I didn’t know Robert Boswell as anything more than “Antonya Nelson’s husband” for a long-ish time, and for that I should probably do some penance somewhere: while Nelson’s an absolute master, and while she certainly deserves every syllable of praise that comes her way, I’m actually upset with myself that I haven’t been reading Boswell till now. Please, please, don’t make my mistake: please start reading Robert Boswell this instant–start with his latest, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, one of the top three or four books of short stories I’ve read this year, maybe even in the last two or three years.
Do you remember the feeling when you read (let’s just assume you have, for my own convenience) DFWallace’s Girl with the Curious Hair? Remember how weird it felt to read a book of short stories in which each story was not just exceptionally well-written and -done, but in which each story read as if it’d been written by a different author? How Wallace was so impressive for being such a wild ventriloquist? Keep that feeling in mind.
Here’s what you do with Robert Boswell’s Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards: read the last/title story first, and then walk around for a night, alone, confused, mouth wide open, shocked that he could do that. I can’t say a thing about the story, other than the fact that the people in the story are both mercilessly unsavory people and totally, totally lovable and endearing (not ‘lovable’ in some schlocky way–you feel for them, deeply). Then read from the start, but go fast, just so you can get, as quickly as possible, to “Supreme Beings,” a story that should be put beneath glass in a museum and studied for it’s dynamics, how it’s able to offer such terror and sizzle.
And, if you read from the start, you’ll get to “A Sketch of Highway on the Nap of a Mountain” just before you get to “Supreme Beings,” and I can think, honest to god, of no better one-two combo of short stories in a single collection than those two back-to-back. Seriously. They’re both fantastic stories, both shockingly good, but in such different ways it’s almost disheartening (just because, really, how many people can write stories this well? Boswell, Munro, Nelson, Lorrie Moore…the list is small, maybe a dozen). “Sketch of Highway” has got whirling, tight, dancing language; there’s a richness of words that you can actually feel on your tongue, like dessert (plus the whole thing clocks at like 4.5 pages). And then “Supreme Beings,” which is gorgeously written as well but which packs it’s punch based on story and character and…
Look, just buy this book. Is it even necessary to mention who published it? Of course it’s not. This book’s an astonishment, a ravishingly beautiful thing, and should be necessary reading for everyone who wants sock-removing sentences that feel about as alive as anything any decent reader could hope for.
