TORTILLA CURTAIN by T. C. Boyle

The Tortilla Curtain, published in 1995 by Viking, was at the time my most controversial novel. Because it dealt with a hot-button socio-political issue--illegal immigration in Southern California--many of the reviewers came into the book with strong prejudices. I took a good deal of abuse, including (my favorite instance) being called "human garbage" on a call-in radio show in San Francisco. As people have had a chance to think about the book more deeply over the course of the past few years, the furor has died down and The Tortilla Curtain has become a modern classic, by far my most popular title, widely read in high schools and universities around the country. The book consciously evokes the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath, and opens with an epigraph from that novel:

"They ain't human. A human being wouldn't live like they do. A human being couldn't stand it to be so dirty and miserable."

This excerpt is from the first chapter.


EXCERPT FROM THE TORTILLA CURTAIN:

PART ONE
ARROYO BLANCO

Afterward, he tried to reduce it to abstract terms, an accident in a world of accidents, the collision of opposing forces--the bumper of his car and the frail scrambling hunched-over form of a dark little man with a wild look in his eye--but he wasn't very successful.  This wasn't a statistic in an actuarial table tucked away in a drawer somewhere, this wasn't random and impersonal.  It had happened to him, Delaney Mossbacher, of 32 Piñon Drive, Arroyo Blanco Estates, a liberal humanist with an unblemished driving record and a freshly waxed Japanese car with personalized plates, and it shook him to the core. (click here to continue)