Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
T.C. Boyle's Talk Talk starts off fast and never lets go -- and that's fun.
Consider the opening. Dana Halter, 33, is running late for a dentist's appointment. She can't find her keys. She can't find her sunglasses, which are lost in a "snarl of jewelry" on the bureau (perfect word: snarl).
No toast, no orange juice, only lukewarm coffee.
Once out of the house, she comes to a stop sign, quickly figures out the coast is clear, makes a feint of stopping and proceeds. Except there is a cop ahead.
Now, consider this. Dana Halter is deaf. She is a high school English teacher, with a Ph.D. in English/American studies; her thesis was on Edgar Allan Poe.
She's the summa cum laude of propriety. But she never gets to the dentist that morning. Instead, she lands in jail.
The charges are really bad, the pits. She's arrested on an assortment of low-life activities: passing bad checks, auto theft, assault and, oh, yes, failure to appear in court.
It takes one infuriating weekend for the truth to come out. Someone has stolen Dana Halter's identity and is ruining her credit and her name. Once she's out of jail, Dana and her boyfriend, Bridger, decide to hunt down and capture this thief. And so they set off in her modest black Jetta, all innocence and determination.
And who might the thief be? He's someone pretending to be Dr. Dana Halter, the Ph.D. morphed into a medical degree. This guy is so full of himself that he could be in The Sopranos. Let's put it this way: If you were to steal and max out other people's credit cards, shouldn't you be living the good life, the bon vivant of the Western world?
In the middle of this cross-country chase, the nice Dana Halter works on a novella, Wild Child, about a boy who lives in the wild and can't speak. (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern published the 78-page Wild Child -- which Boyle wrote but does not include in Talk Talk -- in the March No. 19 spring issue; store.mcsweeneys.net.)
In Talk Talk, Boyle once again delivers an entertaining story with his usual laser commentary -- about the way we identify ourselves and the role language plays.
He brings his sweeping embrace of exotic words and images -- a "bolus of hatred," "sere wind," "etiolated little kernel" of a child's face -- that readers have come to expect. It is a bonus with his writing: Beyond the plot is this underworld of fanciful words, at the ready to send a reader straight to Webster's.
Talk Talk
By T.C. Boyle
Viking, 340 pp., $25.95
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
