Talk Talk

Loved this book, the first one I've read by T.C. Boyle recommended by my sister, who owns a bookstore (Books N Bears in Florence, OR). The first chapter or so I was kind of annoyed by his use of words I had to look up. But he did less of that as the story progressed (so why do it at all? I kept

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wondering). It was the kind of narrative where you could kind of guess where it was going (foreshadowing), but not exactly!

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This was a good story of a deaf woman and her boyfriend dealing with identify theft. As is common in books like this, the criminal is the most interesting character, but Boyle does a good job of fleshing out the woman and her boyfriend as well. I listened to this in the audio book version, which is

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greatly enhanced by Boyle's own performance of the story. Calling it "reading" would be to do him an injustice. He could make a living reader other people's books if he had to!

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Not one of Boyle's best but still good. Boyle keeps the story moving but it sort of peters out at the end. The identity theft scammer is drawn more vividly than the deaf victim.

A computer tech guy and a deaf girl who both have their identities stolen by an ex-con. They are incensened and go to all limits to stop him.

Dana is deaf but her boyfriend isn't. But Dana is also the victim of identity theft. Peck Wilson steals Dana's identity and she and her boyfriend, Bridger decide to chase him across the country. The plot was interesting, but not very believable, and there was something very detached about the

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characters that made me feel like I wasn't really a part of their world.

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The plot begins with real punch, and the vilain is a true sociopath, an individual with no empathy towards others. Boyle's writing is powerful and decriptive. All good stuff. However, in spite of all its positives, Talk, Talk lost its momentum somewhere during the protagonist's road trip across the

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States ("somewhere in the middle of Montana" to quote a possibly familiar song).

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This was the first Boyle with a plot for me and it was also the weakest. I don’t think he knows what to do when there is a goal to accomplish. He got sidetracked by trying to build characters (all of whom had anger issues) and then when he remembered about plot, it felt tacked-on and not very

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well thought-out. The cord of the story is supposed to be taut, but it gets too much slack in its line and tension and angst fall. The situation is frightening and the attitude of Peck is so appalling that Boyle should have had an easy time of keeping the reader fully engaged, but he loses us and that makes the terrible ending somehow easier to bear. We were cheated out of payback, but somehow we knew all along we wouldn’t get it.

There were some interesting insights into being deaf, though. The difference going deaf after learning language skills makes. How and when to play the deaf card. How it is sometimes not so hard to ‘pass’ and how at other times it is impossible. How little difference it made to Bridger.

And the aspect of total identity theft was frightening as well. I’m sure my base identifiers have been compromised a ton of times in my life as others’ have as well. It’s a wonder there isn’t a lot more of this kind of thing. There is insurance for it though, so maybe it is. Very scary though and Boyle did a good job of reflecting the anger and helplessness that comes with being a victim of this kind of crime. Dana had some remarkably unsympathetic people in her life though; I can’t believe that real people would be so hard and heap on insult after injury. But I suppose that’s what makes it a novel.

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While I enjoyed this book and the theme is a current concern, the main character's actions seemed a bit unbelievable. The average person facing identity theft generally doesn't quit everything and chase down the thief.

*SPOILER*
I was so enraged by the end of this book that I would've tossed it out the window of my car (I listened to the audio version) and run it over a few times had it not been a library book. This had to be the most unsatisfying ending I've EVER encountered. Yes, I realize good doesn't always

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win, but for Chrissakes TC...can you give us something besides having Bridger (what a dumb name!) paste his and Dana's images on one of the computer-generated monsters? I was so enraged at having 11 hours wasted...I'm sure reading Bobsey Twins books by the dozens would have been more intellectually fulfilling.
One positive: (And I do mean the ONLY positive) he makes a great statement on how heartless our justice system is in this country.

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A page-turner and a thriller about a deaf woman, her loyal boyfriend, and the social parasite who steals both their identities. This was a truly engrossing and frightening story, but the slap-dash ending feels as if it was grafted on at the last minute.

A deaf woman's identity is stolen and she goes on a road trip to try and find the perp who ruined her life. Well plotted and exciting to the somewhat unsatisfying, but fully plausible ending.

Alternating between narrators..Dana and Peck. Peck materialistic 'whore. ..addicted to buying things.
Boyle addresses why we want acceptance and how we attain it. Peck has alife where people believe in him - successful, excellent taste- underneath he is a fraud. Dana remains torn between accepting

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her deafness and wanting others to do the same and yet gets angry when she can't camouflage it in a way that amkes others think she si jsutlike them. About fear, identity . Funny. addresses issues of prejudice and communicationa s wella s identity. Addresses why we want acceptance and how we go about attaining it. All too often we abse our identitiy on the way others view us when our human instincts tell us otherwise. Whether we're deaf or defeated it doesn't chnge the fact that our identitiy remains a crucial part of our life and when its altered in any way we become vulnerable, leaving one's faith in humainity to see each of us for who we really are

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Great read, topical theme. A deaf teacher is the victim of identity theft, which drags her and her boyfriend into a cross-continental pursuit of the fraudster.

Odd story about a deaf woman and her boyfriend who experience identity theft and chase down the perpetrator. But the story is told cinematic style, and though we're inside the characters, we're not that far inside. It's as if we're looking at them from a distancing distance. And the ending is a

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letdown.

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This is a great book, and reminded me why I like T.C. Boyle so much. I started out listening to this book during my commute, but it got so engrossing, I couldn't wait for the commute, and finished reading it at home. This is fast-paced, with interesting characters, and a relevant contemporary plot.

An entertaining novel, very contemporary, dealing with identity theft. There are three main characters, a deaf woman whose identity is stolen, her boyfriend who is not deaf, and the man who steals their identities. There are exciting encounters, a chase across the country, and plenty of rage and

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anger by all parties. It's almost a thriller - only the ending is anti climatic, although not disappointing. Another excellent novel by T.C. Boyle.

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For the first time I read a T.C Boyle book with characters I could relate too and which I liked. It's about identity theft from a deaf woman's point of view. Not only is the idea of getting your identity stolen really scary, also the consequences can be pretty brutal. Add to that the bureaucracy

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and inflexibility of the justice system, a handicap that makes it difficult to communicate and general helplessness towards the whole situation. Reading the book made me angry. It was difficult to put down but also scary to continue.

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The beginning of the book felt claustrophobic, like a frustration dream -- deaf girl imprisoned because of mistaken identity, unable to communicate. I thought it was going to be a dark and disturbing story and I almost put it down. Gradually it morphed into a less chaotic and conventional

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"thriller"-type book. I eventually got into the plot and wanted to see how everything turned out. But the book was ultimately unsatisfying. How to describe it....unimportant? trivial? What was the big idea, the point? Maybe there was some deep message involving communication that i missed. One of the main characters was deaf, and then there's the title, which refers to how normal, hearing people seem to blabber away to deaf people. I read "World's End" long ago, and I remember that book being powerful and entrancing. This book felt light and insubstantial.

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Like him or not, you can’t call T. Coraghessan Boyle lazy. Talk Talk, his 2006 novel about Dana Halter, a deaf woman who’s had her identity stolen and the resultant single-minded attempt to confront the man who did it, was his 11th novel since 1982’s Water Music. Coupled with the eight

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collections of short stories he had out at the time, that’s a lot of pages. For most of those pages, Boyle has shown himself to be a consummate wordsmith whose plots are always conveyed with an artisan’s sense of shade and nuance and a prankster’s sense of the ridiculous.

Talk Talk starts out like it had been shot out of a cannon, and Boyle adeptly conveys Halter’s headlong crash into the brick wall of a jaded and overworked judicial system. From the time she leaves the house, Halter is behind the eight ball, and we are barely hanging on, along for the ride: She was running late, always running late, a failing of hers, she knew it, but then she couldn’t find her purse and once she did manage to locate it (underneath her blue corduroy jacket on the coat tree in the front hall), she couldn’t find her keys.

We quickly learn what Halter is made of—she still worked harder than anyone she knew, driving herself with an internal whip that kept all her childhood wounds open and grieving in the flesh—when she is thrown in jail after a traffic stop reveals a veritable litany of bad behavior. None of it, of course, has anything to do with her. The real her.

Up until this point, the book is a horrifying trip through a Kafkaesque nightmare of identity theft, incarceration, and the painful aftermath of both. Boyle shows how tenuous our grip on the information we rely on to define ourselves can be in the modern, data-driven era. Boyle further plays with the concept of identity by giving Halter’s nemesis everything that she has worked for her whole life. Deep down, she has always only ever wanted to belong.

The other Dana Halter, a sociopath who started out as William Wilson, is accepted by the well-heeled Marin County society with whom he rubs elbows. Whether shopping with his Russian immigrant girlfriend, cooking up gourmet dinners in his Sausalito condo overlooking the bay, or going out to the best restaurants his attitude is—they knew him here—everybody knew him—and if there was a line of tourists or whoever, they always seated him the minute he walked in the door. Which was the way it should be. His money was good, he tipped large … and his girlfriend was a knockout—they should have paid him just to sit at the bar.

Halter soon sleuths Wilson out and enlists her somewhat immature boyfriend Bridger Martin into a half-baked scheme to find and confront the guy. Martin is not the vigilante type—all his life he’d cruised along … living a video existence, easy in everything and never happier than when he was sunk into the couch wit a DVD or spooned into a plush seat in the theater with the opening credits rolling—but he rises to the occasion, putting his job as a digital effects jockey and, ultimately, his life on the line.

Wilson, however, is more like Halter than either would ever care to admit. Both of them have a chip on their shoulder the size of a stolen BMW Z4, and both are tenacious as hell—Wilson puts as much sheer determination and willpower into maintaining his farcical life as Halter, or anyone, puts into their real ones. Boyle often enjoys giving his anti-heroes the choicest parts, the most glamorous lives; in Talk Talk, he seems to enjoy tossing even that convention on its head. Wilson’s living the good life, but he doesn’t seem to be enjoying it any more than Halter enjoyed mixing with the drunks and prostitutes in the county lockup. The two have finally found, in each other, the perfect foils to blame for their insecurities and frustrations and Martin and Wilson’s girlfriend Natalia get dragged into the maelstrom.

After a cross-country chase that places the two principals back at the mercy of their respective mothers, Boyle seems to falter and becomes unwilling to bring the hunt to a suitable conclusion. At first I thought, that after embracing the thriller genre, he got nervous about being perceived as a hack and decided to end his book not with a bang but a whimper. Was it the right move for integrity’s sake? Perhaps. Does it deliver the much-needed payoff? No, not all. In fact it points out the glaring plot hole of “what did Halter expect to accomplish by chasing this guy across the continent?” Then I read somewhere that Boyle’s Ur-moment, when he knew that he had to write fiction, was after reading Robert Coover’s Pricksongs & Descants.

Coover’s stories are all about the unexpected, the set-up without the payoff we’ve come to anticipate—or all of them at once. Boyle simply left us a trail of breadcrumbs to follow into the forest, and while we were there, we got to think about the nature of identity and look at the pretty trees. It’s not his fault if we weren’t tossed into an oven by some crazy bitch. Sometimes, shit doesn’t happen. And, that’s OK.

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The observations about deaf people and their interaction with the world and their perception of the world are extremely enlightening.

I found the novel quite tense during the first half. I kept expecting horrific things to happen.

I loved the feisty lead character, she is so good.

This book is a great deal about being deaf in America, the way you are treated and the helplessness you might feel when so many agencies, including the criminal justice system fail you completely. It's about the prejudices of everyone from the ignorant waitress to your hearing boyfriend's mother.

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It's filled with incisive tragedies that can make up someone's every day experiences, not to mention some larger dramatic ones that involve major destruction.

But this book is also about the ineptitude of our law enforcement in dealing with "white collar criminals" or people who look rich and wealthy but are really stealing the identities of others and going from one person to the next, ruining lives and for awhile without them even catching on. It seems so easy for the villain, Peck, to do so and get away with it and he seems to feel entitled to do just that. He can't believe the audacity of one of his victims actually seeking him out and instead of feeling guilty (especially considering he's unknowingly targeted a woman who is deaf) he feels rage.

This novel alternates between these two protagonists, Dana the woman who is deaf struggling to get to the bottom of this thief who stole her identity and became the impetus to so much in her life going absolutely wrong and the thief himself who, btw, loves Reggae. From the outsider, Dana's actions seem brave and understandable whereas the thief, Peck, seems to be insane and ignorant and one can't help but feel empathy for her and disgust for people like Peck who make his kinds of decisions...even more so because these people actually exist and the inept cops don't seem too hard pressed to track them down.

This book is also about the futility in life, too, and one can't help but feel like things are a little too unresolved and we long for more of a final feeling to the ending but this is written like real life in many ways I think...and that's all I'll say about that or I worry I'll give away too much.

Read this book if you are interested in the experience of someone with a disability because it seems realistic in its depiction of cruelty or if you are intrigued by the idea of identity theft.

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There probably aren’t many novels that combine identity theft and deafness in a storyline as this one does. I learned a thing or two about both, but the story was a bit disappointing. It wasn’t the quality of the writing – which was very good – I think it was that a certain sameyness set in

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after the first section, and ultimately it had a slightly anticlimactic ending.

I never quite got to grips with the nuts and bolts of identity theft as portrayed here – maybe because it’s set in a country I don’t live in, but I didn’t totally get why the benefits all accrue to the identity thief and the costs all accrue to the victim....or why it’s up to the victim to track him down. But still, upon finishing this book I went out and fished some receipts out of the bin and shredded them instead so maybe it’s had some effect.

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A compelling enough read but one that never really transcends the genre in the way you can feel the author trying to. The protagonists are frustrating in ways that I imagine were meant to feel realistic, but instead seemed jarring. The idea of exploring the ways in which deaf people experience the

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world within a thriller was a promising one, but in the end Boyle falls a bit short on both counts. A shame, because it has the kernel of something wonderful in it.

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Loved it, couldn't get enough, then lost steam. It happens a lot with me and TC Boyle.