The Tortilla Curtain by T. C. Boyle

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 Pinon 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. Everywhere he turned he saw those red-flecked eyes, the rictus of the mouth, the rotten teeth and incongruous shock of gray in the heavy black brush of the mustache -- they infested his dreams, cut through his waking hours like a window on another reality. He saw his victim in a book of stamps at the post office, reflected in the blameless glass panels of the gently closing twin doors at Jordan’s elementary school, staring up at him from his omelette aux fines herbes at Emilio’s in the shank of the evening.

Without question, I think T. C. Boyle consistently has the best opening paragraphs in all fiction. This opening paragraph of The Tortilla Curtain tells you much of what you’ll need to know for the journey ahead -- most especially who Delaney Mossbacher is and, obliquely, who his narrative doppelganger is going to be.

The whole thing had happened so quickly. One minute he was winding his way up the canyon with a backseat full of newspapers, mayonnaise jars and Diet Coke cans for the recycler, thinking nothing, absolutely nothing, and the next thing he knew the car was skewed across the shoulder in a dissipating fan of dust. The man must have been crouching in the bushes like some feral thing, like a stray dog or bird-mauling cat, and at the last possible moment he’d flung himself across the road in a mad suicidal scramble. There was the astonished look, a flash of mustache, the collapsing mouth flung open in a mute cry, and then the brake, the impact, the marimba rattle of the stones beneath the car, and finally, the dust. The car had stalled, the air conditioner blowing full, the voice on the radio nattering on about import quotas and American jobs. The man was gone. Delaney opened his eyes and unclenched his teeth. The accident was over, already a moment in history.

The man -- the flash of mustache -- is Cándido Rincón -- an immigrant from Mexico, in the United States illegally, a person scraping by as best he can with his young and pregnant wife. And his back story is very different than that of Delaney Mossbacher. After the accident, he lies outside, on the ground, beside a cooking fire, fighting back against pains both physical and otherwise.

The pain was like the central core of that fire, radiating out in every direction, and the dreams -- well, now he saw his mother, dead of something, dead of whatever. He was six years old and he thought he’d killed her himself -- because he wasn’t good enough, because he didn’t say his “Hail Marys” and “Our Fathers” and because he fell asleep in church and didn’t help with the housework. There was no refrigeration in Tepoztlan, no draining of the blood and pumping in of chemicals, just meat, dead meat. They sealed the coffin in glass because of the smell. He remembered it, huge and awful, like some ship from an ancient sea, set up on two chairs in the middle of the room. And he remembered how he sat up with her long after his father and his sisters and brothers and uncles and aunts and the compadres had fallen asleep, and how he’d talked to her through the glass. Her face was like something chipped out of stone. She was in her best dress and her crucifix hung limp at her throat. Mama, he whispered, I want you to take me with you, I don’t want to stay here without you, I want to die and go to the angels too, and then her dead eyes flashed open on his and her dead lips said, Go to the devil, mijo.

This is Candido’s world and it is utterly hidden from Delaney’s -- the two experiences twinned and juxtaposed in Boyle’s artful way -- two unknown twins marching through the same story without ever understanding the chords that connect them and their lives.

Even when Delaney is put into a similar circumstance as Candido -- forced to evacuate his home during a dinner party due to a sudden wildfire swooping down on his gated community -- he is too dim to perceive the irony.

He’d done his best. He’d managed to get his word processor and discs into the car in the ten minutes the police had given them between the first and final warnings -- a pair of cruisers crawling up and down the street with their loudspeakers blaring -- but that was about all. Ten minutes. What could you do in ten minutes? He was frozen with grief and anxiety … He was standing there in the garish light, the wind in his face and his entire cranial cavity filled with smoke, angry at the world -- What next? he was thinking, what more could they do to him?

He is too dim, but we aren’t. This is exactly the circumstance that Candido faces on a daily basis, but he faces it without a Land-Rover “packed to the windows with their cardinal possessions, the college yearbooks, the Miles Davis albums, the financial records, the TVs and VCRs, the paintings and rugs and jewelry.”

And the anger is the same. The anger that both men feel at their undeserved circumstances, each misdirected onto whatever scapegoat will suffice.

The subtext of Boyle’s novel is rife with metaphors of infestation.

The rain playing off the slick blacktop at the gate made him think of Florida and the way the roads would disappear under a glistening field of flesh when the Siamese walking catfish were on the move in all their ambulatory millions. He remembered being awed by the sheer seething protoplasmic power of them, their jaws gaping and eyes aglitter as they waddled from one canal to the next, and army on the march. No one, least of all the exotic aquaria importer who brought them into the country, suspected that they could actually walk, despite the powerful intimation of their common name, and they’d slithered right out of their holding tanks and into the empty niche awaiting them in the soft moist subtropical night. Now they were unstoppable, endlessly breeding, straining the resources of the environment and gobbling up the native fishes like popcorn. And all because of some shortsighted enthusiast who thought they might look amusing in an aquarium.

An invasive species. Covering the land and gobbling up everything in its path. And under Boyle’s sharpened prose, it is never quite clear if he is satirizing the border crossers like Candido, or the suburban dwellers like Delaney.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.