Talk Talk Review

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Talk Talk ReviewWith TALK TALK, his eleventh novel, T.C. Boyle has constructed another literate, thoughtful page-turner. The protagonist is Dana Halter, an independent, feisty, attractive woman in her early 30s. She teaches school, enjoys an occasional evening out at loud nightclubs, and has a younger boyfriend named Bridger Martin who adores her. In short, she's a normal, responsible young woman who also happens to be profoundly deaf. The problem is that apparently there's another Dana Halter out there, as she discovers when she's arrested after running a stop sign. This other Dana Halter passes bad checks in multiple states with her driver's license number, her social security number. And this Dana Halter has skipped bail twice. So despite Bridger's best efforts, Dana spends a humiliating, uncomfortable weekend in the San Roque county jail.
"Dana Halter" is only one of the identities that the antagonist Peck Wilson has collected in the years since he was released from prison in New York State. As the book opens, Peck lives as Dr. Dana Halter in a Marin County waterfront condo furnished with nothing but the best for his kitchen (he's a very gourmet sociopath) and his bed (a Russian beauty named Natalia.) He is an old hand at identity theft and manages them carefully, wringing them almost dry before moving on and covering his tracks.
When the real Dana is finally released from jail, she finds that the authorities aren't overly concerned with prosecuting this so-called victimless crime. It's up to her and Bridger to retrieve her impounded car and field phone calls from irate creditors. But Bridger acquires the thief's cell phone number from one such creditor and makes contact. Peck, wanting to cut his losses, informs the wary Natalia that his name is not Dana after all, and trades in her BMW Z4 on a wine-colored Mercedes S500 for their escape from town. Thus begins a cat-and-mouse, Jetta vs. Mercedes chase across the continent that culminates in a final showdown of sorts at a train station in Peck's hometown of Peterskill, New York.
The plot packs a wallop matched by Boyle's inventive language and multi-faceted, believable characters. Dana's "handicap" has made her tough and stubborn; we see the tremendous effort it takes to make herself understood, and how frustrated she gets when she can't. Bridger has learned to sign and she reads lips, but under the fatigue and uncertainty they face, sometimes communication between them breaks down. The thief, Peck, wears his sense of entitlement as naturally and easily as his Italian suits, and in the long stretches of narrative from his point of view, we are equally fascinated and repulsed by his absolute disregard for anyone but himself. Natalia, who he thinks he loves, is really just another fine possession, more complicated than a car perhaps, but manageable by charming lies or threatening fury.
T.C. Boyle is in fine fettle here. He can linger on a character's momentary interior state for a page and a half without boring us, because he can also cover a few days effectively in a single paragraph. Boyle's cleverness makes us smile. "At the impound yard --- CASH OR CREDIT ONLY NO CHECKS --- they waited in line for twenty minutes while the people in front of them put on a demonstration of the limits and varieties of hominid rage." And his incisive similes keep us firmly in a character's head. Here is Peck in an ecstatic mood: "Then it was back down what had to be one of the most scenic highways in the world, the road sliced right out of the side of the mountain like a long abdominal suture holding the two pieces together, and the view had never seemed so exotic to him, sailboats on the river like clean white napkins on a big blue tablecloth, the light portioning out the sky in pillars of fire."
TALK TALK succeeds because it ponders the mysteries of identity and communication while seducing the reader with that most primal of motives: revenge. Will Dana have it, and if she does, what will it cost her? Or will the wily Peck slip under the radar once again?
--- Reviewed by Eileen Zimmerman Nicol
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