Word: mexicans
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...After that start, the narration wafts aloft into further elegant absurdity, as follows: "Known throughout south Texas as the Great Western, she came walking up from the muddy Rio Grande holding a big snapping turtle by the tail. Matilda was almost as large as the skinny little Mexican mustang Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call were trying to saddle-break...
...McCrae, too young and foolish to know better, short on everything except energy and ignorance, have joined a ragtag outfit called the Rangers, less a military force than a band of hungry looters, commanded by a puffing, self-anointed general. This faker has heard about Santa Fe, then a Mexican settlement, but does not know where it is. Nor does anyone else. Nevertheless, they set out to capture the town and live happily ever after...
Instead the Rangers are overwhelmed by Mexican soldiers, and the survivors reach Santa Fe in chains after an agonizing mountain trek. The novel's plan is not much different, in fact, from that of Lonesome Dove or Streets of Laredo: an incredibly difficult journey that no prudent soul would have undertaken, with a psychopathic Comanche (Blue Duck in Lonesome Dove, Buffalo Hump here) skulking in the shadows to pick off stragglers...
...novel, The Tortilla Curtain (Viking; 355 pages; $23.95), botches a good theme: the shuddering distaste of California's patio-living Anglos for the Mexican illegals who perform the state's stoop labor. His pale hero is Delaney, a nature writer who has moved with his wife Kyra, a real estate shark, to a housing development above Topanga Canyon. Delaney is not just politically correct, he's politically exquisite, but when a Mexican man, Candido, blunders in front of his white Acura on a canyon road, his reaction is angry revulsion: the wounded wet back, to whom he gives...
...overpraised novelist with an unpleasant habit of sneering at his own cardboard characters," writes criticJohn Skow. Some writers can carry this off; Boyle definitely can't. His new novel (Viking; 355 pages; $23.95) has possibilities in its discussion of the shuddering distaste of California's Anglos for the Mexican illegals who perform the state's stoop labor. But the author mistrusts his skill and the reader's acuteness. "This is weak, obvious stuff," says Skow, "worth a raised eyebrow and a shrug...