Talk Talk

Not Boyle's Best

Here's a bad sign: The most compelling scene in Talk Talk , T. C. Boyle's new chase novel, is the first, in which Dana Halter, a deaf schoolteacher, is stopped for a routine traffic violation only to be arrested, jailed, and generally brutalized for outstanding warrants run up by an identity thief. Halter is so defenseless that her life quickly liquefies -- job lost, finances ruined. Sympathy is a heady tonic, and the truth is, you do feel, in those first 15 pages, that this could happen to anyone, especially you. You make a note: Visit Staples. Buy shredder. The idea of Dana Halter chasing Dana Halter has the makings of a postmodern house of mirrors -- at least until the thief quickly sheds Halter's name, abandoning with it Boyle's typical authorial puzzle and any sense of palpable predicament. What ensues is a soggy, spiritless chase from West Coast to East, Boyle examining the social slights that make life for deaf people so difficult along the way. In the end, ironically, it's the thief's loss that we care about, not Halter's. That might be Boyle's point. But if so, it's also the fleshiest, most intriguing crime in the book.

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