If you read this blog you know that I grew up working in my father’s junkyard. Many of the people who worked for my Dad were Mexican-American. Spanish was spoken as often — perhaps more often — than English.
My point is that I spent a lot of time around people of Mexican heritage when I was growing up.
Several years ago I picked up a copy of The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle. It sat on my end table for a long time before I finally got around to reading it. I probably kept putting it off because it is a novel, and I tend to read mostly non-fiction.
When I finally did read it, it struck me to my core. It was the kind of book that I couldn’t put down even when I was upset by it.
Boyle tells two simultaneous stories about two families. One story is about an upper middle class white family in Southern California. The other story is about a young Mexican couple, both illegal immigrants, doing odd jobs in the same neighborhood as where the white family lives. Their lives are intertwined, sometimes tragically. The misunderstanding, mistrust, and fear are palatable. The consequences can bring you to tears. Or outrage.
In many ways this book reminds me of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Both books explore the despair of poverty and the consequences of not being wanted. But Tortilla takes it a step further, looking at the issue from both the perspective of those in need and those with much. Steinbeck is the better writer and his descriptive style is superior, but Boyle breaks your heart as you see how simple it would be to make a difference. The reader senses the Mexican immigrants fear of the future alongside the white couples fear of the unknown. The two judge each other as they are contrasted, and a reader cannot help but think about justice.
Of course, the book has many critics. And some of the criticism is legitimate. The characters in the book are a bit narrow and stereotypical. The events are extraordinary and not typical. But then again, I’ve met people who fit the characters that Boyle has created. They do exist. And extraordinary occurrences do happen in life.
Anyway, criticisms and defensiveness aside, the book will make you think. It will push you to perceive others differently. Rather than de-humanizing a person and viewing them as interchangeable parts in a machine, we will begin to see them as fully human. Instead of ignoring economic and societal injustices, or blaming those injustices on forces beyond our control, or even attempting to justify them as some kind of cultural self-determination, the reader will see the human pain and suffering that accompanies the inequalities around us.
What I love about this book is that it offers no conclusions or solutions. Boyle does not create a happy ending. He does not preach a favored solution. He does not judge (though the sensitive types might think he is).
Instead, he makes us uncomfortable as he makes us confront what is all around us. Solutions, if there are any, become something tantalizingly close but still requiring our effort. We need to work toward change. Toward justice. Toward love.
You gotta love a book that makes you think that way. And that’s why T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain is on the list of the books that most influenced my life.
Want to read more of my top 25? Here is the list thus far:
Celebration of Discipline – #1
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings – #2
The Cost of Discipleship – #3
The Screwtape Letters – #4
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – #5
Only the Paranoid Survive – #6
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold – #7
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – #8
Truman – #9
Shantaram – #10
The Maltese Falcon – #11
The Shadow of the Wind – #12
Survey of the New Testament – #13
Calvin & Hobbes – #14
Celtic Daily Prayer – #15
Managing the Nonprofit Organization – #16
A Wrinkle in Time – #17
The Practice of the Presence of God – #18
Catch 22 – #19
The Tortilla Curtain – #20
The Kingdom of God is a Party – #21
Earthkeeping – #22
Reviving Ophelia – #23
The Grapes of Wrath – #24
Peanuts – #25