Présentation de l'éditeur Over the past twenty-five years, T.C. Boyle has earned wide acclaim and an enthusiastic following with such adventurous, inimitable novels as The Tortilla Curtain, Drop City, and The Road to Wellville. For his riveting eleventh novel, Boyle offers readers the closest thing to a thriller he has ever written, a tightly scripted page turner about the trials of Dana Halter, a thirty-three-year-old deaf woman whose identity has been stolen. Featuring a woman in the lead role (a Boyle first), Talk Talk is both a suspenseful chase across America and a moving story about language, love, and identity from one of America's most versatile and entertaining novelists. Extrait TALKTALK ALSO BY T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE NOVELS The Inner Circle Drop City A Friend of the Earth Riven Rock The Tortilla Curtain The Road to Wellville East Is East World’s End Budding Prospects Water Music SHORT STORIES Tooth and Claw The Human Fly After the Plague T.C. Boyle Stories Without a Hero If the River Was Whiskey Greasy Lake Descent of Man TALKTALK A NOVEL T. Coraghessan Boyle VIKING Acknowledgments Author’s Note PART I Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six PART II Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six PART III Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five PART IV Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five PART V Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four EPILOGUE Acknowledgments I would like to thank Marie Alex, Jamieson Fry, Susan Abramson and Linda Funesti-Benton for their generous help and advice. Author’s Note Except where indicated, it is not my intention to represent a literal translation of signed English, as a number of writers have done in the past, quite admirably, but rather to approximate what is being communicated by means of standard English dialogue. We are our language, but our real language, our real identity, lies in inner speech, that ceaseless stream and generation of meaning that constitutes the inner mind. —L. S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language I learnt man’s tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughtsInto the stony idiom of the brain, … I learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret;The code of night tapped on my tongue;What had been one was many sounding minded. —Dylan Thomas, “From love’s first fever to her plague” PART I One 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. They should have been in her purse, but they weren’t, and so she’d made a circuit of the apartment—two circuits, three—before she thought to look through the pockets of the jeans she’d worn the day before, but where were they? No time for toast. Forget the toast, forget food. She was out of orange juice. Out of butter and cream cheese. The newspaper on the front mat was just another obstacle. Piss-warm—was that an acceptable term? Yes—piss-warm coffee in a stained mug, a quick check of lipstick and hair in the rearview mirror, and then she was putting the car in gear and backing out onto the street. She may have been peripherally aware of a van flitting by in the opposite direction, the piebald dog sniffing at a stain on the edge of the pavement, someone’s lawn sprinkler holding the light in a shimmer of translucent beads, but the persistent beat of adrenaline—or nerves, or whatever it was—wouldn’t allow her to focus. Plus, the sun was in her eyes, and where were her sunglasses? She thought she remembered seeing them on the bureau, in a snarl of jewelry—or was it the kitchen table, next to the bananas, and she’d considered taking a banana with her, fast food, potassium, roughage, but then she figured she wouldn’t because with Dr. Stroud it was better to have nothing at all in your stomach. Air. Air alone would sustain her. To r
