GALVESTON — About 900 residents greeted author T.C. Boyle, whose book “The Tortilla Curtain” was the first selection for the Galveston Reads program.
Boyle was at Ball High School Monday to discuss his 1995 book, which contrasts an American couple with a passion for recycling and a Mexican couple who have crossed the border illegally.
The meeting was a finale for those who read and discussed the book that escalated the debate over illegal immigration across the nation.
“Most of the critics called it a political novel and said ‘He has an ax to grind,’ but I write these books to sort out my own feelings,” Boyle said. “I was attacked by all shades of the political spectrum. A few years later the book is called a classic and those critics have never come back to apologize.”
The novel was published shortly after California passed Proposition 187, a bill that denies certain social privileges — mainly welfare, public schooling and nonemergency medical care — to illegal immigrants.
Dr. John Gorman, an English professor with the University of Houston-Clear Lake, said Boyle confronts not only immigration in “The Tortilla Curtain,” but also social consciousness, environmental awareness, crime and unemployment in a tale that raises the curtain on the dark side of the American dream.
In “The Tortilla Curtain,” two couples live in close proximity and yet are worlds apart. High atop a hill overlooking Southern California’s Topanga Canyon, nature writer Delaney Mossbacher and his wife, real estate agent Kyra Menaker-Mossbacher, reside in an exclusive, secluded housing development with their son, Jordan.
Camped out in a ravine at the bottom of the canyon are Candido and America Rincun. On the edge of starvation, they search desperately for work in the hope of moving into an apartment before their baby is born. They cling to their vision of the American dream, which, no matter how hard they try to achieve it, manages to elude their grasp at every turn.
A chance, violent encounter brings together Delaney and Candido, instigating a chain of events that eventually culminates in a harrowing confrontation. The novel shifts back and forth between the two couples, giving voice to each of the four main characters as their lives become inextricably intertwined and their worlds collide. The Rincuns search for the American dream, and the Mossbachers attempt to protect it.
Answering a question on how he researched the book, Boyle said that he had been living in Los Angeles for 15 years, “so I knew Topanga Canyon and the people living in the creek bed.”
“I went to Tijuana (Mexico) to look at the fence,” Boyle said. “But the rest evolved from what I knew. I tell it from four separate points of view.”
Boyle, who was born in Peekskill, N.Y., said that much is lost when it becomes a requirement to read a book — “read it for fun.”
“In California schools, everyone has to read it for an exam,” he said. “The joy of it is that it’s fiction. Literature is entertainment — we don’t need critics to tell us what to read.”
Boyle told the group that his writing process is exactly like the students in the audience who have a term paper due tomorrow — “for me it’s line by line, day by day.”
He said his stories evolve as he writes and rewrites on a daily basis until 2 p.m., then goes off and does something entirely different.
California hosts about 40 percent of the nation’s estimated 3.4 million illegal immigrants.
Boyle earned a bachelor’s in English and history from State University of New York at Potsdam, and a Masters of fine arts at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. He earned a doctorate in British Literature in 1977.
