![]() ![]() Beginning with his unforgettable debut novel, Crooked Hearts, Boswell has demonstrated a compassionate understanding of dysfunctional families and misfits, and his insights about the self-destructive behavior of most of his characters are both bitingly sharp and tender. Meanwhile, the self-dramatizing Gay attempts to rationalize her decision, 12 years earlier, to try to preserve sexual excitement in her marriage by pretending to divorce her husband, Sander, whom she meets for trysts once a month. Teenaged bully, thug and paranoid psychopath Rudy Salazar lives in Apuro, and his hate for a Mexican family that has escaped to Persimmon ultimately brings him to a brutal confrontation with naive, romantic Rita. ![]() On the other is the shantytown colonia of Apuro, a hovel of shacks that lack electricity and running water, where the residents are mainly illegal immigrants. On one side is Persimmon, a predominately white, middle-class town where unconventional, sexually promiscuous Gay Schaefer lives with her preadolescent daughter, Rita. ![]() Two communities near the border of southern New Mexico are neatly cleaved by the Rio Grande. Two metaphors-a river that mysteriously turns dark as blood, and a motel marquee proclaiming American Owned/Love Covers All Sins-recur with rising intensity in Boswell's complexly plotted meditation on the mysteries of love and the corrosive divisions of race and class in America. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |