It’s a damn shame that someone with as engagingly goofy a style as T. Coraghessan Boyle should feel the need to turn political on us all of a sudden, because when you finish ital The Tortilla Curtain ital, with its final, oh-so-touching, Martin Luther King act of magnanimity, you’ve been hit over the head so many times with the author’s voice of conscience that your welts have got welts.The pounding begins even before the novel. Anticipating comparisons with ital The Grapes of Wrath ital (which, I shouldn’t have to tell you, is a much, much better book), Boyle’s opening quote is the famous passage about “A human being couldn’t stand it to be so dirty and miserable.” Bang! The particulars of Boyle’s tale of hypocrites and innocents are thus: Delaney Mossbacher strikes homeless immigrant Cándido Rincón with his Acura on the way to the recycler. Unable to communicate and afraid of each other, Delaney guiltily hands him a twenty and Cándido scurries, wounded, into the ravine where he makes his home “camping” with his young pregnant wife, América (bang!). She replaces Cándido at the local labor pool, much to his chagrin. Delaney—who fancies himself an environmentalist but lives in Topanga Canyon with a pool and two lawns—soon forgets the incident because he is concerned with the more pressing matter of his terrier being eaten by a coyote in the backyard of his Mission-style house in a gated development. América endures the indignity of working for a lecherous thief and, more drastic, getting raped by a local (immigrant) thug, who also intimidates Delaney’s wife Kyra near a house she is selling. Just as things are looking up for the Rincóns, their crude Thanksgiving campfire ignites the canyon, burning all their money and belongings and forcing the Mossbachers to evacuate, reminding them that they occupy a fragile frontier that is neither urban nor rural yet, to them, holds the dangers of each. Soon América’s pregnancy reaches the moment of truth, Cándido cleverly steals building materials, intended for a wall around the Mossbacher’s development, for shelter against the coming rains, and Delaney rapidly grows more paranoid until the inevitable, ultimate meeting which is so heavily foreshadowed you cringe in anticipation of another crack to the skull.Boyle’s (the name, incidentally, is pronounced co-RAH-guh-zen, after one of Genghis Khan's lieutenants; he goes by “Tom”) picture of the central characters’ divergent lives is as exaggerated as the characters themselves; their spatial juxtaposition itself is therefore ironic. Everybody in ital The Tortilla Curtain ital is living on a precipice, and only we can see both sides. Boyle’s extravagant style, which gives his short stories such urgency, does not lend itself to a novel that is political by subject and by its appearance here and now; every character becomes a caricature of Good and Evil, in thought and in action. As if aware of this, Boyle provides Bad Mexicans and Worse Whites to provide contrast, but their purpose is plain and their symbolism transparent. Boyle’s most obvious skill is humor, but ital The Tortilla Curtain ital lacks it. Not that there’s anything particularly amusing about race-baiting, poverty, and the hypocrisy of contemporary liberalism, but it’s possible to laugh at these things rather than with them. Lines like, “…Wagontire, Oregon, where six ital indocumentados ital piling out of the smoking wreck of a rust-eaten 1971 Buick Electra were something less than inconspicuous” are so rare I felt the need to write “funny!” in the margin beside it.The Rincóns want what the Mossbachers got, and the Mossbachers see them as a threat, as tangible as the coyote (a symbol of their encroachment on nature—ital duh ital) in their yard. What Boyle seems to be saying is that they—we—needn’t be so afraid, that what the Rincóns and the Laotians and the Yemenis and the Eritreans want is what our ancestors wanted and that there’s enough to go around. Denial of The Good Life to these current American Dreamers is therefore not only hypocritical but unfounded. Like his previous novel ital East Is East ital, ital The Tortilla Curtain ital is at base about two completely different people, from widely divergent backgrounds—culturally, economically and otherwise—violently confronted with one another. And like ital Budding Prospects ital and ital The Road To Wellville ital, it’s also about people way over their heads and utterly out of place without realizing it. Boyle normally throws curveballs at his characters and then laughs as they whiff; this time, he furrows his brow, nods sympathetically and pats them on the shoulder on their way back to the dugout. I think I’d rather get my moralizing from a cookbook, or maybe Shaquille O’Neal. Paul Tullis is books editor at Might magazine, among other things.