for The Tortilla Curtain, the French Prix Medicis Etranger for best foreign novel.
A self-styled “wild man of American fiction,” Boyle often incorporates histori-
cal characters into his work—for example, explorer Mungo Park in Water Music
(1981); physician and pioneering nutritionist John Harvey Kellogg in The Road
to Wellville (1993); Stanley, the troubled son of inventor and industrialist Cyrus
McCormick, in Riven Rock (1998); sex researcher Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey in The
Inner Circle (2004); and architect Frank Lloyd Wright in The Women (2008)—but
the author’s creative interests also take him in more-contemporary directions.
Drop City (2003) explores the 1970s drug scene, A Friend of the Earth (2000)
looks at environmental and ecological crises from both the 1980s and 1990s and
an imagined 2025, and Talk Talk (2006) considers the psychological as well as
financial impact of identity theft. While these topics may seem wildly dissimilar,
Boyle claimed in a 2003 interview with Robert Birnbaum that all his “books are
allied in one way or another.”
Like Boyle’s other novels set in contemporary times, The Tortilla Curtain is
a satire that, while it focuses specifically on illegal immigration, critiques modern
American society in other ways as well. Two worlds—those of the privileged white
citizens of Los Angeles and of illegal Mexican immigrants—literally collide in
the first pages of the novel when Delaney Mossbacher hits Candido Rincon with
his car. Delaney and his real-estate agent wife, Kyra, live in an exclusive upper-
middle-class suburb, Arroyo Blanco Estates; Candido and his pregnant wife,
America, survive in hand-to-mouth fashion by camping in Topanga Canyon and
seeking day-labor as they try to raise enough money to secure a modest apart-
ment, their symbol of the American dream of financial safety. The two couples’
lives intersect in both accidental and intentional ways; the novel culminates as fire
and flood devastate their (unequally) shared environment.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH
- Boyle appears to maintain ironic neutrality while exploring the nature of cul-
tural and social misunderstanding, economic struggle and middle-class mate-
rialism, and personal and environmental catastrophe. Critics often consider his
ironic detachment a successful approach to such provocative content. Chicago
Tribune critic Jeff Kunerth affirms that the novel “takes an unflattering look
at the politically charged issue of immigration from two divergent perspec-
tives and comes up with a compelling story of myopic misunderstanding and
mutual tragedy.” Tobias Jones of the London Literary Review agrees: “Boyle has
written a political novel that is both funny and serious; he hits his targets with
venomous prose and parody, whilst his humor always pulls him up short of
sentimentalism. He sketches the whole panorama of animalistic activity and,
above all, he shows what happens to liberal humanism when the ‘human’ is for-
gotten.” Other critics are less enamored. Scott Spencer contends that because
the Mossbachers are so socially unconscious and narcissistic, the novel’s com-
mentary “rings hollow.” Indeed, “where the socially engaged novel once offered
critique, Mr. Boyle provides contempt.... Contempt is a dangerous emotion,
luring us into believing that we understand more than we do. Contempt causes