1 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
us to jeer rather than speak, to poke at rather than touch.” For a more detailed
look at critical response, consult both Boyle’s website (where multiple reviews
are easily available) and Spencer’s 1995 New York Times assessment. Defend or
attack one or more of these responses using examples from the novel to sup-
port your opinion.
- Scholars also examine the success of the novel as a work of art and explore the
implications of Boyle’s satiric take on modern social issues. Does the structure
of multiple narrators work, or does the authorial voice intrude and thereby
disrupt the subjectivity? Are the Mossbachers relatively flat (and therefore
unsympathetic) as characters, while our compassion is drawn to Candido and
America because we know their complicated personal histories, their trag-
edies? How does the image of the coyote as both predator and survivor expose
and illuminate naturalist-writer Delaney’s understanding—and that of the
reader—of the migration of the human species? Is the end of the novel left
open to the possibilities of a shared future, an ironic gesture, or an unsatisfy-
ing cop-out? For an insightful close reading of the novel as well as a measured
critique of its strengths and shortcomings, see Peter Freese’s “T. Coraghessan
Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain: A Case Study in the Genesis of Xenophobia”
(2000).
- The timeliness and political nature of the novel continue to engage scholarly
interest. The novel takes place in an explosive era, when the Los Angeles riots
of 1992, the Malibu/Topanga fire of 1993, and the passage in 1994 of the anti-
immigrant California Proposition 187 were immediately relevant. However,
not only current political and social events ground the narrative; Boyle’s deep
literary knowledge enables him to connect this highly contemporary story the-
matically to earlier landmark fictions. One is French Enlightenment philoso-
pher Voltaire’s 1759 satire Candide: or, The Optimist; Voltaire’s eponymous hero
is, like Boyle’s, “a hapless picaro traveling in search of the best of all possible
worlds” (Elisabeth Schäfer-Wünsche, p. 404). Two American Depression-era
classics also offer context. John Steinbeck’s 1939 opus The Grapes of Wrath
provides the epigraph as well as themes of migration and exploitation and the
formal structure that alternates the narrative voice from chapter to chapter.
The protagonist of William Faulkner’s 1932 Light in August, the racially mixed
Joe Christmas, becomes The Tortilla Curtain’s Jose Navidad, a parallel though
now secondary character who reflects the disturbing impact of racism. For a
reading of the novel that not only explores its literary connections but also
gives a Marxist interpretation of class conflict and eco-racism by comparing
the novel to the contemporary work of social commentator Mike Davis, see
Gregory Myerson’s “Tortilla Curtain and The Ecology of Fear ” (2004). Elisabeth
Schäfer-Wünsche also reads the novel as in dialogue with Davis’s work. How
does a reading of the novel change when put in the context of such literary
references, or when comparing The Tortilla Curtain to the work of Davis?
- Boyle’s examination of contemporary American society invites interdisciplin-
ary academic inquiry. Students might find particularly fruitful an engagement
with one such methodology, whiteness studies, which asserts that the concept
of race is a social construct conferring privilege on those identified as white
