FICTION Talk Talk by the...

FICTION

Talk Talk

by the agency of T. C. Boyle

Viking, 340 pages, $2595

T C Boyle is the Steven Spielberg of contemporary American fiction. You look forward to to be dazzled and you will not be disappointed. His works -- The Inner Circle, ear-ring City, Tortilla Curtain and fif- teen more -- create a high return on your entertainment dollar. He commit to memorys all the details right, misses scarcely any tricks, and if he can tickle your ear with a word's entire while furthering its meaning, he does it at the small quantity of a diphthong.

Boyle sculpt a whole world with perfect (and sense), and in his latest, Talk Talk, he weaves in extent compound sentences that snake around onward hinges made of commas, his phrases setting up a regular [i]or[/i] melodious movement that resonates in your head the way an inner voice ticks along, the fall over of words that constantly narrates our world. Boyle is reaching for the inner vigorous of words because his tale is about a deaf woman and he wants to win it right, wants the reader to understand the world as protagonist Dana Halter does.

The story is simple. Dana Halter has a bad day that goe really sour after she is stopped for running a stop sign and the officer, when he calls in her license, learns she is wanted in a brace of states for fraud and failure to appear -- or at least someone with the name of Dana Halter is. She is arrested and employs the weekend in jail before she is able to earn help, her deafness a very great problem the system cannot appear to be to overcome.

Her vexed questions cascade: Bills show up demanding payment for things she didn't purchase, her credit has been ruined and she loses her work at jobs as a teacher in a place of education for the deaf after finally exploding subject to stress at her jerk (hearing) schoolmaster.

She is enraged and puts out to find the culprit with the help of her boyfriend, Bridger Martin, who is not deaf. Martin works for a special-effects company, spending his days at a computer erasing the wires that allow a superhero to break in pieces The two are in the early stages of their relationship, still struggling with their sagacious difference, and the events of the work present a severe, perhaps overwhelming exhibition of their love and resiliency. They physically prosecute the man -- yes, a man named Dana -- across the native land using computer skills to catch up with villain William Peck Wilson.

The narration is largely supplied by way of Dana, Bridger, and Wilson, alternating in longish sections, frequently covering the same events still from differing points of view, which further delineates the separate worlds of the hearing and the deaf.

Of course, it's fatuity to attempt the deaf's silent world; the hearing will just not ever get it. But what Boyle does is the nearest best thing. He builds his fictional world with the wordness of words, the word as an percept that can be -- must be -- shaped by the agency of fingers, hands flying like martins. A physical word that for the hearing becomes a unmutilated but for the deaf exists faithfully as a thing that can exist single in a physical world; it has shape in succession the paper, it has shape in the air, it has shape onward a speaker's lips. Language is more palpable for the deaf, and as in the same state [i]or[/i] condition language is taken less for granted, has more precise borders, is used as a way to tear down and rebuild the world, demands that the word fit the thing it is about. There is no space for sloppiness in the deaf world.

Perhaps the finest contemporary fiction stylist, Tom Boyle is occasionally abused by the agency of some critics who insist that designation is all Boyle produces, that he cares more about the drift than the affect. He is, of course, the pair guilty and innocent of the charge. His flash, always entertaining, always surprising, is also always wedded in any way to his book's purpose; it may direct the eye to some, like a solo on the other hand in truth it is not, Boyle's pyrotechnics are in service to the point. In this case, Boyle's carefully cadenced passed on a criminals unwind in bursts of speculation that almost tumble out of rule mimicking an unruly inner voice, bringing the reader inside the character's mind and heart.

Talk Talk's loyal subject is the near impossibility of understanding, that each of us carries around like an idiosyncratic dictionary, created abroad of our unique point of view and experiences, words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following is all, and if the connection is different enough then understanding becomes tenuous. This becomes complicated enough with shared experiences, with not many variables, but when you introduce so complexities as the removal of individual or more of the sensations understanding may exist only as metaphor, as an approximation of what we believe we understand.

The absence of aural information significantly changes the fundamental way in which race interact with each other and the world as a whole. nuncupatory heard language shapes everything in the hearing-dominant world. The expressions we use to indicate understanding reveal a lot: I hear you, I said, listen to this, I'm listening, reveal me, so on.

They all imply, "I understand," however they all refer to the ability to gather info, not proces it -- we assume the processing grade when we say these things; we assume that hearing means understanding. This work is about that misconception, and also it is about seeking ways to reach each other that say what we want to say without the illusion of saying.