In his novels and short stories, T.C. Boyle has focused on the flip sides of the American Dream. Heads, you get to reinvent yourself as whomever you want, to turn fantasies into riches, to shuck off the past and start over, tabula rasa. Tails, you find yourself circling the drain, rootless and confused, caught in a downward spiral of failure and disappointment and subject to the worst sort of paranoid nightmares.
In his propulsive but ultimately disappointing new novel, Talk Talk, Boyle fashions these two sides of the coin into a single story. It is a story about identity theft, featuring the victim of the crime — a lovely, strong-willed deaf woman named Dana Halter — and the thief of her good name: a high-living lowlife named Peck Wilson, who's on the run from his former wife and a stint in prison. Their story, told in chapters that alternate between each one’s point of view, is funny, engaging, and suspenseful, and sadly undermined by a forced, slap-dash ending that feels as if it had been grafted on at the last minute in a desperate effort to find some way of bringing this novel to a close.
As in so many of Boyle's stories, an Ahab-like obsession comes to afflict his two central characters, pushing them both into dangerous territory and threatening to destroy all that they have come to hold dear: their relationships with their significant others, their careers, their peace of mind.
When Dana is arrested and jailed — on grounds that she is wanted in several states for crimes that her doppelgaenger, Peck, has committed — she becomes enraged at the theft of her identity. And things soon go from bad to worse: She loses her job as a teacher, finds herself being dunned by bill collectors for past-due accounts she’s never opened, and is refused credit cards she’s never applied for.
"Identity takeover," a victims' assistance counselor explains to Dana. "It's when somebody becomes a second you — lives as you, under your name, for months, sometimes years. And if they live quietly and don't get in trouble with the law, they might never be detected.”
It soon becomes clear that the government and the credit agencies aren't going to do much about Peck or his scam, and Dana and her devoted boyfriend, Bridger Martin, set out to find the identity thief themselves. "Revenge, that was what she wanted," Boyle writes of Dana. "To make him hurt the way she did. Only that." The two make their way to northern California and decide to stake out Peck's house.
Meanwhile, Peck, a former restaurateur with a terrible temper, has been living large off Dana's and other people's credit cards. His Russian girlfriend, Natalia, has become accustomed to pricey meals and designer clothes, and Peck, who hasn’t even told her who he really is, flies into a rage when he realizes that Dana and Bridger are on to him. He decides to drop his identity as Dana Halter and adopt a new one: that of Bridger Martin. He also vows to get revenge on Dana for disrupting his pampered, if larcenous, existence.
Using his gift for manic invention and freewheeling, hyperventilated prose, 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.
Whereas some of the author’s earlier stories have substituted comic pratfalls for felt emotion, he manages here to mix clever narrative pyrotechnics with real character development. He not only depicts Dana as an intriguing, conflicted, and genuinely likable heroine, but also succeeds in making Peck an oddly engaging character, too: selfish, heedless, and dangerous, but not entirely unsympathetic. In fact, as the two become increasingly obsessed with avenging themselves, they slowly morph into mirror images of each other: two Danas, fueled by anger and resentment, and willing to do almost anything to achieve their goals.
Having put the real Dana and the phony Dana on a collision course, Boyle unfortunately bails on the reader at the last moment: Either he was unable to think of a plausible — or satisfying — ending, or he was in such a rush to finish his story that he simply tacked on the first scenario that came to mind. In any case, it's a sorry and pallid conclusion to what might have been one of this gifted writer’s more winning novels.
Publishion Notes:
TALK TALK
By T.C. Boyle
340 pages
Viking
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