubles - creating a message novel that is also a thundering good read.