The Tortilla Curtain Critical Essay | Critical Review by Scott Spencer

SOURCE: "The Pilgrim of Topanga Creek," in The New York Times Book Review, September 3, 1995, p. 3.

In the following review, Spencer faults Boyle's presentation of the two story lines in The Tortilla Curtain as uneven.

Viking has somehow got the idea it has another Grapes of Wrath on its hands. Then again, T. Coraghessan Boyle may have contributed to the delusion by using a few lines from Steinbeck's novel as the epigraph to his own meditation on the dispossessed and the American dream, California style. But while Steinbeck's tale of the Joad family was the very apotheosis of the proletarian novel, with its almost surreal emotional clarity and passages of nearly overpowering pathos, The Tortilla Curtain is, as the dust jacket would have it, about "the Okies of the 1990's." This apparently means that the narrative contains no real heroes or villains, and that the suddenly old-fashioned hopefulness...
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