In the small New Mexico town of Persimmon, Gay Schaefer lives an independent, proudly promiscuous life, never letting on--not even to her teenage daughter, Rita--that she is still married to her husband and continues to meet him for one romantic rendezvous each month. But her neatly compartmentalized life is soon thrown into complete disarray by the new basketball coach, the divorced Denny, a simple man without pretense, with whom Gay, in spite of herself, falls in love. Across the Rio Grande is Apuro, a Mexican shantytown with no electricity. In his own mind, Rudy Salazar is king of Apuro, keeping the Anglos from infecting it with their modern ways. Boswell's poignant novel portrays the contrasting communities of Persimmon and Apuro, finding beauty and ugliness, happiness and despair, on both sides of the mysterious river. As in his critically acclaimed earlier novels, such as Mystery Ride (1992) and Crooked Hearts (1987), Boswell's plainspoken prose, void of cliches and hyperbole, evokes feelings far beneath the surface. A beautiful novel about family and change. Mary Frances Wilkens
From Kirkus Reviews
An ambitious, absorbing saga of family and community relations, set in present-day New Mexico, from the author of the well-received Mystery Ride (1993), etc.. The town of Persimmon, which lies just across the Rio Grande from the Mexican-American colonia of Apura, is inhabited by such harmlessly distracted souls as 30ish Gay Schaefer and her adolescent daughter Rita; Gay's cousin Heart, a remote woman who's a recovering cancer patient; and Denny Redmon, the high-school basketball coach Gay dallies with--and strings along--while living apart from the husband whom she's never divorced and with whom she has frequently reunited. Apura houses more desperate and dangerous people, such as 19-year-old Rudy Salazar, a powder keg whose anger and resentment over his culture's second-class status will flame out and touch the Schaefers--and also the family of Enrique ``Henry'' Calzado, who've moved ``up'' to Persimmon. Boswell creates a vivid and disturbing picture of a society tested by the pressures of assimilation, in which the proud declaration that properties and businesses are exclusively ``American owned'' makes it painfully clear to the malcontent Rudy that ``most of the world operated at a distance and in a language he did not know.'' The novel is generously, if a trifle mechanically, plotted and noteworthy for the compassion and insight that Boswell extends to virtually all his characters. He writes exquisite and arousing sex scenes, and knows exactly how high-school kids swagger and banter. As convincing as his confused and self-conscious adults are, Boswell excels at portraying adolescents: both Enrique's efforts to Americanize himself (he adores River Phoenix and My Own Private Idaho) and Rita's passage through sexual humiliation and violence to ``purity'' are presented with lucid straightforwardness and sympathetic understanding. Splendid work, from a novelist who keeps getting better and better. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
Robert Boswell's 1993 novel, Mystery Ride deserved its almost reverential reception... So when I had trouble forcing myself through Mr. Boswell's fourth novel, American Owned Love, I wondered if it was my fault. After all, this book offers variants of some of the engaging figures in Mystery Ride... But in that clunky title I seemed to hear an ax being ground, and the first few pages made me suspicious... If Mr. Boswell's earlier work is any indication, neither the sentimental nor the pretentious is his natural bent. With any luck, he is now fresh out of symbols, archetypes and big ideas in general, and American Owned Love will turn out to have been a cul-de-sac in his own mystery ride. -- The New York Times Book Review, David Gates From the Inside Flap
ll has a gift for writing people into flagrant, discomfiting existence--as with the incorrigible Dulcie of his acclaimed novel of 1993, Mystery Ride.
Now he conjures up Gay Schaefer, a sultry truck dispatcher who is determined to ignore small-town conventions and possess her life--to make it "original, graceful, adventurous". Separated from her husband of fifteen years, she meets him once a month at the Desert Oasis Motel for glorious carousing, but pretends they are divorced for the benefit of her teenaged daughter. Meanwhile, hanging around with the local basketball coach sends a strange charge darting through her chest--a casual affair, at first, that threatens to upset the balance of her carefully constructed life.
Gay's daughter, Rita, is muddled, pudgy, obliged to admit that she, unlike her mother, doesn't "know how to dress for disaster". She doesn't even know whether it actually spells disaster when the river behind her house-
About the Author
Robert Boswell lives with his wife, the writer Antonya Nelson, and their children in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Telluride, Colorado. He is an associate professor of English at New Mexico State University and is on the faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA program for writers. He has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN West Award for fiction, the Evil Companions Prize, and the Iowa School of Letters Award for short fiction.
