T.C. Boyle occupies a unique niche among contemporary writers. Hipper than John Updike, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates or Philip Roth, he is at the same time less personal and more wide-ranging than most of the younger generation, whose gaze seldom extends beyond their navels.
He is serious but not solemn and possessed of perfect pitch when it comes to popular culture. Among his 10 novels are examinations of subjects as varied as Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, the Kinsey Report and illegal immigration.
He’s current but not really political, and his approach, although often antic, is never ideological. His characters imbibe despair like mother’s milk, but somehow hope always rears its head, if sometimes disguised as anger. His books are sometimes maddening but never uninteresting.
Boyle’s latest, ironically titled “Talk Talk” because the main character is deaf, centers on an important issue – identity theft. Yet while Boyle demonstrates real knowledge and insight into the problem, he’s not your friendly consumer columnist offering possible ways to protect your home. For Boyle’s real subject here is not economic disaster, important as that might be to most of us, but something deeper and more metaphysical, that is, the loss of self that can accompany identity theft. And by extension the fragile hold many of us have on who we really are. This is what makes “Talk Talk” so interesting, and even profound.
As serious as the book is, however, Boyle’s novel actually takes the form of a thriller, a chase novel and one that will keep readers on the edge of their seats. Dana Halter, a young deaf school teacher, is stopped for running a stop sign and soon finds herself in jail on a bewildering number of charges, all resulting from debts run up by someone who has taken on her identity. “They booked her,” Boyle writes. “… fingerprinted her, took away her pager and cellphone and her rings and her jade pendant and her purse, made her stand against a wall – cowed and miserable and with her shoulders slumped and her eyes vacant – for the lingering humiliation of the mug shot …The lips of the policeman flailed at her and she let her voice go till it must have grown wings and careened round the room with the dull gray walls and framed certificates and the flag that hung from a shining brass pole in limp validation of the whole corrupt and tottering system.”
The chase begins
After an agonizing weekend in the lock-up, Dana is finally released into the custody of her boyfriend, Bridger Martin, a computer geek who works in a Hollywood animation factory. But Dana is too furious to simply return home and let things go. Together, Bridger and Dana are able to track the thief and go off in a pursuit that spreads across the country and ends up in New York State.
This is the most interesting section of the novel as Boyle has packed it with a cornucopia of arcane details about identity theft, the movie business and the way the deaf are educated in this country. Moreover, Boyle’s depiction of Dana’s relationship with Bridger and their excruciating difficulty in communicating is very moving. Bridger is attempting to learn to sign, and she reads lips, but he’s still awkward, and if he is turned away, she can’t understand him. “He hadn’t stopped talking even to draw breath.”
Boyle writes after Bridger is finally able to secure Dana’s release from jail. “Talk, talk,” Dana thinks to herself. “That was what happened when the deaf got together … they talked a lot, talked all the time, talked the way Bridger was talking now, only with their hands …. Communication, the universal need. Information. Access. Escape from the prison of silence. Talk, talk, talk.”
The prison of silence is a problem that we all face to some extent, but Boyle makes his point with powerful simplicity. As good as this is, however, Boyle seems to think it’s not enough to focus on the love relationship between Dana and Bridger. Midway through “Talk, Talk,” he shifts the focus onto the thief himself, a lowlife named Peck Wilson, who it turns out has stolen other identities in addition to Dana’s and is so angry at being discovered that he decides to borrow Bridger’s in retaliation and uses it to buy a new Mercedes for his cross-country escape.
Realities are disturbing
Among the more disturbing aspects of this novel is how apparently easy it is to commit such crimes with neither response nor real concern from the police or other enforcement agencies. Billions of dollars are lost annually by credit card companies, and peoples’ lives are unalterably affected, but little seems to be done about it.
Wilson and his Russian émigré lover live a high life only imagined by most working stiffs, spending day after day shopping for luxuries and eating at high-end bistros. They buy and sell condos and houses, cars and clothes, and the law seems largely uninterested in them, though Peck has done time. Indeed a problem in the novel is the fact that such characters are going to be difficult for most readers to like or sympathize with, especially because remorse seems to be an unknown concept to Peck, even when he is confronted by those whom he has wronged.
It would be unfair to reveal the end of this stunning novel, which is noteworthy not only for its unusual subject matter but also, as always with Boyle, for his sinewy prose, brilliant descriptions and dialogue that jumps off the page. Boyle’s artistry has never been more apparent, and the novel is sufficiently creepy that many readers will be checking both wallet and bank balance before the conclusion. But Boyle’s achievement goes beyond that. It is commonplace to say that some books get under one’s skin. This is true here, but the difference with “Talk, Talk” is that for many readers it will stay there, a haunting reminder of the thin veil between identity and self.
David Milofsky is a Denver novelist and professor of English at Colorado State University.
Talk Talk
By T.C. Boyle
Viking, 340 pages, $25.95
