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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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Talk Talk by T.C. Boyle |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Identity Not all is the
way it appears to be in T.C. Boyle’s latest novel, Talk Talk. The deaf protagonist, Dana Halter, can’t hear,
but understands more words than almost everyone around her. Her boyfriend, Bridger
Martin, seems like a slacker, but rises to the occasion when duty demands.
Dana’s identity is stolen by William Peck Wilson, a cunning criminal and a
gourmet cook. His girlfriend, Natalia, is beautiful
and has Peck eating out of her hand. Dana finds herself jailed for Peck’s
crimes, and following her release, she and Bridger track Peck down seeking
revenge. Thanks to Boyle’s mastery of language, imagery, plot and character, Talk Talk keeps readers engaged throughout. Here’s an
excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 6, pp. 60-64: Bridger
was at work, dwelling deep in Drex III, cruising
right along, the mouse a disembodied extension of his brain and his blood
circulating in a steady, sure, tranquil squeeze and release, when Dana
called. He’d come in early, directly after dropping her off at school, hoping
to make up some of the ground he’d lost over the past four days, and he’d
already got two hours in before anyone else showed up. Which
didn’t prevent Radko from lecturing him in front of
the whole crew about “the impordance of deamwork” and how he was letting everyone down.
This struck him as unfair, grossly unfair, especially when Deet-Deet leaned out of his cubicle and made Radko faces at him throughout his dressing-down, but he
didn’t say anything in his own defense other than that he’d been there since
eight and would stay on through dinner— whatever it took—until he finished up
every last frame of this sequence (another head replacement, this time of The
Kade’s co-star, Lara Sikorsky, whose stand-in did a
triple-gainer off one of Drex III’s
needle-like pillars and into a lake of fire, from which she emerged
unscathed, of course, because of a genetic adaptation that allowed her skin,
hair and meticulously buffed and polished nails to survive temperatures as
high as a thousand degrees Fahrenheit). In fact, he’d been so absorbed in the
work he hadn’t opened any of the pop-ups from his co-workers or even put
anything on his stomach yet, other than coffee, that is. His cell
began to vibrate and he surreptitiously slipped it from his pocket and leaned
deep into his cubicle to screen it from anyone—i.e., Radko—who
might be passing by on the way to the refrigerator or restroom. Dana had a
tendency to text messages that went on for paragraphs, but this time she was
terse: Koch is a real A-hole! I’m
quitting. I swear. He punched
in a response: Do you want to talk? Nothing to talk about. I’m going home. Don’t. You only have four more days. Nothing.
He held the phone a moment as if it were totemic, as if it could project
meaning apart from any human agency, and then she retransmitted the original
message: Koch is a real A-hole! All else
aside, this was a proposition he couldn’t deny. He’d met the man four or five
times now, at one grindingly dull school function or another (which Dana was required
to attend on pain of forfeiture of administrative patience and goodwill), and
he was as stiff and formal and unsympathetic as one of the helmeted palace
guards on Drex III. And the way he condescended to
the deaf teachers—and to the students too—you would have thought his special
talent was for humiliation rather than education. Still, he was the man in
charge and it wasn’t as if she had a whole lot of options: the San Roque School was the only show in town—in fact, it was
the only school for the deaf on the He called
every fifteen minutes after that, but she wouldn’t pick up, and he took a
moment to peer out of his cubicle and determine Radko’s
whereabouts before e—maiing her as well (Don’t do anything rash, was the
message he left on cell and PC alike). As the morning wore on, though, he
couldn’t seem to recover his concentration, the mouse moving so slowly it
might have been made of kryptonite, the frame before him frozen in an instant
that wasn’t appreciably different from the instant that had preceded it, the
whole movie turning to sludge before his eyes. All he could think about was
what would happen to her if she lost her job. At the very least she’d have to
move God knew where to find another one—there was a deaf school in Berkeley,
he was pretty sure, but the others might have been anyplace, Texas, North
Dakota, Alabama. The thought of it— When Radko
left at three-thirty to drive down to She was
having an animated discussion in Sign with one of her students, a
weasel-faced kid of seventeen or so who seemed to have given an inordinate
degree of thought to his hairstyle (bi-colored, heavy on the gel, naked skin
round the ears and too far up the nape), and she looked like her old self as
she rose to her feet, gathered up her things and slid into the car. But then
her eyes went cold and the first thing she said wasn’t “How was your day?” or
“I love you” or even “Thanks for picking me up:’ but “I’m really at the end
of my rope:’ He lifted his eyebrows in
what he hoped was an inquisitive look, though he wasn’t much good at
pantomime. “With Koch, I mean.” “Why?” he asked, careful to
exaggerate the movement of his lips. “What happened?” The car—a ‘96 Chevy pickup
he’d bought used when he was in college and had been meaning to service ever
since—stuttered, died and caught again. “Never mind:’ she said. “It would
take me a week to explain.” The weasel-faced kid gave them a tragic look, a look
that ratified what Bridger had already surmised—that he was burning up with
the delirium of love and would walk through fire for his teacher, as soon as
he could eliminate the competition, that is. She gave the kid a farewell wave
and turned back to him: “Just drive. I’ve got to get my car back— I mean, I’m helpless without it. And the papers”—she did a
characteristic thing then, a Dana thing, a sort of hyperactive writhing from
the waist as if the seat were on fire and she couldn’t escape it—”oh, Jesus,
the papers.” At the
impound yard—CASH OR CREDIT CARD ONLY ABSOLUTELY NO CHECKs—they
waited in line for twenty minutes while the people ahead of them put on a
demonstration of the limits and varieties of hominid rage. The office, to
which they were guided by a series of insistent arrows painted on the outer
wall, was made of concrete block and had the feel of a bunker, dark and
diminished and utterly impregnable. Immediately on entering they were
confronted with a wall of bulletproof Plexiglas, behind which sat a skinny
sallow grim-faced cashier with hair dyed the color of engine oil. She might
have been forty, forty-five— an age, at any rate, beyond which there is
neither hope nor even the pretense of it—and she wore a blue work shirt with
some sort of badge affixed to the shoulder. Her job was to accept payment
through a courtesy slit and then, at her leisure, stamp a form to release
the vehicle in question. From early morning till closing time at six, people
spoke to her—cursed, raved, foamed at her—through a scuffed metal grille.
There were no cars in sight. The cars were out back somewhere, secreted
behind a ten-foot-high concrete-and-stucco wall surmounted with concertina
wire. The couple who were stalled
at the window when they arrived inquired as to whether the woman on the
other side of the Plexiglas would take a personal check and the woman didn’t
bother with a reply, merely raising a lifeless finger to point to the NO
CHECKS sign nearest her. There was some further negotiation—Could she accept
the major part of the amount on a credit card and the rest in a
check?—followed by a second objectification of the finger, after which there
was a rumble of uncontained threats (a mention of lawsuits, the mayor, the
governor himself) before the couple swung round, murder stamped across their
brows, and slammed out the door, vehicleless. Next
in line was a man so tall—six-six or more—that he had to bend nearly double
and lean into the counter in order to speak through the grille. He was calm
at first—or at least he made an effort to suppress the rage and consternation
in his voice—but when the cashier handed him the bill for towing and two
days’ Storage, he lost it. “What is this?” he demanded. “What the fuck is
this?” The woman fastened on him
with two dead eyes. She never moved, never flinched, even when he began to
pound at the Plexiglas with both fists. When he was done, when he’d exhausted
himself, she said only, “Cash or charge?” Dana had
observed all this, of course, though she was spared the details, the whole
business a kind of mute Punch and Judy show to her, Bridger supposed, but
when it was her turn she stepped forward, slid the impound notice and her
driver’s license through the courtesy slit and waited for the woman to return
her keys. But the woman didn’t return the keys. Instead she pushed an
invoice through the slit and said, “That’ll be four hundred eighty-seven
dollars, towing fee plus four days’ storage. Cash or charge?” “But you
don’t understand:’ Dana said, her voice like an
electric drill, “I’m innocent. It’s all a mistake. It was somebody else they
wanted, not me. Look”—and she held up the affidavit, pressed it to the glass.
“You see? This exonerates me.” Bridger
couldn’t be sure, but it seemed as if the smallest flare of interest
awakened in the cashier’s eyes. There was something unusual here, something
out of the ordinary, and for a moment he almost thought she was going to act
on it, but no such luck. “Cash or charge?” she repeated. “Listen:’
he said, stepping forward, though Dana hated for him to interfere, as if his
acting as interpreter somehow exposed or diminished her. She didn’t need an
interpreter, she always insisted—she’d got on just fine all her life without
him or anyone else conducting her business for her. Dana gave him a savage
look, but he couldn’t help himself. “You don’t get it’ he said. “I mean,
ma’am, if you would only listen a minute—they got the wrong person, is all,
she didn’t do anything. . . You saw the
affidavit.” The
cashier leaned forward now. “Four hundred eighty-seven dollars’ she
repeated, enunciating slowly and carefully so there would be no mistake. “You
pay or you walk.” The excerpt
showcases Boyle’s perfect selection of words, the creation of dialogue, and
the creation of scenes and situations that keep readers turning pages. Talk Talk will reveal the terror of identity theft, and
the range of human reactions to perceptions of identity. Steve Hopkins,
September 25, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the October 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Talk
Talk.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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