T.C. Boyle your hands

I remember a friend of mine once being displeased that his reading palate just wasn't refined enough. He was distraught that he never read a bad book. His argument was that he seemed to like everything he read. I assured him that this was because he could sense a bad book and therefore avoid it. In his case, this was probably true, though his tastes did run to the extraordinarily bleak. He was always recommending these books about getting cheated on and losing one's religious faith in Poland. I could never stomach some of his more extreme suggestions, though we agreed on enough volumes to be able to discuss the subject of literature with a certain expertise. God forbid, though, that I should read that much French poetry. For those who don't know, their poetry (and their novels) are like their food. Good for one course, but too rich for an entire meal.

Nonetheless, it is a sign, I think, of refined taste, that one has the good sense to put a book down when it is bad. Because of my advisor's belief that I haven't read enough, I've decided to prove otherwise, at least to myself, by recording the books that I read here. Unfortunately, this assertion came after I had just read a good number of books which I would have loved to record but they came a little too before the wire. There's no point mentioning them a month late, and so I won't.

Unfortunately, this means that the first book I should have mentioned would have been T.C. Boyle's, The Tortilla Curtain. By the way, when I say read, I include the concept of books on tape. I would perhaps make better use of the verb, digested, but that has too many gastro-intestinal connotations to leave it even the hint of savoriness, nor does it portray my own reverance for the narrative. But I digress, because I neither finished listening nor reading Pen Malumud award wining writer T.C. Boyle's novel which is recyclable as toilet paper.

Let's start. One of the main characters who gets fucked over by the system is named America. No accent mark over any of the vowels is going to dissemble the fact that the character is named AMERICA. Overwritten? The whole book is this bad.

The tension between Southern Californians and Mexican immigrants is painted in the broad strokes of a writer in his apprentice stage--where everyone is either good or bad. Sci fi writers are famous for this, making whole races despicable, only to be wiped out by more ethically responsible races--genocide being seen as the only sensible alternative to racial strife of this kind. No, this is not one of my anti-Bush blogs.

I guess Boyle could be commended for switching this relationship around a bit. Here it is the white lower Upper class that serve the function of Tolkien's orcs, but still it isn't like the innocent good haven't before been portrayed as suffering at the hands of a self aggrandize fake moral superior. Hell, that was the reality of the Holocaust, so... No credit for Boyle in any case.

Nonetheless, the portrayal is so pitifully bad. In one scene there's a Mexican who has only recently survived a near fatal car crash (in which the driver gave him $20, didn't call for help, and didn't even drive the guy to the hospital, because he was Mexican and didn't deserve any kindness). Anyway, there's the Mexican, limping, face covered in a scab, kidneys bleeding, etc., crawling through the parking lot of a supermarket looking for his lost wife, who he's afraid may have been deported. He can't speak the language, he has no money, and he's otherwise afraid that the whites will either deport him, beat him, or kill him--and for good reason. In this book, every white is just waiting for a Mexican to come along so that they can release all of their pent up aggression on a target who, by virtue of being an illegal immigrant, is without protection or petition.

So here he is, Candido--beaten, broken--looking for America (God it hurts just to write it), and he bumps into a trucker who takes one look at the broken shell of a man dressed in rags, and begins to publicly berate him and threaten him and it is only through absolute humbleness that Candido escapes. Certainly he can't expect any help from the crowds of whites that gather around to see what happens (presumably they are too busy wishing that it was they who were beating this Mexican senseless to offer any help).

Oh my, this book is bad. I can imagine only two reasons that T.C. Boyle would write Tortilla Curtain. Either he himself ran over an illegal immigrant at some point in his life and left the poor soul for dead--in which case, the language of the book clearly demonstrates some sort of overcompensation. He writes to show the world how whites treat Mexicans, when what he really is showing is how he'd like to treat Mexicans. It's like the guy who tells you, "Sure we'd all like to have sex with children, but we know it's wrong so we don't." No. We don't all want to have sex with children. It's just you, you sick fuck. T.C. Boyle is saying, "sure we'd all like a sexy illegal immigrant from Mexico around who we could rape at our leisure knowing full well that she would never go to the police for fear of being deported, but we know its wrong, so we don't kidnap people from their various hovels."

Or, this book is a warning and should be read the way you read any sort of racist literature. In which case, I suppose it is more eloquent than KKK literature, but still...I mean, is that the point of this book, "hey Mexicans, if you come to America, you can expect this to happen to you."

I think T.C. Boyle may be incorrectly categorized as a writer of social awareness. It's probably safer to say that he's some sort of fascist nutjob. Anyway, his book is trash, and I did not finish it.

I did, however, read a collection of stories by Ray Bradbury, and they were very good. I recommend them highly, including especially "The Anthem Sprinters," which was very humorous.