Book Review

The Tortilla Curtain

T. Coraghessan Boyle

Bloomsbury Paperbacks, London

The Tortilla Curtain is set in the heat of a Spanish-style Los Angeles suburb, complete with supermarket, parking lot, highway, canyon and creek. It tells the stories of two male residents and their wives: Delaney, a liberal writer married to a woman well placed in real estate, and Candido whose wife America is pregnant, a wetback from Mexico. Delaney lives in a big white house, Candido andd America live in the canyon in the open air. One day, as he is returning to his home in the canyon, Candido is knocked down by Delaney, and from then on their lives become intertwined and come to symbolise the age old struggle between the haves and the have nots.

But the novel is about far more than this. As Delaney moves from being a couch liberal to an espouser of the Not in my Back Yard principal, we see an x-ray of how societies become xenophobic through ignorance and fear when economic migrants arrive on their doorstep. As Candido and America struggle to achieve their dream of a house of their own in a society which considers them a useful source of cheap labour but otherwise an eyesore, we see the complexity of the decisions taken by economic migrants and the pain and dignity of people who opt to travel in search of work. Would America have been better off in Mexico where she would have eaten every day, but the opportunities for advancement would have been non-existent, than here, where the prospect of economic improvement tantalises at every turn, but racism and prejudice make it impossible?

This book is particularly relevant to Ireland today, both in terms of travellers (Delaney builds a fence, we put up boulders) and the increasing refugee population. These diverse communities which have arrived in recent years with widely varying difficulties and complexities are lumped together by press and xenophobic commentators as "spongers", and the economic migrant is singled out as the worst kind of parasite with a Grand Plan to destroy our Way of Life. As I watched Delaney progress from his self-satisfied liberalism to his pursuit of Candido as the source of all his problems I was reminded of the non-racist label we liked to assume Irish society deserved until it faced its first challenge and the relentless growth of xenophobia in the last few years. The scenes at the supermarket - where Candido is amazed by the dazzling variety of the foods he cannot afford, whereas Delaney's family can spend $100 as an afterthought for the Thanksgiving dinner, reminded me of Celtic tiger supermarkets, where Big Issue sellers from other countries watch the Irish nouveau riche sweep past them, unseeing, with their laden trollies.

This book is sparsely written, with an attention to the detail of the two lifestyles described, and manages not to be cliched. It is also a whopping great story with a cataclysmic ending. A must.