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.
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.
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780143112150 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/26/2007 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 - 17 Years |
About the Author
T. C. Boyle is the author of eleven novels, including World's End (winner of the PEN/FaulknerAward), Drop City (a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award), and The Inner Circle. His most recent story collections are Tooth and Claw and The Human Fly and Other Stories.
Hometown:
Santa Barbara CaliforniaDate of Birth:
December 2, 1948Place of Birth:
Peekskill, New YorkEducation:
B.A. in music, State University of New York at Potsdam, 1970; Ph.D. in literature, Iowa University, 1977Website:
http://www.tcboyle.com/Read an Excerpt
TALK
TALK
ALSO BY T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE
NOVELS
The Inner Circle
Drop City
A Friend of the Earth
Riven Rock
The Tortilla Curtain
The Road to Wellville
East Is East
World’s End
Budding Prospects
Water Music
SHORT STORIES
Tooth and Claw
The Human Fly
After the Plague
T.C. Boyle Stories
Without a Hero
If the River Was Whiskey
Greasy Lake
Descent of Man
TALK
TALK
A NOVEL
T. Coraghessan Boyle
VIKING
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
PART I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
PART II
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
PART III
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
PART IV
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
PART V
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Marie Alex, Jamieson Fry, Susan Abramson and Linda Funesti-Benton for their generous help and advice.
Author’s Note
Except where indicated, it is not my intention to represent a literal translation of signed English, as a number of writers have done in the past, quite admirably, but rather to approximate what is being communicated by means of standard English dialogue.
We are our language, but our real language, our real identity, lies in inner speech, that ceaseless stream and generation of meaning that constitutes the inner mind.
—L. S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language
I learnt man’s tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts
Into the stony idiom of the brain,
…
I learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret;
The code of night tapped on my tongue;
What had been one was many sounding minded.
—Dylan Thomas, “From love’s first fever to her plague”
PART I
One
SHE WAS RUNNING LATE, always running late, a failing of hers, she knew it, but then she couldn’t find her purse and once she did manage to locate it (underneath her blue corduroy jacket on the coat tree in the front hall), she couldn’t find her keys. They should have been in her purse, but they weren’t, and so she’d made a circuit of the apartment—two circuits, three—before she thought to look through the pockets of the jeans she’d worn the day before, but where were they? No time for toast. Forget the toast, forget food. She was out of orange juice. Out of butter and cream cheese. The newspaper on the front mat was just another obstacle. Piss-warm—was that an acceptable term? Yes—piss-warm coffee in a stained mug, a quick check of lipstick and hair in the rearview mirror, and then she was putting the car in gear and backing out onto the street.
She may have been peripherally aware of a van flitting by in the opposite direction, the piebald dog sniffing at a stain on the edge of the pavement, someone’s lawn sprinkler holding the light in a shimmer of translucent beads, but the persistent beat of adrenaline—or nerves, or whatever it was—wouldn’t allow her to focus. Plus, the sun was in her eyes, and where were her sunglasses? She thought she remembered seeing them on the bureau, in a snarl of jewelry—or was it the kitchen table, next to the bananas, and she’d considered taking a banana with her, fast food, potassium, roughage, but then she figured she wouldn’t because with Dr. Stroud it was better to have nothing at all in your stomach. Air. Air alone would sustain her.
To rush, to hurry, to fret: Old English and Latinate roots, the same sad connotative stab of meaning. She wasn’t thinking clearly. She was stressed, stressed out, running late. And when she got to the four-way stop at the end of the block she felt momentarily blessed because there was no one there to stop for, yet even as she made a feint of slowing and shifted from neutral to second with a quick deft plunge of clutch and accelerator, she spotted the patrol car parked just up the street in the bruised shadow of an SUV.
There was a moment of suspended time, the cop frozen at the wheel of his car, she giving him a helpless exculpatory look, and then she was past him and cursing herself as she watched him pull a lazy U-turn behind her and activate the flashing lights. All at once she saw the world complete, the palms with their pineapple trunks and peeling skirts, the armored spines of the yucca plants climbing the hill, yellow rock, red rock, a gunmetal pickup slowing to gape at her where she’d pulled over on a tan strip of dirt, and below her, a descending expanse of tiled rooftops and the distant blue wallop of the Pacific, no hurry now, no hurry at all. She watched the cop—the patrolman—in her side mirror as he sliced open the door, hitched up his belt (they all did that, as if the belt with its Mace and handcuffs and the hard black-handled revolver were all the badge they needed) and walked stiffly to her car.
She had her license and registration ready and held them out to him in offering, in supplication, but he didn’t take them, not yet. He was saying something, lips flapping as if he were chewing a wad of gristle, but what was it? It wasn’t License and registration, but what else could it be? Is that the sun in the sky? What’s the square root of a hundred forty-four? Do you know why I pulled you over? Yes. That was it. And she did know. She’d run a stop sign. Because she was in a hurry—a hurry to get to the dentist’s, of all places—and she was running late.
“I know,” she said, “I know, but…but I did shift down…”
He was young, this patrolman, no older than she, a coeval, a contemporary, somebody she might have danced alongside of—or with—at Velvet Jones or one of the other clubs on lower State. His eyes were too big for his head and they bulged out like a Boston terrier’s—and what was that called? Exophthalmia. The word came to her and she felt a quick glow of satisfaction despite the circumstances. But the cop, the patrolman. There was a softness to his jaw, that when combined with the eyes—liquid and weepy—gave him an unfinished look, as if he weren’t her age at all but an adolescent, a big-headed child all dressed up spick-and-span in his uniform and playing at authority. She saw his face change when she spoke, but she was used to that.
He said something then, and this time she read him correctly, handing him the laminated license and the thin wafer of the registration slip, and she couldn’t help asking him what was the matter, though she knew her face would give her away. A question always flared her eyebrows as if she were being accusatory or angry, and she’d tried to work on that but with mixed success. He backed away from the car and said something further—probably that he was going to go back to his own vehicle and run a standard check on her license before writing out the standard ticket for running the standard stop sign—and this time she kept her mouth shut.
For the first few minutes she wasn’t aware of the time passing. All she could think was what this was going to cost her, points on her license, the insurance—was it last year or the year before that she’d got her speeding ticket?—and that now she was definitely going to be late. For the dentist. All this for the dentist. And if she was late for the dentist and the procedure that was to take two hours minimum, as she’d been advised in writing to assure that there would be no misunderstanding, then she would be late for her class too and no one to cover for her. She thought of the problem of the telephone—she supposed she could use the dentist’s receptionist as an intermediary, but what a hassle. Hassle. And what was the derivation of that? she wondered. She made a note to herself to look it up in her Dictionary of American Slang when she got home. But what was taking him so long? She had an urge to look over her shoulder, fix the glowing sun-blistered windshield with a withering stare, but she resisted the impulse and lowered her left shoulder to peer instead through the side mirror.
Nothing. There was a form there, the patrolman’s form, a bulked-up shadow, head bent. She glanced at the clock on the dash. Ten minutes had passed since he’d left her. She wondered if he was a slow learner, dyslexic, the sort of person who would have trouble recollecting the particular statute of the motor vehicle code she stood in violation of, who would fumble with the nub of his pencil, pressing extra hard for the duplicate. A dope, a dummy, a half-wit. A Neanderthal. She tried out the word on her tongue, beating out the syllables—Ne-an-der-thal—and watched in the mirror as her lips pursed and drew back and pursed again.
She was thinking of her dentist, an inveterate talker, with eyebrows that seemed to crawl across his inverted face as he hung over her, oblivious to the fact that she couldn’t respond except with grunts and deep-throated cries as the cotton wads throttled her tongue and the vacuum tube tugged at her lip, when the door of the police car caught the light as it swung open again and the patrolman emerged. Right away she could see that something was wrong. His body language was different, radically different, the stiffness gone out of his legs, his shoulders hunched forward and his feet stalking the gravel with exaggerated care. She watched till his face loomed up in the mirror—his mouth drawn tight, his eyes narrowed and deflated—and then turned to face him.
That was when she had her first shock.
He was standing three paces back from the driver’s door and he had his weapon drawn and pointed at her and he was saying something about her hands—barking, his face discomposed, furious—and he had to repeat himself, more furious each time, until she understood: Put your hands where I can see them.
At first, she’d been too scared to speak, numbly complying, stung by the elemental violence of the moment. He’d jerked her out of the car, the gun still on her, shoved her face into the hot metal and glass of her own vehicle and twisted her arms round behind her to clamp the cuffs over her wrists, the weight of him pressing into her until she felt him forcing her legs apart with the anvil of his knee. His hands were on her then, gripping her ankles first, sliding up her legs to her hips, her abdomen, her armpits, patting, probing. There was the sharp hormonal smell of him, of his contempt and outrage, his hot breath exploding in her ear with the fricatives and plosives of speech. He was brisk, brutal, sparing nothing. There might have been questions, orders, a meliorating softness in his tone, but she couldn’t hear and she couldn’t see his face—and her hands, her hands were caught like fish on a stringer.
Now, in the patrol car, in the cage of the backseat that was exactly like the cage they put stray dogs in, she felt the way they wanted you to feel: small, helpless, without hope or recourse. Her heart was hammering. She was on the verge of tears. People were staring at her, slowing their cars to get a good look, and there was nothing she could do but turn away in shame and horror and pray that one of her students didn’t happen to be passing by—or anybody she knew, her neighbors, the landlord. She slouched down in the seat, dropped her head till her hair shook loose. She’d always wondered why the accused shielded their faces on the courthouse steps, why they tried so hard to hide their identities even when everyone in the world knew who they were, but now she understood, now she felt it for herself.
The color rose to her face—she was being arrested, and in public no less—and for a moment she was paralyzed. All she could think of was the shame of it, a shame that stung like some physical hurt, like the bite of an insect, a thousand insects seething all over her body—she could still feel the hot clamp of his hands on her ankles, her thighs. It was as if he’d burned her, scored her flesh with acid. She studied the back of the seat, the floormat, her right foot tapping and jittering with the uncontainable pulse of her nerves, and then all at once, as if a switch had been thrown in her brain, she felt the anger rising in her. Why should she feel shame? What had she done?
It was the cop. He was the one. He was responsible for all this. She lifted her eyes and there he was, the idiot, the pig, a pair of squared-off shoulders in the tight blue-black uniform, the back of his head as flat and rigid as a paddle strapped to his neck, and he was saying something into his radio, the microphone at his mouth even as the cruiser lurched out into the street and she felt herself flung helplessly forward against the seat restraint. Suddenly she was furious, ready to explode. What was wrong with him? What did he think, she was a drug dealer or something? A thief? A terrorist? She’d run a stop sign, for Christ’s sake, that was all—a stop sign. Jesus.
Before she knew it, the words were out of her mouth. “Are you crazy?” she demanded, and she didn’t care if her voice was too loud, if it was toneless and ugly and made people wince. She didn’t care what she sounded like, not now, not here. “I said, are you crazy?”
But he wasn’t hearing her, he didn’t understand. “Listen,” she said, “listen,” leaning forward as far as the seat restraint would allow her, struggling to enunciate as carefully as she could, though she was choked and wrought up and the manacles were too tight and her heart was throbbing like a trapped bird trying to beat its way out of the nest, “there must be some mistake. Don’t you know who I am?”
The world chopped by in a harsh savage glide, the car jolting beneath her. She strained to see his face reflected in the rearview mirror, to see if his lips were moving, to get a clue—the smallest hint, anything—as to what was happening to her. He must have read her her rights as he handcuffed her—You have the right to remain silent and all the rest of it, the obligatory phrases she’d seen on the TV screen a hundred times and more. But why? What had she done? And why did his eyes keep leaping from the road to the mirror and back again as if she couldn’t be trusted even in the cage and the cuffs, as if he expected her to change shape, vomit bile, ooze and leak and smell? Why the hate? The bitterness? The intransigence?
It took her a moment, the blood burning in her veins, her face flushed with shame and anger and frustration, until she understood: it was a case of mistaken identity. Of course it was. Obviously. What else could it be? Someone who looked like her—some other slim graceful dark-eyed deaf woman of thirty-three who wasn’t on her way to the dentist with a sheaf of papers she had to finish grading by the time her class met—had robbed a bank at gunpoint, shot up the neighborhood, hit a child and run. It was the only explanation, because she’d never violated the law in her life except in the most ordinary and innocuous ways, speeding on the freeway alongside a hundred other speeders, smoking the occasional joint when she was a teenager (she and Carrie Cheung and later Richie Cohen, cruising the neighborhood, high as—well, kites—but no one ever knew or cared, least of all the police), collecting the odd parking ticket or moving violation—all of which had been duly registered, paid for and expunged from her record. At least she thought they’d been. That parking ticket in Venice, sixty bucks and she was maybe two minutes late, the meter maid already writing out the summons even as she stood there pleading with her—but she’d taken care of that, hadn’t she?
No, it was too much. The whole thing, the shock of it, the scare—and these people were going to pay, they were, she’d get an attorney, police brutality, incompetence, false arrest, the whole works. All right. All right, fine. If that was what they wanted, she’d give it to them. The car rocked beneath her. The cop held rigid, like a mannequin. She closed her eyes a moment, an old habit, and took herself out of the world.
They booked her, fingerprinted her, took away her pager and cell phone 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, and still nothing. No charges. No sense. The lips of the policemen 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. She was beside herself. Hurt. Furious. Stung. “There must be some mistake,” she insisted over and over again. “I’m Dana, Dana Halter. I teach at the San Roque School for the Deaf and I’ve never…I’m deaf, can’t you see that? You’ve got the wrong person.” She watched them shift and shrug as if she were some sort of freak of nature, a talking dolphin or a ventriloquist’s dummy come to life, but they gave her nothing. To them she was just another criminal—another perp—one more worthless case to be locked away and ignored.
But they didn’t lock her away, not yet. She was handcuffed to a bench that gave onto a hallway behind the front desk, and she didn’t catch the explanation offered her—the cop, the booking officer, a man in his thirties who looked almost apologetic as he took her by the arm, had averted his face as he gently but firmly pushed her down and readjusted the cuffs—but it became clear when a bleached-out wisp of a man with a labile face and the faintest pale trace of a mustache came through the door and made his way to her, his hands already in motion. His name—he finger-spelled it for her—was Charles Iverson and he was an interpreter for the deaf. I work at the San Roque School sometimes, he signed. I’ve seen you around.
She didn’t recognize him—or maybe she did. There was something familiar in the smallness and neatness of him, and she seemed to recollect the image of him in the hallway, his head down, moving with swift, sure strides. She forced a smile. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said aloud, lifting her cuffed hands in an attempt to sign simultaneously as she tended to do when she was agitated. “There’s some huge mistake. All I did was run a four-way stop…and they, they”—she felt the injustice and the hurt of it building in her and struggled to control her face. And her voice. It must have jumped and planed off because people were staring—the booking officer, a secretary with an embellished figure and a hard plain face, two young Latinos stalled at the front desk in their canted baseball caps and voluminous shorts. Put a lid on it, that’s what their body language told her.
Iverson took his time. His signing was rigid and inelegant but comprehensible for all that, and she focused her whole being on him as he explained the charges against her. There are multiple outstanding warrants, he began, in Marin County, Tulare and L.A. Counties—and out of state too, in Nevada. Reno and Stateline.
Warrants? What warrants?
He was wearing a sport coat over a T-shirt with the name of a basketball team emblazoned across the breast. His hair had been sprayed or gelled, but not very successfully—it curled up like the fluff of the chicks they’d kept under a heat lamp in elementary school, so blond it was nearly translucent. She watched him lift the lapel of his jacket and extract a folded sheet of paper from the inside pocket. He seemed to consider it a moment, weighing it like a knife, before dropping it to his lap and signing, Failure to appear on a number of charges, different courts, different dates, over the past two years. Passing bad checks, auto theft, possession of a controlled substance, assault with a deadly weapon—the list goes on. He held her eyes. His mouth was drawn tight, no sympathy there. It came to her that he believed the charges, believed that she’d led a double life, that she’d violated every decent standard and let the deaf community down, one more hearing prejudice confirmed. Yes, his eyes said, the deaf live by their own rules, inferior rules, compromised rules, they live off of us and on us. It was a look she’d seen all her life.
He handed her the sheet and there it all was, dates, places, the police department codes and the charges brought. Incredibly, her name was there too, undeniably and indelibly, in caps, under Felony Complaint, Superior Court of this county or the other, and the warrant numbers marching down the margin of the page.
She looked up and it was as if he’d slapped her across the face. I’ve never even been to Tulare County—I don’t even know where it is. Or to Nevada either. It’s crazy. It’s wrong, a mistake, that’s all. Tell them it’s a mistake.
The coldest look, the smallest Sign. You get one phone call.
Two
BRIDGER WAS AT WORK, the morning obliterated by Starbucks and the twilit irreality of the long cool room at Digital Dynasty, seeing and hearing and breathing in the world within a world that was the screen before him. The scene—a single frame—was frozen there in a deep gloom of mahogany and copper tones, and he was working on a head replacement. His boss—Radko Goric, a thirty-eight-year-old entrepreneur wrapped in two-hundred-dollar designer shades, off-color Pierro Quarto jackets and clunky vinyl shoes out of the bargain bin—had underbid three other special effects companies for the contract on this picture, the last installment of a trilogy set on a distant and inimical planet where saurian warlords battled for dominance and human mercenaries shifted allegiance in observance of the tenets of an ancient warrior code. All well and good. He was a fan of the series—had seen the first two episodes six or seven times each, in fact, marveling at the detail, the sweep, the seamlessness of the effects—and he’d gone into the project with the best of intentions, a kind of euphoria even. But Rad (as he insisted on being called, and not Radko or Mr. Goric or Your Royal Highness) had given them zero leeway as far as the time frame was concerned. The film was due to premiere in less than a month and Bridger and his five co-workers were putting in twelve-hour days, seven days a week.
For a long while, he just stared at the screen, his chin propped on two pale fists that seemed to have gone boneless on him. The world was there, right there in front of him, much more immediate and real than this cubicle, these walls, the ceiling, the painted cement floor, and he was inside it, drifting, dreaming, sleeping with his eyes open. He was beat. Dead. His fingers were limp, his backside blistered. He’d been wearing the same socks three days running. And now he could feel an exhaustion headache building inside his skull like the turd-brown clouds that roiled Drex III, the planet he shaded and scored and polished to the gleam of a dagger’s edge with the assistance of his Discreet software and a finger-worn mouse. The coffee did nothing for him. It had been Banjo’s turn to go for Starbucks during coffee break, and he’d ordered a venti with a shot of espresso, and there it was, half-consumed, and all he felt was queasy. And sleepy, drowsy, narcoleptic. If only he could lay his head down, just for a minute…
But he had a message. From Deet-Deet. The icon popped up in the corner of his screen, and he opened it to find a cartoon image of a peg-legged pirate waving a cutlass, onto which Deet-Deet had grafted an outsized cutout of Radko’s head. The text read: Har-har-har, me hearties! You’ll all walk the plank if this project isn’t in the bag by the thirtieth—and no snoozing on the job!
This was the way they kept their sanity. The work was drudgery, piecework, paint and roto at twenty-five dollars and seventy-two cents an hour, before taxes, and while it had its moments of artistic satisfaction—like painting out the wires on the tiny flying bodies hurled into the scabrous skies by one nasty extraterrestrial explosion or another—essentially it was a grind. The head replacement shot Bridger had been working on all the previous day and into this soporific morning involved superimposing the three-dimensionally photographed face of the film’s action hero, Kade (or The Kade, as he was now being billed), over the white helmet of a stuntman on a futuristic blade-sprouting chopper that shot up a ramp and off a cliff to skim one of Drex III’s lakes of fire and propel its driver into the heart of the enemy camp, where he would proceed to hack and gouge and face-kick one hapless lizard warrior after another. It wasn’t exactly what Bridger had imagined himself doing six years out of film school—he’d pictured a trajectory more like Fincher’s or Spielberg’s—but it was a living. A good living. And it was in the industry.
What he did now was superimpose The Kade’s head over Radko’s—he had The Kade winking and grinning, then grimacing (the look when the bike lands amongst the saurian legions with a sacroiliac-jarring thump) and finally winking again—and messaged his reply: Scuttle the ship and bring me coffee, my kingdom for a cup, another cup. He added a P.S., his favorite quotation from Miss Lonelyhearts, which he made a point of inserting wherever it applied: Like a dead man, only friction could warm him or violence make him mobile.
And then, from the physical distance of two cubicles over and the hurtling unbridgeable interstices of cyberspace, Plum chimed in, and then Lumpen, Pixel and Banjo, and everybody was awake again and the new day that was exactly like the preceding day and the day before that began to unfold.
He was painting out the vestigial white edges around The Kade’s head and beginning to think about breakfast (bagel and cream cheese) or maybe lunch (bagel and cream cheese with lox, sprouts and mustard), when his cell began to vibrate. Radko didn’t like to hear any buzzing or carillons during working hours because he didn’t want his employees distracted by personal calls, just as he didn’t want them surfing the Web, going to chat rooms or instant messaging, so Bridger always kept his cell phone on vibrate, and he always kept it in his right front pocket so that he could be instantly alerted to the odd crepitating motion of it and take his calls on the sly. “Hello?” he said, keeping his voice in the range of a propulsive whisper.
“Yes, hello. This is Charles Iverson with the San Roque Police Department. I’m an interpreter for the deaf and I have Dana Halter here.”
“Police? What’s the problem? Has there been an accident or something?”
“This is Dana,” the voice said, as if it were the instrument of a medium channeling a spirit. “I need you to come down here and bail me out.”
“For what? What did you do?”
“I don’t know,” the voice said, the man’s voice, low-pitched and with a handful of gravel in it, “but I ran a stop sign and now they think I—”
There was a pause. The Kade stared back at him from the screen, grimacing, the left side of his head still encumbered with three-quarters of his white halo. Overhead, the barely functional fluorescent lights briefly brightened and then dimmed again, one tube or another eternally going bad. Plum—the only female among them—got up from her cubicle and padded down the hall in the direction of the bathroom.
Iverson’s voice came back: “—they think I committed all these crimes, but”—a pause—“I didn’t.”
“Of course you didn’t,” he said, and he pictured Dana there in some anonymous police precinct, her face angled away from the phone and the man with the voice signing to her amidst the mug shots and wanted posters, and the picture wasn’t right. “I thought you were supposed to be at the dentist’s,” he said. And then: “Crimes? What crimes?”
“I was,” Iverson said. “But I ran a stop sign and the police arrested me.” There was more—Bridger could hear Dana’s voice in the background—but the interpreter was giving him the shorthand version. Without further elaboration he read off the list of charges as if he were a waiter reciting the specials of the day.
“But that’s crazy,” Bridger said. “You didn’t, I mean, she didn’t—”
“Time’s up,” Iverson said.
“Listen, I’ll be right there. Ten minutes or less.” Bridger glanced up as Plum slipped back into her cubicle, dropping his voice to the breath of a whisper. “What’s the bail? I mean, what does it cost?”
“What? Speak up. I can’t hear you.”
Radko was coming down the hall now and Bridger leaned deeper into the cubicle to mask the phone. “The bail—how much?”
“It hasn’t been set yet.”
“All right,” he said. “All right. I’ll be right there. Love you.”
There was a pause. “Love you too,” Iverson said.
He’d never been to the San Roque Police Station and he had to look up the address in the phone book, and then, when he turned down the street indicated, he was startled to see it lined on both sides with idle patrol cars. It took him a while to find a parking spot, circling the block again and again till one of the cruisers finally pulled out and he cautiously signaled his intention and did an elaborate and constrained job of parallel parking between two black-and-whites. He was agitated. He was in a hurry. But this was hardly the time or place for a fender bender or even a bumper-kiss.
A puffing bloated woman who seemed to have a crust of dried blood rimming her eye sockets—or was that makeup?—was stumping up the steps ahead of him and he had the presence of mind to hold the door for her, which in turn gave him a moment to compose himself. His relations with the police over the course of his adult years had been minimal and strictly formal (“All right, out of the car”) and he’d been arrested exactly twice in his life, once for shoplifting when he was fourteen and then, in college, for driving under the influence. He understood theoretically that the police were the servants and protectors of the public—that is, his servants and protectors—but for all that he couldn’t help experiencing a sudden rapid uptick of alarm and a queasy sense of culpability whenever he saw a cop on the street. Even rent-a-cops gave him pause. No matter: he followed the bloated woman through the door.
Inside, a waist-high counter divided the public space (flags, both state and federal, fierce overhead lights, linoleum that gleamed as if in defiance of the bodily fluids and street filth that were regularly deposited on its surface) from the inner sanctum, where the police and detectives had their desks and a discreet hallway led presumably to the holding cells. Where Dana was. Even as he walked up to the counter, he shifted his eyes to the hallway, as if he might be able to catch a glimpse of her there, but of course he couldn’t. She was already locked up in some pen with a bunch of prostitutes, drunks, violent offenders, and the thought of it made him go cold. They’d be all over her. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t handle herself—she was the most insistently independent woman he’d ever met—but she was naïve, too sympathetic for her own good, and as soon as they discovered she was deaf they’d have a wedge to use against her. He thought of the way street people would hit on her whenever he took her anywhere, as if she were their special emissary, as if her handicap—he had to check himself: her difference—reduced her somehow to their level. Or lower. Lower still.
But this was all a misunderstanding. Obviously. And he would have her out before they could get their hooks in her, no matter what it took. He waited his turn behind the fat woman, checking his watch reflexively every five seconds. Ten past eleven. Eleven past. Twelve. The fat woman was complaining about her neighbor’s dog—she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t think, because it barked so relentlessly, and she’d called the police, this very precinct, twenty-two times already and had a log of each phone call going back fifteen months to prove it. And were they going to do anything about it? Or did she have to stand here at this desk till she dropped dead? Because she would if that’s what it took. She’d stand right here.
Radko hadn’t been pleased when he begged off work. “It’s Dana,” Bridger had said, flagging him down on his way to the refrigerator. Bridger was already on his feet, already patting down his pockets for the car keys. “She’s been arrested. It’s an emergency.”
The lights fluttered, darkened. Drex III glowed menacingly from the screen—there were twenty-seven days left till it was due to take its place in the firmament among the other interstellar spheres. Radko took a step back and squinted at him out of his heavy-lidded eyes. “Emergency?” he repeated. “For what? People they get thrown in jail every day.”
“No,” Bridger said, “you don’t understand. She didn’t do anything. It’s a mistake. I need to, well—I know this sounds crazy but I need to go down there and bail her out. Right now.”
Nothing. Radko compressed his lips and gave him a look Pixel had described in a sudden flare of inspiration as “Paranoia infests the frog.”
“I mean, I can’t leave her there. In a cell. Would you want to be stuck in a cell?”
Wrong question. “In my country,” Radko intoned, “people they are born in cells, they give birth in cells, they die in cells.”
“Is that good?” Bridger threw back at him. “Is that why you came here?”
But Radko just turned away from him, waving a hand in the air. “Pffft!” was all he had to add.
“I’m going,” Bridger said, and he could see Plum leaning out of her carrel to savor the spectacle. “Just so you know—I don’t have any choice.”
Heavily, one hand on the door of the refrigerator, the other describing a quick arc as he swung round to point an admonitory finger, Radko rumbled, “One hour. One hour max. Just so you know.”
The officer at the desk—balding on top, sideburns gone white, milky exasperated eyes glancing up over the reading glasses riding the bridge of his nose—reassured the fat woman in soft, placatory tones, but the fat woman wasn’t there for reassurance; she was there for action. The more softly the policeman spoke, the more the woman’s voice seemed to rise, till finally he turned away from her and gestured across the room. A moment later, a much younger officer—a ramrod Latino in a uniform that looked custom-fit—beckoned to her from a swinging door that led into the offices proper. The man at the desk said: “This is Officer Torres. He’s going to help you. He’s our dog expert. Isn’t that right, Torres?”
The second man took the cue, not a hint of amusement on his face. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “That’s right. I’m the dog man.”
And then the man at the desk turned to Bridger. “Yes?” he said.
Bridger shuffled his Nikes, focused on a spot just to the left of the cop’s head and said, “I’m here for Dana. Dana Halter?”
Two hours later, he was still waiting. This was a Friday, a Friday afternoon now, and things seemed to be moving slowly, in a quiet retrograde tumble toward the weekend and the fomenting parade of drunks and brawlers who could go ahead and set the place on fire for all these putty-faced men and women cared, these desk-hounds and functionaries and sleepwalkers with the thousand-yard stares. They were going home at five o’clock to drink a beer and put their feet up and until then they were going to shuffle back and forth to the filing cabinets and peck at their computers in a zone where nobody, least of all Bridger, could reach them. He had managed to pry a few essential nuggets of information from the cop with the white sideburns—Yes, they’d brought her in; No, bail hadn’t been set yet; No, he couldn’t see her; No, he couldn’t talk to her—and after that he’d stationed himself on a bench by the doorway with nothing to read and nothing to do but wait.
There were four other people waiting along with him: a very old man in a heavy suit who held himself so perfectly erect his jacket never made contact with the back of the bench; a Middle Eastern woman of indeterminate age, dressed in what might have been a caftan or a sacramental robe of some sort, and beside her, her ceaselessly leg-kicking son who looked to be five or so, but Bridger wasn’t much acquainted with kids and the more he observed this one the less certain he was about that estimate—actually, the kid could have been anywhere from three to twelve; and, seated farthest from him, a girl in her late teens/ early twenties who wasn’t particularly attractive in either face or figure, but who began to take on a certain allure after two hours of surreptitious study. Beyond that, probably a hundred people had scuffed in and out of the place, most of them conferring in quiet deferential tones with the cop at the desk and then bowing their way back out the door. The fat woman had long since returned to her barking zone.
Bridger was profoundly bored. He had a difficult time sitting still under any circumstances, unless he was absorbed in a video game or letting his mind drift into the poisonous atmosphere of Drex III or some other digitized scenario, and he found himself fidgeting almost as much as the child (who had never ceased kicking his legs out and drawing them back again, as if the bench were an outsized swing and he was trying to lift them all up and away and out of this stupefying place). For long periods, Bridger stared into the middle distance, thinking nothing, thinking of bleakness and the void, and then, inevitably, his fears for Dana would materialize again, and he’d see her face, the sweet confusion of her mouth and the way she knitted her brows when she posed a question—What time is it? Where did you say the omelet pan was? How many jiggers of triple sec?—and his stomach would churn with anxiety. And hunger. Simple hunger. It occurred to him that he’d had neither the breakfast bagel nor the lunch—he’d had nothing but Starbucks, in fact—and he could feel the acidity creeping up his throat. What was wrong with these people? Couldn’t they answer a simple question? Process a form? Dispense some information in a timely fashion?
He cautioned himself to stay calm, though that was difficult, given that he’d already called Radko six times and Radko had become increasingly impatient with each call in the sequence. “I’ll work till midnight,” Bridger promised, “I swear.” Radko’s voice, bottom-heavy and thick with the bludgeoning consonants of his transported English, came back at him in minor detonations of meaning: “You bedder,” he said. “You betcha. All through night, not just midnight.” But he was being selfish, he told himself. Imagine Dana, imagine what she was going through. He fought off the image of her locked up in a cell with half a dozen strangers, women who would mock her to her face, make demands, get physical with her. Dana would be all but helpless in that arena, the strange flat uninflected flutter of her voice that he found so compelling nothing but a provocation to them, angry women, hard women, needy women. It was all a mistake. It had to be.
And then he was focusing on nothing, the cop at the desk, his fellow sufferers in Purgatory, the dreary walls and glowing floors all melding in a blur, and he was revisiting the first time he’d laid eyes on her, just over a year ago. It was at a club. He’d gone out after work with Deet-Deet, both of them frazzled, their eyes swollen and twitching as an aftereffect of fixating on their monitors from ten a.m. till past eight in the evening, the Visine they passed back and forth notwithstanding. First they’d gone for sushi and downed a couple of cold sakes each, and then, because they just had to unwind even though it was a Monday and the whole dreary week stretched out before them like a cinema-scape out of Dune, they decided to go clubbing and see what turned up. At the time, Deet-Deet had just broken up with his girlfriend and Bridger was unattached himself (going on three fruitless months), and so, especially after two sakes, this had seemed like a plan.
They were waiting in line in front of Doge, ten-thirty at night, the mist coming in off the sea to insert itself in the alleys and make the pavement shine under the headlights of the slow-rolling traffic, when Deet-Deet interrupted his monologue about the faults and excesses of his ex long enough to light a cigarette and Bridger took the opportunity to lift his head and check out their prospects. This particular club was open to the street so that the pulse of the music and the jumpy erratic flash of the strobe leaked out onto the sidewalk where the prospective patrons could get a look in advance and decide whether it was worth the five-dollar cover charge. Bridger observed the usual mass of bodies swaying under the assault of the music (or of the bass, which was about all you could hear), limbs flung out and retracted, people decapitated by a slash of the strobe even as their heads were restored in the next instant, knees lifted, butts thumping, the same scenario that had played out the night before and would play out the next night and the night after that. His eyes throbbed. The sake sucked the moisture from his brain. He was about to tell Deet-Deet he was having second thoughts about the club, about any club, because he could feel a headache coming on and it was only Monday and they had to keep sight of the fact that they were required to be in by ten to paint out the wires on the interminable martial arts movie they’d been working on for the past three weeks, when he spotted Dana.
She was poised at the edge of the dance floor, right up against one of the big standing speakers, lifting and dropping her feet—her bare feet—to the pulse of the bass and working her elbows as if she were doing aerobics or climbing the StairMaster. Or maybe, somewhere in her mind, she was square dancing, do-si-do and swing your partner. Her eyes were closed tight. Her knees jerked and her feet rose and fell. The red filter caught her hair and set it afire.
“So what do you think, anything worthwhile?” Deet-Deet was saying. Deet-Deet was five foot four and a half inches tall, he was twenty-five years old and he affected the Goth style, despite the fact that most of the SFX world had long since moved on to a modified geek/Indie look. His real name was Ian Fleischer, but at Digital Dynasty people went by their online aliases only, whether they liked it or not. Bridger himself was known as “Sharper” because when he’d first started as a dust-buster, when he was earnest and committed and excited about the work they were doing, he was always hounding the Scan-Record people for sharper plates to clean. “Because I don’t know if I want to stay out too late,” Deet-Deet added, by way of elucidation, “and that sake, I think, is really starting to hit me. What do you mix with that, anyway—beer? Beer, I guess, right? Stick to beer?”
Bridger wasn’t listening. He was letting the lights trigger something inside him, allowing the music to seep in and transfigure his mood. The line moved forward—maybe ten people between him and the bouncer—and he moved with it. He had a new angle now—a new perspective from which to study this girl, this woman, heroically fighting her way against the music at the edge of the dance floor. Up came her knees, down went her fists, out swung her elbows. Her movements weren’t jerky or spastic or out of sync with the beat—or not exactly. It was as if she were attuned to some deeper rhythm, a counter-rhythm, some hidden matrix beneath the surface of the music that no one else—not the dancers, the DJ or the musicians who’d laid down the tracks—was aware of. It fascinated him. She fascinated him.
“Sharper? You with me?” Deet-Deet was gaping up at him like a child lost at the fair. “I was saying, I don’t know if I—you see anything worthwhile in there?” He raised himself up on his toes to get a better look. The music collapsed suddenly and then reassembled around the bass line of the next tune. “Her? Is that what you’re looking at?”
They were almost at the door, twenty-five or thirty people gathered behind them, the mist shining on everything now, on the streetlights, the palms, people’s hair.
Deet-Deet tried one last time: “You want to go in? Think it’s worth the five bucks tonight?”
It took him a moment, because he was distracted—or no, he was mesmerized. He’d been involved in two major relationships in his life, one in college and the one—with Melissa—that had died off three months ago with the sound of a tree falling in the woods when no one’s there to hear it. Something tugged at him, the irresistible force, an intuition that sparked across the eroded pan of his consciousness like the flash of the strobe. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “I’m going in.”
Now, as he pulled himself up out of the haze of recollection to see that the woman with the child had vaporized and the cop with the white sideburns had been replaced by a female with drooping, possibly sympathetic eyes, he got to his feet. What time was it? Past four. Radko would have a fit. He’d had a fit. He was having a fit now. Bridger had missed an entire afternoon at work just when the team needed him most—and what had he accomplished aside from having a nice nap at the public’s expense on a choice buttock-smoothed bench in the downtown San Roque Police Station? Nothing. Nothing at all. Dana was still locked up back there someplace and he was still here, clueless. He felt the irritation rise in him, a sudden spike of anger he could barely contain, and in order to calm himself he strode over to a display of pamphlets—How to Protect Yourself on the Street; How to Burglar-Proof Your Home; Identity Theft: What Is It?—and made a pretense of absorbing the sage information dispensed there. He gave it a moment, then casually turned to the desk.
“Hello,” he said, and the woman lifted her eyes from the form she was filling out. “My name’s Bridger Martin and I’ve been waiting here since just past eleven—in the morning—and I was just wondering if you could maybe help me…”
She said nothing, because why bother? He was a petitioner, a special pleader, a creature of wants and needs and demands, no different from the thousands of others who’d stood here before him, and he would get to the point in his own way and in his own time, she knew that. The prospect seemed to bore her. The counter and the computers and the walls and the floors and the lights bored her too—Bridger bored her. Her fellow officers. Her shoes, her uniform: everything was a bore and a trial, ritualized, clichéd, without beginning or end. Her eyes told him that, and they weren’t nearly as sympathetic as he’d thought, not up close, anyway. And her lips—her lips were tightly constricted, as if she were fighting some facial tic.
“It’s my—my girlfriend. She’s been arrested and we don’t really know why. I took the whole afternoon off from work just to come down here and”—this was movie dialogue and the phrase stuck to the roof of his mouth—“bail her out, but nobody knows what the bail is or even what the charges are?” He made a question of it, a plea.
She surprised him. Her lips softened. The humanity—the fellow-feeling and sympathy—came back into her eyes. She was going to help. She was going to help, after all. “Name?” she queried.
“Dana,” he said. “Dana Halter, H-a-l-t-e-r.”
She was hitting the keys even as he superfluously spelled out the name and he watched her face as she studied the screen. She was pretty for a middle-aged woman, or almost pretty, now that the vise of her mouth had come unclamped. But he wanted to be charitable, wanted to be helped, babied, led by the hand—she was beautiful, wielder of the sword of justice, radiant with truth. At least for the few seconds it took to bring up the information. Then she lost her animation and became less than pretty all over again. Her eyes were hard suddenly, her mouth small and bitter. “We don’t know what we’ve got here,” she said tersely, “—the charges are still coming in. And because of the Nevada thing, it looks like the Feds are going to be interested.”
“Nevada thing?”
“Interstate. Passing bad checks.”
“Bad checks?” he echoed in disbelief. “She never—” he began, and then caught himself. “Listen,” he said, “help me out here: what does it mean, because it’s obviously all a mistake, mistaken identity or something explicable like that. I just want to know when I can get her out on bail? And where do I go?”
The faintest flicker of amusement lifted the corners of her mouth. “She’s got no-bail holds in at least two counties because she walked in the past, which means I don’t see anything happening till Monday—”
“Monday?” he echoed, and it was almost a yelp, he couldn’t help himself.
A beat. Two. Then her lips were moving again: “At the earliest.”
Three
What People are Saying About This
[Boyle's] most exciting novel yet. (The Washington Post, front page review)
Reading Group Guide
INTRODUCTION
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.
ABOUT T.C. BOYLE
T. C. Boyle is the author of eleven novels, including World’s End (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award), Drop City (a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award), and The Inner Circle. His stories regularly appear in The New Yorker, GQ, The Paris Review, Playboy, and Esquire. A five-time recipient of the O. Henry Award, he holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Iowa and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Since 1978, he has taught in the English department at the University of Southern California.
A CONVERSATION WITH T.C. BOYLE
Q. Talk Talk is your first foray into thriller fiction. What attracted you to the genre? Do you have any plans on returning to it in the future?
A. I do not consider this “thriller fiction,” but rather just a thrilling read, like many of my stories and novels—the designation, I think, limits the reader’s expectations. Novels like Drop City and A Friend of the Earth are equally thrilling, as are many of my short stories, such as “Termination Dust” and “Killing Babies,” to name just a few. To my mind, the term “thriller” applies to books that focus on one level only—that of plot—while Talk Talk provides a rich subtext probing the question of what our identity is and how we know ourselves through language. It may be interesting to note that while most critics here saw The Tortilla Curtain as a socio-political novel, a number of critics in England called it a thriller. Amazing, no? It just goes to show you how limiting such designations can be.
Q. If I am not mistaken, Talk Talk is your first novel since World’s End set substantially in Westchester County, New York. Was there a particular reason you chose to return to the region of your upbringing for this novel?
A. Many of the characters in my novels and short stories hail from Peterskill, the fictional town I’ve created as a stand in for Peekskill (on the Hudson), where I was born and raised. Peterskill remains at the heart of my fiction, no matter where the stories take me, and I find comfort in returning to it whenever I can. Peck Wilson, like Tyrone Tierwater of A Friend of the Earth—like me—is a stranger in a strange land out here on the West Coast. No matter how long I live in California or how closely I am identified with its society and landscape, I will always see it slightly askew—that is, from the perspective of an Easterner, born and bred. I like the tension this slight disassociation lends to my work.
Q. As some critics have remarked, in its satire of the American dream Talk Talk shares much with your novel The Tortilla Curtain, first published in 1995. Has your opinion of the American dream changed since you wrote The Tortilla Curtain? Do you think the dream has changed?
A. What, exactly, is the American Dream and how do you prove it has come true (or failed) in your own life? I am a product of this dream, if you take it to mean that in a democracy such as ours social mobility is possible, that if you work hard enough and have the talent and education, you can succeed at what you put your mind to. All well and good. But for many—immigrants, especially, but also native-born Americans like Peck Wilson—the outward show of prosperity is all that matters. We are sold product from the day we are born till the day we die and the majority of ads imply that without one shining new thing or another we are somehow lesser people and woefully unfulfilled. It is easy to mistake the object for the reality. Dana’s dream, like Peck’s, is to be accepted in the larger society—or not simply accepted, but admired. And yet she goes about it in the old-fashioned way, working compulsively to overcome her difference and succeed on her own terms. Peck, with his narcissistic (sociopathic) personality, sees no reason to bother, when the fruit is there for the picking and the show is all.
Q. The ending of Talk Talk clearly upsets the conventions of thriller fiction. Why did you choose to create, then frustrate, that desire for revenge that runs through the novel?
A. Well, of course, for one thing I do not adhere to convention—I want always to surprise myself and, by extension, my readers. I do think, however, that some readers, in the mad, page-turning rush of this novel—breathing hard, ignoring the telephone—might just miss the subtlety and appropriateness of the ending of the Dana/Peck story. If this is a book that explores what it is to identify oneself—through language, as Dana does in a different way from hearing people and that Victor, the wild child, is never able to do—then it may be significant to think about the fact that the ending builds to the only moment of verbal communication between the antagonists. What do you want? Yes, and you can almost hear the waters rushing into that gulf. How could anyone put it into words?
Q. A question about the novel’s literary forebears. William Peck Wilson, the novel’s villain and double, is an allusion to Poe. Dana’s reciting of Poe’s “Annabel Lee” (the name of a character in Nabokov’s Lolita) then connects it to Lolita, another detective road novel, as it were, involving a doppelganger. Finally, Bridger Martin seems to reflect the eponymous hero of William Golding’s Pincher Martin, a character like Bridger with a skewed sense of reality. Could you talk briefly about these or any other literary works that influenced the writing of the novel?
A. Nice observation. Yes, I was, of course, referring to Poe’s doppelganger story and did have Nabokov’s Lolita in mind to a certain degree—not totally, but rather for its playfulness (which will be reflected much more fully in my next novel) and the fact that it is a classic American road novel, as you’ve stated.
Q.Your portrayal of Dana’s condition is very convincing. How much research did you conduct beforehand? Have you received any feedback from the deaf community about the book?
A. Once I discovered that Dana would be deaf, the whole book opened up for me in the way I’ve discussed above: we are our language and Dana’s language is very different from ours, a visuo-spatial language rather than an auditory one, and so she is more protective of her identity even than we might be. I had the great good fortune to be able to go to Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., and meet with the students there while writing this book. I was also assisted by a friend who went deaf later in life and who has become an advocate of cochlear implants. I have indeed heard (listen to the prejudicial verb) from several people in the deaf community who felt that my portrayal was accurate and that it brought out some of their own feelings on the issue of their difference.
Q. Like Ned Rise in your early novel Water Music, Peck Wilson is a talented, resourceful, and lawless entrepreneur. Could you share your observations about the novelistic appeal of such characters? What is it that draws you to personae like these?
A. I am fascinated by this sort of personality. It is the same personality most novelists are saddled with, as were the real-life figures upon whom I’ve based past novels, Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey (The Inner Circle) and John Harvey Kellogg (The Road to Wellville). This is a personality type—narcissistic—which can help one focus on a given project in a very positive and compelling way, but which also, at its worst, does not allow empathy for anyone. That is, such figures, whether they be gurus, politicians, preachers or what have you, gather people to them only in pursuit of their own agenda. They cannot see any point of view but their own (and the ability to use point of view is what saves novelists from entering the realm of the casually evil, like Peck). What I like about Peck is his obliviousness. He doesn’t see himself as a bad guy, but rather just someone atop the Darwinian heap and fully welcome to all society’s rewards.
Q. Have the movie rights have been optioned for Talk Talk? You’ve seen at least one film adaptation before with The Road to Wellville. Does the idea of another film adaptation of one of your books fill you with excitement or trepidation?
A. Excitement, mais oui! All that color, that movement, the music, those faces!
I am happy to report that the movie rights were sold before the book was released. Universal Pictures has assigned a director, Gary Fleder, who has made several intriguing and fast-paced films (dare I call them thrillers without damning myself?) in the past. Many short films have been made of my work, with mixed results, and one major Hollywood film, The Road to Wellville, which I loved. I still think it’s one of the funniest movies ever made, very nearly ascending to the great height of The Big Lebowski, the apex of all funny movies. There are a number of films based on my stories and novels in the works, which I try to keep updated on tcboyle.com for any who may be interested.
Since I don’t participate in film work in any way—my job is to create fiction on the page and if I had nineteen lifetimes I don’t think I would ever get enough of it— I simply trust to the filmmakers and hope for the best.
Q. What are you working on now?
A. As I mentioned above, Nabokov has influenced my latest, especially his magical Pale Fire. As of this writing—in June of 2007—I am nearly finished with this book, another historical setting built around another of my egomaniacal (yes, and quintessentially narcissistic) real-life heroes, Frank Lloyd Wright. The book is called The Women, and it is written for the most part from the points of view of the four principal women in the architect’s life, as filtered, in a Nabokovian way, through a narrator who provides introductions to each of the three sections and a footnoted commentary throughout. He is an invented character named Tadashi Sato, who, in my telling, was one of Wright’s apprentices at Taliesin in the 1930s. I’m enjoying the opportunity to revisit Japanese culture, which I haven’t explored since 1990’s East Is East, and, with good conscience, eating plenty of sushi (or maybe with bad conscience, considering the global-warming and mass-extinction revelations of A Friend of the Earth). I should say too that the book is very, very funny, albeit necessarily tragic in the end.
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