Living To Be A Hundred: Stories - Hardcover

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.

The protagonists of nine of the 11 short stories in this impressive collection by the author of Mystery Ride are sad, disillusioned middle-aged men looking back at the brief time when their lives seem to have had wonder and promise, and realizing that everything went downhill after "one perfect moment." Most of them have had hardscrabble lives, sometimes the result of childhoods spent with fathers who are failures themselves, as in the affectingly elegiac "Glissando." Now, like the narrator of "The Good Man," they are "consumed by the sweet pain of longing" that can never be assuaged. The tales explore the mistakes, humiliations, mysteries (especially the nature of love) and the reasons why "my life had turned wrong." Most of them are set in hot desert towns of the Southwest, and the scorching climate intensifies the protagonists' searing epiphanies. The title story begins with an incident that shows the narrator "what little it took to throw your life off, to turn it upside down," and progresses, during the course of a sizzling heat wave, to a shocking but inevitable climax. The man who narrates "The Earth's Crown" discovers that "there are ten thousand ways to ruin your life, a million ways to lose the people you love." "Grief," told from a woman's point of view, has the feel of a Greek tragedy, with a surprising twist at the end. In the mesmerizing "Salt Commons," an ordinary man is taken hostage by a deranged woman and regrets all the things he has never experienced; the narrator of "The Products of Love" understands--too late--"that love is more important than happiness." Though the collection suffers somewhat from a certain sameness of theme, Boswell's tales are gracefully written and often haunting.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.