Talk Talk
T.C. Boyle, 2006
Penguin Group USA
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143112150
Summary
Over the past twenty-five years, T.C. Boyle has earned wide acclaim and an enthusiastic following with such adventurous, inimitable novels as The Tortilla Curtain, Drop City, and The Road to Wellville.
For his riveting eleventh novel, Boyle offers readers the closest thing to a thriller he has ever written, a tightly scripted page turner about the trials of Dana Halter, a thirty-three-year-old deaf woman whose identity has been stolen. Featuring a woman in the lead role (a Boyle first), Talk Talk is both a suspenseful chase across America and a moving story about language, love, and identity from one of America's most versatile and entertaining novelists. (From the publishers .)
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Readers of T. C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain will recognize a familiar satiric target in his latest novel Talk Talk—the American dream. What better way to parody America’s ideology of self-reinvention, a vital component to the American dream, than with a story about identity theft? The subject also allows for Boyle to reexamine another bete noire, our culture’s crass consumerism, as well as address the anxieties of living in the information age, where one’s legal and financial identity is more vulnerable than ever before. But Talk Talk, while full of Boylesque humor, is not a satire at all. It is instead a book that reads with all the breathless, headlong pace of a thriller, while at the same time examining deeper questions of language and identity.
Talk Talk is centered on three main characters: Dana Halter, a deaf teacher of English literature; Bridger Martin, her boyfriend; and Peck Wilson, the career thief who steals Dana’s identity. The novel opens with Dana being pulled over for a routine traffic violation. A check on her driver’s license reveals Dana Halter to be a dangerous fugitive with a long rap sheet that includes auto theft and assault with a deadly weapon. Her identity has been stolen and, for the time being, she is powerless to prove it. After a weekend of incarceration, stripped of her rights, her clothes, and her dignity, Dana sees not only the idiocy of the justice system but also the fluid and fragile nature of identity. Prior to this episode her issues of selfhood dealt mainly with trying to pass for “normal” in a world of hearing. Now, viewed as “just another perp” by her jailors and cellmates, she is forced to restore her legal and financial identity, a process that will entail an intimate self-examination. Since the law enforcement agencies prove incapable or unwilling to apprehend the identity thief she decides to track him down herself.
Although aurally challenged, Dana has a mind for detective work. Her interest in the etymological roots of words (e.g. “disrespect” in the slang word “dis”) mirrors her search for the base identifier (in this case, the true name) of her assailant. Yet, at her journey’s end she discovers much more than the thief’s identity.
Bridger Martin, Dana’s boyfriend, joins her on this cross-country search for her criminal double. Issues of self-identity also plague Bridger. He spends most of his time working at a special-effects company under the alias of “Sharper.” His imagination and sense of reality is informed with the products of popular visual culture—film, TV, video games. When he learns of Dana’s incarceration he immediately conjures up stock scenes of prison films, such as slop being fed to prisoners out of a bucket. (Dana is actually fed bologna sandwiches.) Reality eventually confronts Bridger in the form of a real emotion—hate—upon seeing the face of Dana’s assailant for the first time. Suddenly, as Boyle suggestively phrases it, “the film has slipped off the reel.” The dangerous journey he takes also forces Bridger to confront real violence, not the celluloid kind to which he is accustomed. It is an experience that leaves him quite literally speechless.
Finally, there is William Peck Wilson, Dana’s assailant. Ever since he served a prison sentence for assaulting his ex-wife’s boyfriend, Peck has been a criminal, assuming so many identities it is hard for him to keep track of who he is at a given moment—Peck Wilson, Frank Calabrese, Dana Halter, Bridger Martin. His motto, taken from his prison mentor Sandman, is a corruption of the Army recruiting slogan (“Be anybody you can be”). As “Dana,” he resides in a lavish condo in Marin County with his sexy, if naïve, Russian girlfriend, Natalia, and her daughter, Madison. When he’s not devising new ways to pay for this lifestyle, he spends his time cultivating the refined tastes and sensibilities of the upper class. However, his California dream comes to an abrupt end when Dana and Bridger arrive at his home, forcing Peck to flee back east, where Sandman has secured him a stately house on the Hudson River, not far from the town he grew up in. His journey east mimics Dana’s as they both prepare to confront their mothers (Dana’s mother also lives in New York) and their past lives, with startlingly different results. For Dana, she learns to accept her deafness as her base identifier. For Peck, while recalling the life he had as a restaurant owner, husband, and father to his only daughter, Sukie, he painfully realizes the only identity he longs to (re)possess is that of fatherhood. Sadly, this identity has been irrevocably lost to him. ("More" from the publisher's Introduction.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 2, 1948
• Where—Peekskill, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., State University of New York at Potsdam; Ph.D., Iowa University
• Awards—PEN/Faulkner Award, 1998
• Currently—lives near Santa Barbara, California
T. Coraghessan Boyle (kuh-RAGG-issun) received his doctorate in nineteenth-century English literature from the University of Iowa in 1977. Since 1977, Boyle has taught creative writing at the University of Southern California. While in college, Boyle exchanged his middle name, John, for the unusual Coraghessan (kuh-RAGG-issun), the name of one of his Irish ancestors.
Boyle is the author of Descent of Man (1979), Water Music (1982), Budding Prospects (1984), Greasy Lake (1985), World's End (1987, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction), If the River Was Whiskey (1989), East Is East (1990), The Road to Wellville (1993), which was made into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins, and Without a Hero (1994). His work has appeared in major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, Paris Review, and Atlantic Monthly. Boyle lives with his wife, Karen, and their three children near Santa Barbara, California, in a house designed in 1909 by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
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In the interest of time and space, it might be easier to note the writers that T. C. Boyle isn't compared to. But let's give the reverse a try: Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Evelyn Waugh, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Kingsley Amis, Thomas Berger, Robert Coover, Lorrie Moore, Stanley Elkin, Tom Robbins, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Don DeLillo, Flannery O'Connor. Oh, let's not forget F. Lee Bailey. And Dr. Seuss.
Boyle, widely admired for his acrobatic verbal skill, wild narratives and quirky characters (in one short story, he imagines a love affair between Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev's wife), has dazzled critics since his first novel in 1981.
Consider this example, from Larry McCaffery in a 1985 article for the New York Times:
Beneath its surface play, erudition and sheer storytelling power, his fiction also presents a disturbing and convincing critique of an American society so jaded with sensationalized images and plasticized excess that nothing stirs its spirit anymore.... It is into this world that Mr. Boyle projects his heroes, who are typically lusty, exuberant dreamers whose wildly inflated ambitions lead them into a series of hilarious, often disastrous adventures.
But as much as critics will bow at his linguistic gifts, some also knock him for resting on them a bit too heavily, hinting that the impressive showmanship attempts to hide a shortage of depth and substance. Craig Seligman, writing in the New Republic in 1993, pointed out that...
Boyle loves a mess. He loves chaos. He loves marshes and jungles, and he loves the jungle of language: luxuriant sentences overgrown with lianas of lists, sesquipedalian words hanging down like rare fruits. For all its exoticism, though, his prose is lucid to the point of transparency. It doesn't require much deeper concentration than a good newspaper (though it does require a dictionary).
Reviewing The Tortilla Curtain in 1995, New York Times critic Scott Spencer scratched his head over why Boyle had invited readers along for this particular ride:
Mr. Boyle's fictional strategy is puzzling. Why are we being asked to follow the fates of characters for whom he clearly feels such contempt? Not surprisingly, this is ultimately off-putting. Perhaps Mr. Boyle has received too much praise for his zany sense of humor; in this book, that wit often seems merely a maddening volley of cheap shots. It's like living next door to a gun nut who spends all day and half the night shooting at beer bottles.
Growing up, Boyle had no aspirations to be a writer. It wasn't until his studies at State University of New York, where he as a music student, that he bumped into his muse. "I went there to be a music major but found I really couldn't hack that at the age of 17," he told The Writer in 1999. "I just started to read outside my classes—literature and history. I wound up being a history and English major; when I wandered into a creative writing class as a junior, I realized that writing was what I could do."
He then started teaching, in part to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam War, and later applied to the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop.
After a collection of short stories in 1979, he released his first novel, Water Music, called "pitiless and brilliant" by the New Republic, and has shuttled back and forth between novels and short stories, all known for their explosions of character imagination. Mr. Boyle's literary sensibility...thrives on excess, profusion, pushing past the limits of good taste to comic extremes," McCaffery wrote in his 1985 New York Times piece. "He is a master of rendering the grotesque details of the rot, decay and sleaze of a society up to its ears in K Mart oil cans, Kitty Litter and the rusted skeletons of abandoned cars and refrigerators."
In his review of Drop City, the 2003 novel set in California commune that won Boyle a National Book Award nomination, Dwight Garner joins the chorus of critical acclaim over the years—"Boyle has always been a fiendishly talented writer"—but he also acknowledges some of the criticism that Boyle has faced in these same years:
The rap against Boyle's work has long been that he's a sort of madcap predator drone, raining down hard nuggets of contempt, sarcasm and bitter humor on the poor men and women in his books while rarely giving us characters we're actually persuaded to feel anything about. This is partly a bum rap—and I'd hate to knock contempt, sarcasm and bitter humor—but there's enough truth in it that it's a joy to find, in Drop City that Boyle gives us a lot more than simply a line of bong-addled innocents led to slaughter.
But perhaps the neatest summary of Boyle's work would be from Lorrie Moore, one of the novelists to which he has been compared. In a 1994 New York Times review of Boyle's short story collection Without a Hero, she praised Boyle's "astonishing and characteristic verve, his unaverted gaze, his fascination with everything lunatic and queasy." She continues...
God knows, Mr. Boyle can write like an angel, if at times a caustic, gum-chewing one. And in this strong, varied collection maybe we have what we'd hope to find in heaven itself (by the time we begged our way there): no lessening of brilliance, plus a couple of laughs to mitigate all that high and distant sighing over what goes on below."
Extras
• Boyle changed his middle name from John to Coraghessan ( "kuh-RAGG-issun") when he was 17.
• He is known almost as much for his ego as his writing. "Each book I put out, I think, 'Goodbye, Updike and Mailer, forget it," the New Republic quoted him as saying. "I joke at Viking that I'm going to make them forget the name of Stephen King forever, I'm going to sell so many copies.
• Boyle's philosophy on reading and writing, as told to The Writer: "Good literature is a living, brilliant, great thing that speaks to you on an individual and personal level. You're the reader. I think the essence of it is telling a story. It's entertainment. It's not something to be taught in a classroom, necessarily. To be alive and be good, it has to be a good story that grabs you by the nose and doesn't let you go till The End." (From Barnes and Noble)
Book Reviews
Using his gift for manic invention and freewheeling, hyperventilated prose, Mr. Boyle does an antic job of recounting the cat-and-mouse-and-cat game played by Dana and Peck, wittily dancing around his theme of identity and identity theft, even as he orchestrates a sense of foreboding and suspense.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Considering Boyle's recent subjects—sex research (The Inner Circle), hippies (Drop City), environmental apocalypse (A Friend of the Earth)—it's remarkable that his most exciting novel yet should focus on the tedium of ruined credit scores and fraudulent drivers' licenses. But Talk Talk benefits from Boyle's highbrow/lowbrow style: He knows how to drill down through the surface of everyday life into our core anxieties, and he knows how to write constantly charging, heart-thumping chase scenes.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Bestseller and PEN/Faulkner Award-winner Boyle recasts the battle of good and evil as an identity theft suspense story in his 11th novel (following The Inner Circle). Dana Halter, a "slim, graceful, dark-eyed deaf woman of thirty-three," runs a stop sign and is hauled off to jail when a routine police check turns up multiple pending felony charges. As Dana disappears into the criminal justice system, her earnest and willing boyfriend, Bridger (on deadline doing a sci-fi film's special effects), isn't much help. Meanwhile, William "Peck" Wilson-a social parasite whose lifestyle includes Armani, a house in Marin County and a shopaholic bombshell girlfriend imported from a former Soviet republic—is actually the man behind the charges against Dana. Finally out on bail and reunited with Bridger, Dana lacks the resources to clear her name, but in the best tradition of the good guy willing to sacrifice everything for justice, Bridger chucks his job, and the two set off on Peck's trail. Boyle, always a risk taker, neatly manages the challenge of a deaf protagonist and a bad guy who is a gourmet cook, genuinely loves his bombshell and has a soft spot for children. As Dana and Bridger hurtle across the country and the tension mounts, Boyle drops crumbs of wisdom in signature style, and readers will be hot on the trail.
Publishers Weekly
In his latest work, Boyle (of Drop City) explores the nightmare of identity theft as deaf teacher Dana Halter is pulled over for running a four-way stop sign and suddenly finds her life turned upside down. After days in a California jail, Dana is released when it is discovered that the "Dana Halter" who committed various crimes in various jurisdictions is a man. Dana and her digital filmmaker boyfriend, Bridger Martin, piece together information on the other Dana (n William "Peck" Wilson) and follow him across the country in order to exact retribution for what the justice system deems a "victimless crime." Dana's childhood insecurities resurface as others react to her as a deaf person in a hearing world, and she questions her ability to communicate who she really is. Even her relationship with Bridger, who learned to sign after they met, begins to fray as their odyssey turns into a vendetta and listening to each other takes a backseat to rage. Alternating chapters offer Peck's take on how easy it is (is this fact or fiction?) to reinvent oneself from a local outcast into a successful (fill in the blank) via the Internet and a bit of time on a library computer. The continuity errors distracted this reviewer, and missing details make the novel more frustrating than riveting. Still, Boyle's many fans will probably want to go along for the ride. —Bette-Lee Fox.
Library Journal
On the surface, this novel of identity theft delivers page-turning suspense, but it also delves deeper into the essence of identity. Having explored the past for perspective on the present in recent novels (the Kinsey sex report in The Inner Circle, 2004; the hippie commune of Drop City, 2003), the prolific Boyle addresses the contemporary concern of identity theft, showing how easy it is for a cyber-criminal to appropriate someone else's identity and how difficult it can be for the victim to untangle the credit and criminal implications. Stopped for a traffic violation, deaf schoolteacher Dana finds herself jailed on charges she can't understand, for crimes committed in states she has never visited. Her only ally in clearing herself is Bridger, the boyfriend she recently met at a dance club. From her Kafkaesque predicament, Dana develops a Moby-Dick-sized obsession (both literary references are evoked within the novel) to find the criminal and regain her identity. When she and Bridger stumble upon some contact information on the perpetrator, they make a big mistake that threatens the novel's plausibility: They call the crook, letting him know they're onto him, rather than passing the information along for police to investigate. What results is a cross-country chase, as Dana and Bridger pursue a quarry who has serial identities, is totally self-centered (whatever self he has assumed) and is convinced that he is society's victim. He's a younger, psychopathic Gatsby, using his purloined wealth to forge an identity that attracts beautiful women whom he treats as identity accessories. The quest costs Dana her job and threatens Bridger's, as he discovers how little he really knows Dana, while she realizes how much she has defined her own identity as a deaf woman, as a daughter (her mother knows her in a way that Bridger never will) and as a victim. By the riveting climax, characters and readers alike recognize that the very concept of a fixed, static identity is a delusion.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. There is a great deal of brand-name dropping in this novel (e.g. Mercedes, Jetta), especially in scenes involving Peck and Natalia. Discuss Boyle’s satiric portrait of our culture’s conspicuous consumption. What is the relationship of designer brands and personal identity established in the novel?
2. “Base identifier” is a wonderfully suggestive phrase that is repeated throughout the novel. What are the base identifiers, in all senses of this phrase, of the main characters? How do the characters understand selfhood? How does the novel dramatize the fragile nature of personal identity?
3. Dana is post-lingually deaf (i.e. she was not born deaf), who refused surgical attempts to restore her hearing. Discuss her condition and her reasons for maintaining it. How does she understand her condition? How does Bridger; her mother? How does it contribute thematically to the novel?
4. Often in literature, film, or television, a character who doesn’t necessarily have many redeeming qualities will evoke pathos nonetheless. Although Peck Wilson is a man capable of brutal, calculated violence, he certainly arouses our interest, and at points, our sympathy. What was your opinion of Peck?
5. At four different points in the novel, Dana recites favorite poems to herself: Wallace Stevens’s “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” What is the significance of each of these poems to the narrative?
6. While ostensibly a road novel, Talk Talk is really a bicoastal novel. Discuss Boyle’s juxtaposition of East Coast and West Coast culture. What are Peck’s attitudes toward each? Do they resonate with you?
7. Sandman’s corruption of an Army recruiting slogan into a motto for identity thieves (“Be anyone you can be”) is one example of how America’s obsession with self- reinvention is parodied. What other examples come to mind? What do you think the novel says about our capacity, or lack thereof, to reinvent ourselves?
8. The scene at Peck’s mother’s house is both humorous and deeply disturbing. The naïve Natalia, full of the expectations and anxieties of a future daughter-in-law, is finally going to meet the mother of the man she hopes to marry, the man whose name she doesn’t even know. Did Boyle intend for this to be a comic scene? Why do you think he chose to omit Peck’s mother entirely from the scene?
9. Discuss the confrontation at the end of the novel. Why did Peck suddenly lose his nerve, the only instance in the entire novel? How do you interpret Peck’s answer to Dana’s seemingly simple question: “What do you want?” What is it about the ending that surprised you the most?
10. Dana and Bridger’s relationship is unusual, but like most couples their problems are generally problems of communication. What makes them unique and typical as a couple? Why does Bridger decide to join Dana on this perilous journey to find her identity thief? What happens to their relationship along the way and why does it ultimately fail?
11. In some respects Talk Talk is a variant of the doppelganger novel, a long-established literary convention in which the protagonist is haunted by the apparition of his or her double. Compare Talk Talk with other classic examples of the genre, such as Dostoyevsky’s The Double, Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson.” Do you think Boyle has successfully updated this literary form for the twenty-first century?
12. Dana and Peck share a fascination with language, which isn’t matched by their respective partners. See for instance Peck’s recollection of the word “plebeian” and Dana’s interest in the etymology of “dis.” Besides this, do they have any other traits in common? At the end of the novel when they confront one another they are said to be “united, wedded.” What is it that unites them?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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