The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards

These short stories are exceptionally good, with a fine eye for detail, well-crafted language and excellent characterizations. Writing at its best. In fact, I found several of these tales to be as satisfying as a full blown novel.

I'm thrilled to have this on my bookshelf, creased, thumbed, already worn-out and with more than a few stains to its pages. There is a breadth to the stories here that can be found in few places these days--the breadth of human lives and possibilities. Too often I read a few stories from a collection and come away depressed that the stories are really just a single story, a variation on a single color of human emotion or instance or place, like a Rothko. 'Heyday' is anything but. It's a collection that seethes with life, variance, wide- and light-ness. It's a collection by an author whose five novels exceed readability and insight, and whose stories remind you just how good literature these days can be.

In this collection of stories about life's uncertainties, Robert Boswell picks up his characters like mechanical toys and winds them tight, and just when they are at maximum tension, he twists the key one more turn, guaranteeing that they will unwind noisily, out of control. Virtually all his characters are losers. A woman, having lost her disabled husband, now finds that she has also lost her best friend. A housecleaner has been abandoned by her husband. A needy young man goes broke while in the thrall of a fortune teller. A priest tries to help a pathetic family by offering a "story to have faith in, even if he cannot entirely believe it." Though sometimes bleak, the stories are always haunting. The characters, just one twist away from the normal, the safe, and the real, feel "different," irrational, sometimes dangerous, and even frightening. They have been buffeted by fate, often inspired by their own misdeeds, and they are, as a group, naïve, thoughtless, sometimes ignorant, and lacking commitment to the larger world. Startling stories grow from seemingly ordinary events. In "Lacunae," Paul Lann has driven two hundred miles across the desert to pick up his father, who is being released from the hospital, and drive him to his family's home nearby. Faced simultaneously with his father's precarious health and a final chance to reunite with his wife and her child, Paul must choose whether to stay or go. In "A Walk in Winter," a young man has returned to North Dakota in the middle of winter. Riding with the sheriff, he is on his way to identify his mother's frozen remains. His mother had disappeared following an argument with her husband when the boy was ten. When he sees the detached jawbone, he is suddenly shocked into understanding the missing pieces of his early life. In the title story, a novella, main character Keen and his friend Clete, addicted to mushrooms and other illegal substances, move in with a friend who is house-sitting for the summer. Several other freeloaders, both male and female also move in, and to support their habits, they sell, one by one, the entire contents of the house. Dividing the story into an ironic ten-step program, the novella begins with a "Happier Time," and progresses through "Considering Others," and "Accepting Responsibility," to "Understanding Mistakes," and "What I've Learned." The ironies of these titles become obvious as two members of the household die and two others get married. Boswell makes every word count here, choosing his descriptors of people and objects so carefully that the reader can instantly see the pictures the author creates. His characters, just one notch beyond normal and one notch more disturbed, are familiar and understandable, regardless of how strange they may be, and the intensity of the stories keep the reader's interest at high pitch. Ultimately, these unforgettable characters, with their haunted and damaged lives, leave the reader uncomfortable with the