Obsession In T. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain

In T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain Kyra’s generally apathetic in her personal life, but her world turns upside down after the dramatic loss of her beloved pets as she tries to prevent more loss. From a property moving machine to a wistful sentimental, Kyra’s work suffered from her grieving state. While showing a house far from the hustle and bustle of city life and even apart from the suburbs she was, “not herself at all…she had never felt this way about a house before…cushioned from the hot, dry, hard-driving world…she began to feel it was hers”(110). The distance of this house from the dangers of the city and even Arroyo Blanco make Kyra wistful towards owning this behemoth of a house. In trying to protect what she has left Kyra endangers her relationships.

When Kyra was in the middle of telling Delaney how she was helping to prompt the building of the wall, “she was leaning forward now, belligerent, angry, channeling it all into this feckless naïve unrealistic impossible man sitting across the table from her” (226).

The discussion turned from an explanation to an all-out hate and blame match in which Kyra proceeds to blame her husband, Delaney for all her recent and traumatic troubles with nature because his entire focus and obsession is with experiencing and understanding nature to an extent of explaining it to another through writing which requires an extremely in depth knowledge therefor symbolizing nature, her current foe. In her quarrel with the symbol of her aggression she jeopardizes her relationship with her husband, Delaney. After her personal security is threatened by a distinct racial group, Kyra begins to profile and subtlety discriminate against Mexicans. On her way to a house showing Kyra crosses the path of the labor exchange an is astonished at the current number of “Mexicans looking for work…there’d never been more than a hand full of

them. Now there must have been fifty of more…there were too many of them here” (l6l). If it was a group of white people rather than Mexicans whom congregated near her path she would not have went to the lengths of getting them removed, in more plain terms getting immigration called to do a sweep of the area for illegal Mexican immigrants, and the property repossessed so that from her perspective she secured her own security and the security of her source of income. Kyra changed because of grief and fear which caused her to make some poor choices like wanting to sequester herself from supposed danger through questionably effective means, jeopardizing Delaney and her relationship, and discriminating against Mexicans.