American Owned Love

by Robert Boswell

Robert Boswell 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--the Rio Grande, chugging through New Mexico on its way to becoming the border--turns black, black as coal or oil or death, the night before she starts high school.

During the year beginning that night, disaster does seem to stalk Rita, getting more and more tangible, shaking even her mother's self-possession. It's got something to do with her best friend, Cecilia Calzado--and with Cecilia's brother Enrique, whom Rita starts dating, even though he's still in junior high--and with the fact that years ago Mr. Calzado had moved his family out of the shabby colonia across the river and earned the wrath of a menacing person named Rudy Salazar.

Love, under these circumstances--"American owned love",  as it were--can get brutal. It can even twist into something that looks a lot like hate--and then maybe, just possibly, back into the realm of redemption.

323 pages, Hardcover

First published March 25, 1997

About the author

Robert Boswell is the author of eleven books, including The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, a story collection with Graywolf Press, in April 2009. His novels: Century's Son, American Owned Love, Mystery Ride, The Geography of Desire, and Crooked Hearts. His other story collections: Living to Be 100 and Dancing in the Movies. His nonfiction: The Half-Known World, a book on the craft of writing, and What Men Call Treasure: The Search for Gold at Victorio Peak, a book about a real-life treasure hunt in New Mexico (co-written with David Schweidel). His cyberpunk novel Virtual Death (published under the pseudonym Shale Aaron) was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award.

His play Tongues won the John Gassner Prize. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, and the Evil Companions Award. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Best Stories from the South, Esquire, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Colorado Review, and many other magazines.

He shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, Antonya Nelson.

Reviews

[Charlaralotte · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good dramatic set-up possibilities of mainstream American town with community of illegal immigrants living across the river. Unfortunately, plotting of American characters a bit dull. Their problems not so interesting compared with problems of village without deeds, sewage, running water. Somehow mixing of inhabitants from two zones wasn't made as compelling as could have been in hands of Garcia Marquez or Bernieres. But then, not every writer has their talent for getting at heart of social consciousness and individual characters.

Rita's eating disorder got tiresome, the Heart poker game tales dull, and Gay's marital thoughts rather uninteresting. Cared much more about Rudy's motivation, Enrique's thoughts, and Humberto's life.

Perhaps a reframing and re-edit might have made things a bit livelier and ultimately more meaningful.

Best thing about the book is the title.

[Stephen D'Agostino · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've read Boswell's "Mystery Ride," "Crooked Hearts," "Geography of Desire," and "Century's Son." I enjoyed them all, especially "Mystery Ride." This one had no real plot and relied too heavy on symbolism.

[Gary J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intricate story of clash of cultures and messed up families set on a border town along the Rio Grande.