SNOBS AND WETBACKS

By John Skow

T.Coraghessan Boyle is an overpraised novelist with an unpleasant habit of sneering at his own cardboard characters. Some writers can carry this off, some can't. Aldous Huxley adopted a toplofty attitude toward his creatures, but he had the intellectual force to transform snobbery into satire. Among current novelists, Martin Amis lacks intellectual force but is well supplied with nastiness, which occasionally resembles humor. Boyle merely sounds as if he needs an antacid.

His new 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 a $20 bill, is an infiltrator.

That's true. Candido and his pregnant 17-year-old wife, decent folk down on their luck, huddle in a makeshift camp in the canyon and climb out every morning to find work at a labor exchange. But the sight of hungry Mexicans spooks Kyra's clients, and she sees to it that the exchange is shut. Delaney's liberal beliefs crumble, and he votes with other residents to build a wall, with a gate, around their development. The author, mistrusting his skill and the reader's acuteness, relentlessly flashes irony alerts. Candido gets work constructing the wall, knowing well enough whom it is intended to keep out. Coyotes eat the nature writer's lapdogs, Osbert and Sacheverell. And when a mud slide sweeps Delaney toward mucky death, let there be no doubt whose brown, work-worn hand reaches to pull him free. This is weak, obvious stuff, worth a raised eyebrow and a shrug.

--J.S.