Turning the tables

EX-CONS! Smackdowns! Pouting hotties with checkered pasts!

The cheesy beauty of genre fiction -- in this instance, the thriller -- is that we know the ingredients ahead of time. From franchisers like James Patterson on up the ladder to full-on masters like Michael Connelly, the most reliable delights on the menu are the narrative drive and the cultivated mayhem that we trust, in our Hollywood-trained hearts, will all work out in the end. No matter how much gore and grit, there’s a white knight in there somewhere, even if he’s deeply flawed, semi-alcoholic and prone to let his knuckles do the talking. Are we not men? The bad guys will get what’s coming to them. And those on the side of right will emerge triumphant.

Or not. When, as in the case of T. Unpronounceable Boyle’s latest, “Talk Talk,” a bona fide literary genius hops on the genre pony, it becomes less a vehicle for straight-up suspense than a Trojan horse. Along with the requisite thrills, the author smuggles in all manner of verbal fireworks and observational wizardry before ultimately and methodically subverting every trope of the genre. (About which, more later.) “Talk Talk’s” setup itself evokes a novelistic three-way with Franz Kafka, Carson McCullers and Jim Thompson.

Check it out: a language-loving deaf teacher (the irony!) named Dana is jailed for crimes she couldn’t possibly have committed. A sympathetic judge realizes her plight and dismisses the charges against her, but by then the damage has been done. Job gone, life shattered, she and her movie-geek boyfriend, Bridger, smoke out the high-living sociopath who’s assumed her identity and trail him cross-country, from small-town California to upstate New York, two of Boyle’s fave literary haunts. In the end, as they say in book jacket-ese, victim and victimizer come face to face in a final, life-altering confrontation.

That’s a blockbuster-friendly plot -- were it not for the author’s aforementioned penchant for subversion. For starters, Boyle breaks the cardinal rule of corporate entertainment: None of his characters is particularly likable. Dana, brilliant and determined, is also self-righteous and slightly humorless. Bridger, a film school grad whose dreams of George Lucas-dom have been reduced to a mind-numbing computer gig at a special-effects house, packs all the appeal of a guy who’ll grow old in his “Star Trek” T-shirt. This snippet, in which Girlfriend tries to appreciate Boyfriend’s attempt to cheer her up on the eve of some hard orthodontic work, pretty much captures their dynamic -- and that of the novel itself:

“The night before, just to reassure her, he’d told her that the last time he’d been to the dentist he’d named names and given up all his secrets in the first three minutes and still the fiend kept drilling. She’d signed back to him, right hand open, palm in, fingers pointing up, then the fingertips to the mouth and the hand moving out and down, ending with the palm up: Thank you. And then aloud: ‘For sharing that.’ ”

Not exactly the stuff of wit -- but that’s the point. Boyle’s abilities as comic fictioneer were on parade as far back as his “Descent of Man” days, nearly 30 years ago. So we’re talking about a creative choice -- not a limitation. By now he possesses the unparalleled ability to create characters who can do far more than amuse. In fact, they’re so absolutely human that they’re annoying -- in the way that humans are. While annihilating his novel’s status as escapist fiction (a status, one suspects, that the author craves as much as he would a blurb from thriller queen Mary Higgins Clark), this points to the higher bar Boyle raises in his work. He’s sweating not to make us sympathize with his creatures but to make us comprehend them. He lavishes his prodigious -- and prodigiously humane -- gifts on how they are, not who they are.

Consider: The intricacies of nonaudible communication, the way it feels to operate in the world, cut off from its cacophony and, most astonishing, the silent wonders such different-sensed individuals savor that the rest of us can never experience -- all of this is chronicled with such soulful, meticulous accuracy that “chronicled” isn’t even the best word. It’s more accurate to say that Boyle, through sheer empathic power, seems to have wormholed into this parallel universe of the deaf.

Here’s Dana conveying how much it means to her when her lover, however clumsily, speaks to her in sign: “He tried for her sake, and it was more intimate, more giving, even than what they did in bed together; in that moment, she felt herself go out to him as if all her tethers had been cut.” It’s as though Boyle captures the sensation and dissects it for an audience burdened with all five senses.

But still ... this being a thriller, or at least a book built with a thriller’s template, it’s de rigueur that the villain be more colorful than Dana and Bridger. Everybody loves a badass -- at least on the page. William “Peck” Wilson, “Talk Talk’s” heavy, duly inspires the kind of fascination we noir-fed citizens tend to feel for violent, amoral monsters who take what they want from hapless squares, then share the spoils with some leggy knockout. But, by way of further genre subversion, Boyle makes Peck a family man. His leggy knockout is the Russian-born mother of a girl he’s helping to raise (instead of his own daughter, who became lost to him when he was sent away for assaulting her mother’s boyfriend).

As a testament to Boyle’s appetite for quirk, our perp was born hating his own name. The ordinariness of being William, Bill or Billy Wilson galls him, so he begins calling himself Peck. What we have, then, is an identity thief who loathes his own identity, enabling the author to plant his timely subject in the soil of timeless neurosis.

Peck learned his craft in the joint from a con named Sandman, who imbued his student with his personal credo: “You know how they say, ‘Be all that you can be’? Well, I say, ‘Be anybody you can be.’ ” From this red, white and blue attitude, mentor showed protege the way. Peck tells us that “Sandman was talking about the greed of the credit card companies, online auto loans, instant credit, social security numbers skimmed at the fast-food outlet and the gas stations and up for sale on half a dozen sites for twenty-five dollars per. He was talking about Photoshop and color copiers, government seals, icons, base identifiers. The whole smorgasbord.”

To the extent that all novels, as has been often said, should teach us something, this one gives the reader enough know-how to start his or her own little racket.

By way of climax, Boyle engineers a not-so-Grand Guignol too spectacularly expectation-defying to reveal here -- except to say that it may have readers pitying the criminal and invite judgment of the victim. But, plot vagaries aside, it’s not just the road but the scenery where the author marches out his chops. No character is too small to lavish with peculiar splendor. Boyle’s hair descriptions alone are worth the price of admission. We see the follicles of a court-appointed signer “curled up like the fluff of the chicks they’d kept in elementary school.” Behind the Plexiglas window at an auto impound lot sits a “sallow, grim-faced cashier with hair the color of engine oil” -- quite possibly the greatest literary tint since Flannery O’Connor gave us a Bible salesman with a “toast-colored hat.”

The litany of descriptive triumphs could fill an entire review, so I’ll call it a day. Suffice it to say that “Talk Talk” stands out as nothing short of an uncomfortable masterpiece -- as simultaneously overwhelming, treacherous, beautiful and boiling over with hellacious revelation as its ultimate subject: life in 21st century America. *