a book
The Tortilla Curtain
T.C. Boyle · 1996 · 368 pages
T.C. Boyle’s “irresistible” (Entertainment Weekly) classic bestseller, a tragicomic novel about assimilation, immigration, and the price of the American dream
“A masterpiece of contemporary social satire.” —The Wall Street Journal
WINNER OF THE PRIX MÉDICIS ÉTRANGER
Topanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Undocumented immigrants Cándido and América Rincón desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine. And from the moment a freak accident brings Cándido and Delaney into intimate contact, these four and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a dramatic comedy of error and prejudice.
“A masterpiece of contemporary social satire.” —The Wall Street Journal
WINNER OF THE PRIX MÉDICIS ÉTRANGER
Topanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Undocumented immigrants Cándido and América Rincón desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine. And from the moment a freak accident brings Cándido and Delaney into intimate contact, these four and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a dramatic comedy of error and prejudice.
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Lionel Shriver
“An unusually evenhanded novel about the divisive subject of immigration. A Mexican couple, the woman heavily pregnant, illegally camp out on public parkland. Their paths cross with a wealthy American couple who live in a gated community after a car accident. Reader identification with the underdog is a narrative inevitability — fiction privileges disadvantage — but T.C. Boyle balances our sympathies, so the white American couple are allowed to have problems too. The climax is as comic as it is tragic, and the negative consequences of illegal immigration — for both the immigrant and the native-born — are not whitewashed. The book is political in the best sense: not about elections and candidates, but about a big, complicated issue that affects ordinary people. And the story is cracking.”↗