A Study Guide for T. C. Boyle's "Tortilla Curtain"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for T. C. Boyle's "Tortilla Curtain," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Mar 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535834582

Book preview

12

The Tortilla Curtain

T. C. Boyle

1995

Introduction

The Tortilla Curtain was published in 1995 and became author T. C. Boyle's most widely read novel. With immigration a major theme of the book, its publication caused a stir as America struggled with illegal immigration and its effects on society. In a 59- to 41-percent vote, California had just passed a bill restricting illegal immigrants' rights to use certain public resources, such as nonemergency health care and public schools. Immigration concerns were on the minds of citizens and politicians alike.

Along with immigration, Boyle's novel explores themes of the American dream, racism, and the value of walls through the depiction of two distinct couples. Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead comfortable, middle-class lives in Topanga Canyon, an estate neighborhood in California. Just around the bend but in what might as well be a totally different planet live Cándido and América Rincón, illegal Mexican immigrants without money, a home, or jobs. The crossing of the two men's paths opens the novel and sets the rest of the story in motion.

Boyle's choice to switch narrators in alternating chapters gives readers a chance to understand and analyze themes and events from a variety of perspectives, particularly those of middle-class Americans and poverty-stricken Mexicans. In this way, the author communicates how cultural values and norms shape one's prejudices and beliefs, even as he neither takes any stance nor presents any bias in his treatment of the main theme of immigration. Boyle does not shy away from tackling the seedier side of immigration and homelessness. Through instances of obscene language and a graphic rape scene, which results in life-altering consequences, the author provides a realistic portrayal of a side of life many would prefer to overlook.

Author Biography

Thomas John Boyle was born on December 2, 1948, in Peekskill, New York, to a janitor (father) and secretary (mother). Boyle changed his middle name to Coraghessan when he was seventeen years old. Initially intending to study music, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in English and history from the State University of New York at Potsdam in 1968. With no job lined up upon graduation, Boyle drifted for a while. He found himself pursuing a musical career after all as he played in a rock band, but the lifestyle proved too much to handle, and he developed a heroin addiction. The death of a close friend helped him escape his own demons, and he memorialized that self-destructive period of his life in the short story The OD and Hepatitis Railroad or Bust, published in the North American Review in the fall of 1972. The story gained him admission into the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, from which he earned his master of fine arts degree in 1974 under the instruction of famous American writers such as John Irving and John Cheever. He followed that three years later with a PhD in nineteenth-century British literature from the University of Iowa. While studying for his PhD, Boyle served as fiction editor for the highly respected literary journal Iowa Review.

In 1978, Boyle accepted a position as assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Southern California; more than thirty years later, he was still teaching at the university, only now he was a distinguished professor of English with twenty-one works of fiction to his credit. The award-winning novel The Tortilla Curtain (1995) was