Porter Shreve

T.C. Boyle has always been a great entertainer, but the fireworks in his previous ten novels and eight story collections tend to be more in his language and dialogue than in his plots. But Talk Talk is a bona fide page-turner, a rush of a novel about a deaf woman, Dana Halter, who has her identity stolen by a small-time criminal, William “Peck” Wilson. Thrown into a Kafkaesque nightmare of confused identity, Dana finds herself locked in jail, hounded by creditors, fired from her job as a teacher at the San Roque School for the Deaf, and unable to explain herself to anyone who might help her. Her boyfriend, Bridger Martin, flies to her aid, risking his own career as a special effects editor, only to discover that the criminal has stolen his identity, too. Boyle threads the perspectives of Dana, Bridger and Peck seamlessly and takes the three on a thrilling, often high-speed chase from Southern to Northern California, then across the country to the suburbs of New York. As Dana and Bridger hunt down and ultimately confront the man who upended their lives, Boyle sneaks in an alarming message about the tenuousness of identity in the communication age.