New West Book Review

Robert Boswell’s “The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards”

By Jenny Shank, 5-10-09

The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards
by Robert Boswell
Graywolf Press, 288 pages, $24

Robert Boswell’s varied new collection The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards features some stories that pass by in a few pages while others stretch out to novella length, some that are light and comic, and others that are dark and death-obsessed, and still others, such as the title tale, in which death and comedy mingle.  They are set all over the country, from a Colorado mountain cabin filled with druggie dropouts to a decadent Florida community inhabited by current and future divorcées ("No River Wide").  There’s a bleak tale set in the North Dakota countryside ("A Walk in Winter") and a quirky one set in Albuquerque ("Miss Famous"), where a cleaning woman with artistic aspirations works for a fastidious client named Mr. Chubb who “was black, too tall to be a dwarf, too short to be normal.”

It’s impossible to guess what you might encounter next in a Boswell story, though every tale is realized with skill.  Boswell, who teaches at New Mexico State and the University of Houston, could use his own book for examples to students of the myriad possibilities for the contemporary short story.  But that would be a bit pompous, and one thing Boswell excels at is milking humor out of pompous displays, as in “In A Foreign Land,” in which a divorced man attends a literary party thrown by one of his ex-wife’s friends and simultaneously participates in and mocks the banter.

Boswell’s wit and fluid use of time in his stories make even a seed that sounds like a cliché—such as a story about an Irish priest with a drinking habit—blossom into something novel.  Father McEwen, protagonist of “Supreme Beings,” turns out to be one of the freshest and most complicated characters in the book.  “Father McEwen,” Boswell writes, “knew the advantage of his height and used it for God’s work.  He leaned heavily on the jamb, filling the doorway.  He was nearing fifty and more of his bulk shifted each year from muscle to fat, but he knew how to exhibit himself.” The story follows McEwen as he ministers to the needs of some of his parishioners, including a single mother who asks him to beat her children because her infirmities don’t allow her to do so with sufficient force, and another mother who requests that McEwen look in on her young adult son, who is wasting all his time and money on a psychic. 

“Supreme Beings” has a novel’s depth, and it transports the reader into its world of broken homes, people with illicit desires, and one priest’s struggle with his faith while he goes about doing his job.  Simple observations, such as McEwen’s thoughts about one parishioner’s home, accrue greater symbolic meaning: “The window needed washing.  What was this grease that settled on glass?  Human oils?  We leave traces of us everywhere, Father McEwen thought.”

Boswell’s depiction of the celibate McEwen’s sexuality is particularly nuanced, and if there’s any common thread to most of the stories in this collection, it’s sex.  People are doing it, thinking about doing it, or are suspected of doing it throughout The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, and many of the stories ride on this current of their characters’ desire for one another. 

One of the more romantic stories is “City Bus,” in which an unmarried woman named Helen Swann rides the bus to her job in Public Records at City Hall.  When Helen was a teenager, she ran off with a boy a few years older than she, but since then her love life has stalled out, and as the story opens, her once-estranged mother has recently died, leaving Helen with a storage unit full of possessions that she’s slowly sorting through.  “City Bus” mostly takes place in Helen’s head, what she calls her “secret life,” as her mind wanders during the bus trip, but then something unexpected happens.  A coworker who never rides the bus boards it on the day of Helen’s birthday.  The ending comes as a wonderful surprise, leaving Helen suspended in a moment of pleasant possibility.

In many of the stories, Boswell manipulates time in unusual ways, such as in “No River Wide,” which begins: “Both things first: Greta Steno is two places at once and walking.  She is in a Chicago neighborhood in the early fall on a sidewalk made ramshackle by tree roots, and she is barefoot in Florida on a warm winter evening, the broad leaves of a banana tree swiping at her hair.  She is thirty-nine and forty-two years old.” The story laps back and forth in time, to scenes before and after the death of Greta’s husband, and captures the way a person’s past can be an overlay on their present.

Because Boswell’s collection is so varied, a given reader might not like them all equally.  The title story was less my taste the others.  Although “The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards” has a lot of funny moments, good dialogue, and a unique structure (in the form of essays assigned for a character’s parole board hearing), it’s a sometimes disjointed fifty-page story about the misadventures of a group of drunks and drug-addicts in a mountain cabin, with a lot of passing out, ramblings, and random sex.  But with this collection, you only have to turn the page to find something completely different.

The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards is a thought-provoking, diverting collection, and its varied subjects appear to be driven equally by Boswell’s experience and imagination.

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