The Tortilla Curtain
by T. Coraghessan Boyle
List Price: $12.95
Pages: 355
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9780140238280
Publisher: Penguin USA
T. Coraghessan Boyle was born in 1948 and grew up in Peekskill, New York. He is a graduate
of the State University of New York at Potsdam, and received his doctorate
in nineteenth-century English literature from the University of Iowa in
1977. Since 1977, Boyle has taught creative writing at the University
of Southern California. While in college, Boyle exchanged his middle name,
John, for the unusual Coraghessan, the name of one of his Irish ancestors.
Boyle is the author of Descent of Man (1979), Water Music (1982), Budding Prospects
(1984), Greasy Lake (1985), World's End (1987, winner
of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction), If the River Was Whiskey
(1989), East Is East (1990), The Road to Wellville (1993),
which was made into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins, and Without
a Hero (1994). His work has appeared in major American magazines,
including The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, The Paris Review, and The
Atlantic Monthly. Boyle lives with his wife, Karen, and their three children
near Santa Barbara, California, in a house designed in 1909 by the architect
Frank Lloyd Wright.
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Q: What is the significance of the title of the book?
A: The title comes from a common phrase for the Mexican border, the tortilla curtain,
and I envision it in this way. We have the Iron Curtain, which as an image
is impenetrable. You picture this wall across Eastern Europe. Then we
have the Bamboo Curtain with regard to China. As I see it, that isn't
quite as impenetrable as an iron curtain. It shatters easily and has gaps
in it. It's not uniform. And now we have The Tortilla Curtain, which is
the opposite of impregnable. It's three strips of barbed wire with some
limp tortillas hanging on it. The central question of this, and of the
images of walls that appear throughout the book--the walls, the gates,
walling people out, what do you wall in, all of that--has to do with us
as a species and who owns what. Do you really own your own property? Do
you have a right to fence people out? Do we have an obligation to assist
people who come over that border, that wall, that gate? How is it that
Americans are allowed to have this incredible standard of living while
others do not? All of these questions, I think, are wrapped up in my view
of our debate over immigration.
Q: What is your view on immigration?
A: I feel that, on the one hand, we do have a right to be a sovereign nation and
to protect our borders. Illegal immigration makes a mockery of legal immigration,
and no other country in the world allows this sort of thing to happen.
On the other hand, what I object to even more than that is this kind of
demonizing of a whole race and class of people, as in considering all
Mexicans, all Guatemalans, all Salvadorans to be bad because they're invading
our country as impoverished and ignorant individuals. The final gesture
of the book, I think, shows you that we are one species and we do have
to understand and appreciate that fact despite ethnic and national differences.
But it's a small gesture because I think that it's a very, very complex
issue that people have to work towards answering.
Q: As an epigraph to the book you use a quotation from The Grapes of
Wrath. Did you have John Steinbeck's novel in mind when you wrote
The Tortilla Curtain?
A: I'm not trying to re-write Steinbeck in any way. I chose the epigraph from him
because I wanted to see how the ethos of the 1930s, and the traditional
liberal ethos of providing for everybody, is applied to today.
Q:
The book is essentially set in your own backyard. Did this prompt you
to write it? Did the proposal and passing of Proposition 187 (a bill passed
in California that denies certain social benefits to illegal immigrants)
factor in?
A: The book was somewhat misunderstood because it came out after the 187 vote, and
people attacked the book or enjoyed it based on their own perspective.
The book was actually conceived and written prior to Proposition 187's
even being drafted, and I think it came from the fact that I lived in
Los Angeles for sixteen years. Reading about immigration in the newspaper
every day and talking to people at parties like the ones that Delaney
and Kyra give, I began to get a sense of something brewing that was akin
to what happened here in Steinbeck's day, but had the added element that
the Okies of today are not American citizens and they're of a different
race.
Q: Do you see The Tortilla Curtain as a political novel?
A: I think obviously people will want to talk about 187, and the campaign to draft
a national bill like 187, but this book isn't a political novel in the
sense that it takes a position and is meant to have people agree or disagree
with that position. It's political in a different sense. I don't think
political novels work because they have "an ax to grind." If you have
"an ax to grind," then you have to sacrifice aesthetics and the discovery
of the book in order to make your point or to make people join your party
or to see your point of view. I write a book like The Tortilla Curtain
from having lived here and picked up on everything going on that finally
resulted in 187, and from trying to sort out my own feelings. I don't
have a position when I begin a book, any book. I write in order to put
some hypothetical elements together and see what will happen. I don't
know what's going to happen even chapter by chapter, and I don't know
what's going to happen at the end of the book. That's a process of discovery,
which is why I write novels rather than, let's say, a polemic, to discover
how I feel about the issues, but particularly about this issue.
Q: Critics and readers on both sides of the immigration issue had mixed reactions
to The Tortilla Curtain. Why do you think the book generated
so much controversy?
A: I'm not presenting any answers, and I think that's why the book was very controversial.
People want a polemic. They want to raise their fist in the air and say,
"Yes, you're on our side." Well, I'm not on your side. I am presenting
a fable, a fiction, so that you can judge for yourself. A lot of people
simply read the book and flew off the handle because it either accords
with what they want it to or it doesn't. People want things to be very
clear-cut. Here's the issue and here's how I stand on it. But I think
it's much more complex. I think it has to do with biology. You may notice
that Delaney is a nature writer. Well, nature writers are generally very
liberal, even radically liberal on all issues except one--the issue of
immigration, on which they are more reactionary than anyone. The reason
for this is they argue that there are six billion people on the planet
now, and who is the enemy of the environment? Who is the enemy of clean
air, clean water, all the dwindling animal species? Well, it's us. Us,
human beings. Our species. And this is an element of the book which is
very important and has been overlooked. There is this population pressure
on the world in all the industrial nations, not simply the United States.
England, Germany, and France all have huge influxes of immigrants, and
I'm wondering, what does this mean and how are people going to deal with
it? I think ultimately, as you see in The Tortilla Curtain, it may simply
exacerbate racist tendencies.
Q: What research did you do to prepare for the writing of The Tortilla
Curtain?
A: It maysound silly, but I've always felt an affection for Mexico and Mexican
culture. I grew up in New York, as you may know, and the language I studied
from eighth grade on was Spanish. In fact, the only language I can speak
besides English is Spanish. I've always been attracted to the culture,
and even before I moved to California I had traveled in Mexico and Central
America. When I decided to write this book, I knew that I had to see one
thing only. And that was the fence at the border. So I went back to Tijuana,
where I hadn't been for some years, and spent the day there. I talked
to people. I walked along the fence. I saw people waiting to climb over
the fence with little plastic bags with everything they owned in them.
I saw the border guards eyeing me suspiciously from the other side. I
saw the huge fence the U.S. is building out into the water, and so on,
just to get a feel for that again and see what it's like. And it's a real
war zone, it's a real disaster, Tijuana, let me tell you.
Q: The search for the American dream is a theme that resounds throughout
The Tortilla Curtain. Do you think there is such a thing as the
American dream?
A: I've addressed this throughout all of my work, our material obsession, all the stuff
I've written about eating and how much we have and the surfeit of things;
my story "Filthy with Things," for instance. What is the American dream?
Well, the American dream is, "you pull yourself up by your bootstraps,
you make it, you have a house, you live in the suburbs, and you drive
a new car." What is that? That is a material dream. If you have nothing,
then you have material dreams. Presumably, if you have an education and
you have enough to eat, then you can have aesthetic dreams or humanistic
dreams. Easy for me to say. I have every material thing I could want.
I didn't become a writer to make money. I became a writer because that
is my obsession and that's how I view the world. As a novelist, my job
is to try to inhabit people of any culture, to be a person of another
sex, or another race, or another ethnic group. I think it helps me to
understand them, and it helps the reader to understand them, too.
Q: What writers do you admire? Have any of them influenced your work?
A: I admire hundreds of writers of the past and present and many, many of them have
influenced my work. A writer who has influenced me with regard to this
type of book is Steinbeck because I'm re-examining his ethos, as we said.
In terms of satire, people like Flannery O'Connor and Evelyn Waugh have
been influential on me, writers who are sort of angry about the way things
are happening in society, and so they hold up certain behaviors to ridicule.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm working on a historical novel entitled Riven Rock about the psychopathology of
love. It's set in my new hometown of Santa Barbara, and it deals with
actual historical figures. The story centers around Stanley McCormick,
the son of the man who invented the reaper, and his wife, Katherine Dexter.
It's quite a wonderful and extraordinary love story.
Courtesy of Penguin Putnam, Inc.
© Copyright 2009 by T. Coraghessan Boyle. Reprinted with permission by Penguin USA. All rights reserved.
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