Boswell is one of the best. His fiction, including the terrific novel, Mystery Ride (1992), is laced with subtle psychology and alive with quirky personalities. This short-story collection revolves around moments of truth and decision, which, more often than not, are actually moments of utter confusion and bitter helplessness. Threesomes are a frequent configuration in these nomadic tales, many of which take place in the gritty Southwest, where the dunning heat explodes petty troubles into crises. In the title story, a man is just a hot breath away from losing his wife to a friend, while in "The Products of Love," a man is too cautious about declaring his love for his married neighbor. "Rain" traces the kaleidescoping of a woman's perceptions and longings after she, her husband, and the woman across the street help search for a missing boy. And, finally, in "The Earth's Crown," a grocer in a tiny Kansas town goes back to his lover, a surrogate mother, right after his wife threatens to leave him because "there are ten thousand ways to ruin your life." And, mysteriously enough, many are suffused with beauty and the thrill of surrender. Donna Seaman
From Kirkus Reviews
From the author of Mystery Ride, a collection of short stories that too often read like a few good characters in search of a major insight. All have previously been published in venues such as the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories 1989, and Ploughshares. An accomplished creator of vivid characters thoroughly and lovingly realized, Boswell is less original when it comes to creating defining moments for them. In the first story, ``Rain,'' which previously appeared in the New Yorker, a young woman joins a search party for a young boy lost in the nearby woods, and, long after the boy is found, finds herself questioning her marriage, her attraction to her co-searcher Orla (a divorced neighbor) and her longing to return to the forest. Only a re-enactment of the search with Orla gives her the less than earth-shattering epiphany she has been searching for. In ``The Good Man,'' the second New Yorker story and one of the best in the book, the match between character and situation is more subtly nuanced as a recovering alcoholic moves with his wife and family to Arizona, where his wife ``misses trees, grass, rain, snow but mostly trees,'' and sometimes even the way her husband used to be when he drank. Other notable stories are ``Grief,'' in which parents struggle to accept the death of a daughter in an accident that her boyfriend, the driver of the car, survives, and after which he goes on to court and marry their remaining daughter; ``Living to be a Hundred,'' which limns the sexual and class tensions of three former college students working in a small desert town; and ``Imagining Spaniards,'' in which a high school teacher is suddenly aware of ``the presence of death...death was not a metaphor. Its coarse tongue chafed his skin.'' The least distinguished tale is ``Brilliant Mistake,'' a sexual awakening story that tries to be different but isn't. Beautifully wrought prose that tries too hard for the bells- and-whistles moment when a quieter, more subtle resolution would better serve. But a writer to watch. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
