Customer Reviews

Trouble with Girls

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Trouble With Girls is a super collection of stories that flow together to form what reads like a novel. The stories tell (the majority of) the life of Parker Hayes, starting at age thirteen at a little league baseball game through to his mid-thirties, all the while telling of his (lack of) readiness to handle the tasks of life, and more specifically, the task of landing the perfect woman.

Set in the 1970's and 1980's we see Parker grow from a child to a man, stumbling from one learning lesson to another (all in a hilarious manner), with each story thrown against the backdrop of the rock music of the days (msuic being his escape, we get a good dose of that backdrop).

The stories are written in a such a way that you will recall your own fumblings of youth and find yourself laughing with him along the way. The female characters here (and there are many) tend be a tad stereotypical (and a tad repetitive) but the reader will quickly see Parker is drawn to the same types, doomed to repeat his mistakes. It all builds to a comfortable closure and leaves you feeling content, and ready to start over and read it again.

An excellent read. Well worth the cover price.

This collection is for all you lovers of Paul Weller, all you readers of Trouser Press. It will make you wonder where all the friends of your youth have gone, those who grew up 'in various and sundry ways' without you. Lovely.

Marshall Boswell's TROUBLE WITH GIRLS is a well written, emotionally compelling, and just plain smart collection of stories. By poignantly revealing the ennervated soul of the post-modern American male, he creates a protagonist that we want to grab by the collar and shake ("You're blowing it!) and yet sympathetically cheer on to find fulfillment. Propelled by prose both Proustian in its circumlocuitous convolutions and yet obviously contemporary in diction and manner, these stories unfold in sequences reminescent of the slo-mo scenes of your favorite relationship car crash. Boswell knows his material--boys and girls, the seventies, eighties, and nineties as the threshing floor of American malehood, dating, grad school, "the real world"--and in these ten pieces, he uses that knowledge to engage the reader fully in the plight of his narrator's movement from naivety to experienced naivety. A great book.

a delightful,insightful, entertaining coming of age story that will resurrect a ton of memories from your adolescence to young adulthood.You should read/watch this rising young fiction star -- he will eventually fill a whole shelf on your bookcase.

The ten stories in Boswell's debut book of fiction had me howling with laughter and sympathy from the first page. Uncannily, through ten interrelated stories, Boswell manages to capture the feel - exactly - of growing up in a certain time period, in a certain part of the country (not too close to the action, not too far), while listening to certain forms of pop music.

And the music is important, forming as it does a motif that appears in practically every story, charting not only the central character's taste but also establishing what is "in" as the years click by - a cultural gauge made all the more heart-wrenching by Parker's repeated failure to connect to that volatile "coolness."

Novelistic in its scope, the underlying theme of the story collection seems to be nothing less than the sexual initiation and maturity of the hero. The first story, "Ready Position," begins with puberty (and brings to mind David Foster Wallace's "Forever Overhead"), and the last story, "Spanish Omens," ends with marriage. Along the way, our hero is launched from the comfortable but unsatisfying nest of his childhood home into the world of sexual warfare, the hero always "in between" the latest romantic disaster and the next still-idealistic, hopefully tranquil union. An impressive read.

Brings to mind Nick Hornby's High Fidelity and also early Updike, specifically Pigeon Feathers. Also plays on some of the themes in Philip Roth's My Life as a Man.

This is a well-written but inconsistent collection of short stories, intended to be read in order and therefore attempting a form somewhere in between an anthology and a novel. But I think other books that have used this form or something like it have executed the concept more successfully, in particular Charles Baxter's The Feast of Love and David Schickler's Kissing in Manhattan. Some of the stories here work quite well by themselves, but the device of connecting them to a book-length narrative adds nothing. Besides featuring the same protagonist, an introspective but unremarkable dud of an everyman named Parker Hayes whose life the book tracks in chronological order, there is no continuity. Parker is given such meager characterization and his adventures synthesize so poorly that each story may as well have given him a different name and been presented independently. Other than Parker, only one character appears in more than one story (and she in only two), and no other common threads link the stories together. Sometimes this just seems careless. In one story, Parker has a pet cat, which subsequently disappears altogether, leaving readers silently to question every so often, "Whatever happened to the cat?" (Maybe this cat is Schroedinger's Cat, dramatically sealed in a box disclosing no certain facts about its fate.)

Fortunately, readers who resolve to approach each story as its own individual work will be rewarded by several clever and perceptive pieces. "New Wave" was clearly written by someone who has forgotten none of the salient sociological facts of high-school life. The story is a funny and touching account of the teenage tendency to assert one's individuality by thoughtlessly gravitating towards one or another cliquish movement (often based on musical taste) and the existential angst suffered when these affectations challenge one's authentic personality. (I would be remiss not to note a passage running from page 81-82 that hilariously captures the arbitrary allegiances of rock-and-roll fandom. Read the whole story for this bit, if for nothing else.) The other two highlights in this collection for me were "Grub Worm" and "Between Things." The former is a story of modern heartbreak with the usual accompanying self-pity, but Parker picks up almost enough self-knowledge to soften the blues. "Between Things" chronicles another staple of contemporary romance, the post-relationship relationship with the same person with whom one has ostensibly broken up. Which stories resonate best with any given reader will depend on the nature of his own troubles with girls. Female readers may be irritated by the one-dimensional characterizations of the women in Parker's life, some of whom appear to have been written according to Jack Nicholson's advice from As Good As It Gets: "I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability." But Boswell doesn't breathe much life into characters of either gender, and the one-dimensional supporting women prove far more captivating than the zero-dimensional Parker Hayes. Boswell's insights into human relationships would have succeeded more vividly had he developed a persona to which readers could actually relate.

Marshall Boswell's collection of stories is simply wonderful, but they are wonderful in a painfully poignant sort of way. They focus on the life of a likeable young man alternately struggling and delighting in the quakes and throes of youth in Memphis, Tennessee during the eighties. These stories give the reader a jolt of pleasure and recognition--they take you back to those days, whether you were a parent, a child or an ageless hanger-on. There is not a whiff of false nostalgia here, either. Boswell is such a careful observer that one is translated back in almost Proustian fashion--swiftly, indelibly, body and soul. The tone, true to the collection's protagonist, is unassuming, cautious and at the same time full-blooded. But brooding over the work is Boswell himself, who knows very well--as his protagonist does not yet--that those aches and terrors of teenhood are worth the price that must be paid. The story "Born Again" is a masterpiece. To read it is to yearn mightily to return to one's youth, eyes and heart wide-open. Splendid.