Book Club: Talk, Talk

Talk, Talk by T. C. Boyle

I meant to post about this long, long ago when I was actually reading it, but I haven't had a spare moment to do so.

This book has a deaf woman, Dana Halter, as a protagonist. She has her identity stolen by another character, Peck/William. I guess we oughtta call him the antagonist. Then there are also the significant others. Bridger is Dana's boyfriend and Natasha is Peck's girlfriend.

The character development in Boyle's novel is excellent. All of the people in the book feel like real people I could have met before. The weird thing is I had a mental picture for most of the characters, but not for the main character. I imagine Bridger to look just like a picture of the author I've seen in the Intro to Fiction book, kind of lanky with spiky brown hair and bird-like eyes. Natasha looks like this one former super model. The only physical detail I have for Dana is that she has lots of auburn hair. There was this one girl at my college who had a super-full mane of red hair. It was just one big huge triangle of hair. Friends of mine actually referred to her as "The Hair." That's my only frame of reference for what Dana must look like. But I know lots of people who have personalities similar to her. I could definitely recognize the personality traits of all of the characters.

The deafness in the novel puts an interesting spin on things. My sister-in-law, Val, is taking a couple of classes on this right now. She's in a finger spelling class that does interesting activities to get the hearing students to think about deafness. I once had a deaf student in one of my 101 classes. It was the most ADHD class I have ever had (and that is saying something). The smalllish room was packed full with 25 students, me, and the two interpreters. Then you have distractable me talking to the students as a whole with one person signing next to me, and about half of the students incapable of keeping a thought in their head without it spewing forth from their mouths. It was chaos. I actually envied the one student who was able to shut the other students out just by turning away from them.

It's such a shame, though, that people look at those with hearing disabilities as somehow lacking in intelligence. The novel makes reference to this several times. Dana talks about "the look" that people give her when they hear how her speech is different and how some strangers choose to talk to the other people with her instead of recognizing that she is a real person who also has a real need to communicate.

There was a big emphasis on words that Dana accumulated in order to help her students prepare for standardized testing. Interesting that this habit stops after a while.

I'm not going to say much about the ending here, but I did find it appropriate. Unexpected, but approporiate.