Dimensions
129 x 198 x 21mm
Until he hit the shabby Mexican pedestrian with his freshly-waxed Japanese car, Delaney Mossbacher's liberal humanist values were as unblemished as his driving record. But Delaney did not report this accident. Nor did he take Candido Rincon to hospital.
He gave the badly injured man just $20 before returning to his tasteful fortress of Californian privilege. Arroyo Blanco Estates. Anyway, it could have just been one of those reckless scams to touch the gringo for insurance pay-offs or handouts, thought Delaney. Yet he could not get the image of Candido out of his mind.
Meanwhile the Mexican staggered down into Topanga Canyon where he and his pregnant seventeen-year-old wife America were living rough like wild animals she thought when their bad luck got too bad. They yearned only to get the casual daily work unpredictably available to illegals and to avoid La Migra the Immigration until one day they too could have a real house in a real neighbourhood with laws and respect and human dignity.
Boyle shifts unforgettably between these two camps: between Candido's and America's makeshift dwelling of dirty-stream bathing, open-fire tortillas and raw survival, and Arroyo Blanco, where Delaney writes his environmental column "Wide Open Spaces" about the joys of rural California, while ironically he and his community are building a seven-foot wall to keep out immigrants as surely as the wild coyote - and the spaces no longer seem very wide open at all.
While the natural disasters and the politics of this novel are Californian, as in Steinbeck, the dramatic emotional truths and humanity of the message are universal.
