Executive Times

 

 

 

 

 

2006 Book Reviews

 

Talk Talk by T.C. Boyle

Rating:

***

 

(Recommended)

 

 

 

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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 Central Coast, as far as he knew. He phoned her back, but there was no answer.

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—Alabama—made his stomach skip, and he dialed her yet again.

When Radko left at three-thirty to drive down to L.A. for “a meed­ing,” Bridger slipped out too. Despite his assurances to the contrary, he had no intention of working straight through, not today—he had to drive Dana to the impound yard to retrieve her car and then sit down with the victims’ assistance people and start the process of reclaiming her life, because there was no guarantee she wouldn’t be arrested again, not until they caught this jerk who’d stolen her identity. When he pulled into the parking lot at the school, she was sitting on the front steps waiting for him, and that was a relief, though he never really be­lieved she’d just walk out on her classes, no matter what degree of ass­holery the headmaster attained. That wouldn’t be like Dana. She never gave up on anything.

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

 

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