The Face on The Tortilla Curtain Novelist T.C. Boyle Raises a Ruckus by Chryss Yost (First published in the Santa Barbara Independent, August 3-15, 2002, Vol. 16, No. 820)

Mexican is good. At least, Montecito’s Café del Sol version of Mexican, which comes with a generous basket of lightly-salted chips, a mild salsa genírico, and crisp linen napkins. Nestled between Highway 101 and the bird refuge, the summer sky dangling over East Beach is framed on one edge by the Child’s estate—the site of Vegemar, one of Santa Barbara’s first mansions, Jungleville, a hobo camp that sprung up in the 1930’s (with the millionaire Childs’ permission), and Santa Barbara’s bite-sized Zoo. Jaguars purr into the parking lot in front of the Café. The master of irony, T.C. Boyle, lurks against the patio wall, sipping an iced tea, looking like a punked-out Willie Wonka, with a wild (if thinning) thatch of mango-tinted hair above dark sunglasses, a sharp nose, and a slightly sinister smile. What Wonka is to candy, Boyle is to words: an inventive and energetic genius with a devious sense of humor, who enjoys nothing more than setting out a opulent buffet where hypocrites, gluttons, and fools can find their just desserts. He is the author of A Friend of the Earth (set in Santa Ynez), Riven Rock (set in Montecito), and The Road to Wellville, to name just a few of his bestsellers. Boyle is the Candyman, and you, reader, are about to be invited into his factory. Once inside the doors, a simple adjective like “Mexican” is suddenly not so simple.It is precisely that refusal to be simple that has Santa Barbara buzzing about The Tortilla Curtain, Boyle’s sixth novel and the first selection for the new Santa Barbara Reads! program. Hitting the shelves in 1995, the book was just in time to become fuel for the smoldering Proposition 187 controversy. Supporters of Prop 187 hoped that drying up access to public services would stop the flow of undocumented

workers from Mexico. Opponents argued that services such as education and prenatal care saved taxpayers dollars for every penny they cost. Nonetheless, Prop 187 was passed by over 60% of California voters in 1994. Portions of the proposition were later declared unconstitutional, other portions were ignored by the Governor in favor of improving relationships
with our southern neighbor, and, heck, who really knows where it stands now. Because of California’s tumultuous co-dependency with cheap Mexican labor, The Tortilla Curtain remains painfully relevant. Like Prop 187, the novel will give Santa Barbarans plenty to argue about.The book is a smorgasbord of ironies, a novel which is bound to twist in the guts of the reader. Those hungry for a lite snack of pat solutions, life-affirming morals, and happy adventures should seek their chicken soup elsewhere. Like Wonka leading hapless children through room after room of temptations, Boyle doesn’t force feed anyone anything. Boyle simply watches—occasionally mumbling a dispassionate “Stop. Don’t”—as his characters inevitably implode from the weight of their own weaknesses. The Tortilla Curtain focuses on two couples: Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher, rich white yuppies, and Cándido and América Rincón,
###################################################################################
illegal aliens who have struggled to cross the border to find the American Dream. Their lives first collide quite literally when Delaney hits Cándido with his freshly-waxed Acura, slightly damaging the car’s headlight and—as if that weren’t enough!—causing serious harm to Cándido, who suffers through his long recuperation at a makeshift camp hidden in the chaparral while pregnant América struggles to earn enough money for their rice and beans. The contrasts are stark, and occasionally heavy-handed, but they are the contrasts of humanity. Are we doing enough to help immigrants, or too much? What do the haves owe the have-nots, if anything? And who is really responsible for crime in our neighborhoods?

The upstanding, and mostly blond, citizens of Arroyo Blanco Estates are having a homeowner’s association meeting, trying to decide whether or not they should build a security gate. The competing voices of Arroyo Blanco—which fittingly translates to “White Stream”—could be the inner voice of Santa Barbara, a voice which echoes in the difference between Milpas and State Streets:

The Crepes of Wrath—Of course, Santa Barbara does not want to be exclusive. After all, this is where they burned the bank back in the ‘60s. Santa Barbara wants Isla Vista idealism, but, as another character responds:

This is the Santa Barbara that celebrates the made-for-Hollywood romance of Old Spanish Days while the schools struggle to accommodate Spanish-speaking children, the Santa Barbara which welcomes Taco Bell and bans tamale carts, etc., etc. The problems are not new and you won’t get any easy answers from Boyle.

“I really don’t know how I feel about anything,” says Boyle, nursing his iced tea, “until I write about it. That’s why I write, really. Even then, I don’t always know. I want to write in a way that forces people to think things through, from different sides. It may make you sad or angry, but that’s the function of art. Good writing has got to be entertaining, and it’s got to make you think.”
In shining a bright and unflattering light on the things most of us would rather not think about, The Tortilla Curtain invites comparison with John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a book so controversial it was banned in many parts of the country and burned twice in Steinbeck’s own town of Salinas. Burning and banning aside, The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer Prize and
###################################################################################
Steinbeck was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize. The Tortilla Curtain was selected for the Santa Barbara Reads! program partly as a complement for The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck’s epic is a key part of the new statewide California Stories program, an effort to capture all sides of what the state is calling “the California experience.”

Santa Barbarans may think they know something about drought, but the local water shortages are nothing compared to the Dustbowl, a devastating decade-long drought that—paired with the Great Depression—forced many Oklahoma farmers from their homes. The Okies arrived to hear California’s golden gates clicking shut as soon as they approached. These were the years when the wealthy Childs were opening their Santa Barbara estate as a makeshift camp for the dispossessed. At one point, there were over thirty hobo shacks in Jungleville alone, and thousands throughout the state.
The Grapes of Wrath is classic American Dream turned nightmare, and no writer today is better at corrupting hope than Boyle. While it takes some chutzpah to declare yourself the new Steinbeck, Boyle leaps right in, introducing his book with a well-known quote from The Grapes of Wrath: “They ain’t human. A human being wouldn’t live like they do. A human being couldn’t stand it to be so dirty and miserable.” Boyle addresses many of Steinbeck’s issues from an updated perspective that moves the battleground from the fields of the central valley into the suburbs of Southern California, where endless remodeling, landscaping, and housecleaning have a unquenchable thirst for cheap, no-benefits-paid labor. As desperate as they are, Cándido and América will be dirtier and more miserable before the story ends. Boyle heaps misfortune after misfortune on them, and yet, like the Joads in Steinbeck’s novel, the Rincóns push to survive, even if they have to eat garbage and cats to do it.

Some of the earliest criticism about The Tortilla Curtain is probably not surprising: Who the heck does this middle-class white dude think he is to write about this stuff as if he knows about it? What makes him think he can write about being Mexican, let alone an illegal immigrant?
“That’s the most racist thing of all.” Boyle is obviously still rankled by the accusation. “It’s the same old line, that only Mexicans can write about Mexicans, only women can write about women, only dogs can write about dogs. . . where does it stop? I’m a writer. I write about people, all sorts. That’s it.” He pauses, and asks the waiter for more ice. Sitting on the shady patio of the Café del Sol, Boyle begins to list his critics as if pulling them out of a line-up. “The P.C. nunnery, the politically correct orthodoxy, of course was the worst. The white liberals were upset with me for poking fun, the right was upset because they thought I was soft on immigration. . .” The list goes on. Chicano Studies. Nature writers. Upsetting people is the risk—some might even say the goal—of satire. It is a risk Boyle has taken throughout his career. The Tortilla Curtain isn’t a comedy with jokes and punch-lines; it is social satire serving up layers upon layers of irony.

His Left (Behind) Foot—From the very beginning of his Converse AllStar walk toward fame, Boyle’s nothing-sacred approach has focused on over-the-top irony, bizarre situations, and outrageous characters. In his first writing class at State University of New York at Potsdam, Boyle wrote “The Foot,” an absurdist one-act play in which centers, quite literally, around the foot of a young boy who has been otherwise eaten by an alligator. His parents keep the foot, with its tennis shoe and ragged sock, in a shrine on the coffee table. Boyle soon turned to short stories. As he explained in an interview with George Plimpton of The Paris Review, “Plays, after all, involve staging, which involves working with people, something I am incapable of.” That may be, but he’s never been one to avoid the
###################################################################################
stage or shun a spotlight.

Boyle is no modest, bookish, ivory-tower intellectual; he has a voracious appetite for attention. “It’s why we write: ego. We have something to say and we want people to hear it. I want people to read my work. I love the interviews, the book tours, the readings, all of it.” As for being the official, if temporary, author of Santa Barbara: “It’s the apotheosis for any writer, isn’t it? To have all these people reading and talking about your work?” He loves the idea that people all over town will be able to recognize their fellow Tortilla readers by special pins. “Just the idea that people will talk about the book in grocery lines, at the bank. Imagine! Maybe Dargan’s could host a Tortilla Curtain night, like their trivia night? There could be bar fights! Over literature!”

It’s easy to picture ringmaster Boyle hosting a “buy a pitcher for literature” night at the local pub. He is a writer who knows the value of self-promotion. Born Thomas John Boyle, and known as “Tom” to his friends, he began publishing as T. Coraghessan (cor-AG-hessan) Boyle, a name so outrageous that the New Yorker featured a cartoon showing a woman in a bookstore with the caption: “I’m looking for a book by T. What’s-His-Face Boyle.” The Chronicle of Higher Education had one in which a woman tells her friend, as they eye her husband reading in an armchair: “What he thinks of the book hardly matters. He won’t be able to resist dropping a name like T. Coraghessan Boyle.” Boyle claims Coraghessan from his mother’s side of the family tree and jokes that it is an old Gaelic term meaning, “Take two and call me in the morning.”

One of his most autobiographical, and best-known, stories is “Greasy Lake,” which opens:

White Punk on Dope—That’s Boyle: the typical working-class Irish-Catholic boy gone sour, a crazy punk who once stole a three-foot-tall statue of Jesus and placed it in the road so His outstretched arms were directing traffic. He claimed in one interview that he still refuses to enter a cathedral, even as a tourist. Both his parents were alcoholics, and Boyle shot up, dressed up, and tore up the roads of Peekskill, New York, and generally raised havoc until 1972.

That year, after having spent a few years as a high school teacher, he rode the success of a story called (appropriately) “The OD and Hepatitis Railroad or Bust,” right into the graduate program at the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where he studied with literary greats John Cheever and John Irving. In 1988, his novel World’s End won the PEN/Faulkner Award and national attention. After earning an M.F.A., then a Ph.D. from Iowa, Boyle was hired by the University of Southern California, where he is now a tenured
###################################################################################
professor. When asked about U.S.C.’s reputation as a school for privileged white kids, and how that might have influenced him in writing The Tortilla Curtain, Boyle points out “In sheer numbers, not percentage but sheer numbers, there are more international students at U.S.C. than any other school in the country. It’s really not about the rich and poor there. That’s L.A., really. That’s California.”

The job at U.S.C. brought him to Southern California. He and his wife, Karen, and their three children settled in Woodland Hills. Now, beginning their tenth year in Montecito, they live in a house built by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1909. “Like everyone, we got tired of L.A., of smog. Santa Barbara is wonderful. It has its own culture, good people, and you can always walk up to the window at the Ensemble Theater and see a great production, just like that. We have wonderful things here, like the Speaking of Stories series, which has done some of my work.”

These days, Boyle is perhaps a little more like a character in his story “Achates McNeil” now than “Greasy Lake.” Here, the narrator in “Achates McNeil” describes his father, a famous writer:

Sound familiar? It certainly sounds familiar to the waitress at Café del Sol, whom Boyle knows by name. She and Boyle talk briefly about the fire burning in Kern County, close to where they both have friends and vacation spots. Boyle has been going up to Kern County since 1978, and all his books have been completed there. He enjoys the calm, the change of scenery, and the chance to work without interruptions. “It’s absolutely boring up there. All I do is write and walk around in the trees. It’s great!”

For all his rebel looks and wild performances, Boyle is a workhorse who writes every morning, seven days a week. “I think it really gets under people’s skin,” he says. “I’m just happy, happy and successful. No huge problems, at least not visible ones.” He has been married for over twenty-five years—and to the same woman, no less. He has a steady job that he loves. Beneath the raucous sense of humor and that crazy hairdo, he’s an undercover Mr. Stability. He works hard. He’s been lucky—“Really, really lucky” he adds—but he also works hard.

He described one of his first book tours, driving around from bookstore to bookstore. Going into a store in San Francisco, he saw they had two paperback copies of his book, Water Music, on the shelf. When he offered to sign them, the store manager seemed reluctant, but finally allowed Boyle to sign the books, with a “sure, what the hell” shrug. Walking out of the bookstore, underwhelmed by his fame, Boyle looked at a bookstore across the street to see a huge line of people circling the store, all with paid-for hardbound copies of a huge, expensive book in their arms. Who were they waiting for? What great literary figure could attract such a crowd?, he wondered. “Bette Midler,” he says, still shaking his head twenty years later. “They lined up like that to buy Bette Midler.” Ah, fame. It wasn’t until the publication of his fifth book, Water Music, that he knew publishers had marketing departments. “Wow! What a revelation!”
###################################################################################
Suddenly, all America was reading this punk with the unpronounceable name.

Now, he publishes as T.C. Boyle, at least on the cover, so they can make each letter in his name bigger. His new novel, Drop City, about hippies who head to Alaska to homestead, will be out early next year, and the publisher has just finished the cover (which you can preview now on www.tcboyle.com). A fiction anthology is in the works. Seven new stories are done and scheduled to appear in magazines like Esquire and The New Yorker. Life is good.

Boyle struts down the train tracks on his walk home, planning to do a little yard work before heading Lucky’s for a stiff one. Meanwhile, across from the former wealth and squalor that was the Childs’ Vegemar mansion and the Jungleville shanties, seditious capybaras consider a swim in the slough, the sun shimmers with affluence and the Santa Barbara Cemetery waits just to the left, like something out of a T.C. Boyle novel.