Tumbledown

Starred review from May 6, 2013
This is a crowded, tender, and captivating novel, the experience of which brings to the fore how reading itself can replenish our love of the imperfect beauty of humanity. Boswell (The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards) spins an elaborate web of characters, and once the initial effort of keeping them straight subsides, the reward of knowing them is especially rich. Therapist James Candler works with young adults of various psychological diagnoses and mental limitations while struggling with his own life. Yet it is the constellation of people around him that makes the book’s development so fascinating. When Lise was a client of James’s, she was a stripper. Unbeknownst to James, when he moves to San Diego, Lise follows, reinventing herself with him in sight and hoping for love. Lise and James do eventually find something magnetic, though it’s limited to the two weeks before James’s fiancée will arrive, an urgency that increases the novel’s pace. As James’s clients try to keep their own hearts in check and James’s indecision mounts, Boswell brilliantly cuts back to childhood and the revelation that James had an autistic big brother named Pook. These slow and precise memories hold everything else together, emphasizing the profound affection we can feel for even the most unreachable. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, InkWell Management.

April 1, 2013
A book that reminds readers that the wages of sin are myriad and include the opportunity to find oneself. James Candler knows better. A counselor at the Onyx Springs Rehabilitation and Therapeutic Center, he seems poised to become the center's youngest director. He has a colorful cast of clients, a fiancee about to arrive from London--he proposed via text message--an expensive car he doesn't respect himself for buying, a drafty stucco McMansion in a bedroom--read bedlam--community, and a roommate, his oldest and best friend Billy Atlas, who can barely get himself out of bed much less hold up the world. The engaged Candler hooks up with a woman he does not realize is his stalker. She, like everyone in the book, is the benevolent avatar of an evil type. Though bad things happen, and Boswell conjures menace with ease, the conclusion of the story will frustrate or please, depending upon your feelings about literary conceits; conceits Boswell handles masterfully. Boswell displays immense talent for characterization and observation, the narrator moving seamlessly among more than a dozen named characters, all with some connection to the haunted and impulsive Candler. Time is elastic, the fate of one character suspended while Boswell moves his attention back to follow a different character through the same few days, hours or minutes. Boswell makes only one misstep in a novel that seems guaranteed to deliver pleasure: Karly Hopper, a client at the rehab center, is drop-dead gorgeous and developmentally disabled, but only enough to make her laugh at everything and flirt with everyone. She's less a character than a waking wet dream, and her redemption--and whom she redeems--is too pat. Boswell (The Heyday of Insensitive Bastards, 2009, etc.), recipient of two NEA Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a PEN West Award for Fiction, shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, writer Antonya Nelson. An impressive work.

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June 15, 2013

Set at a California counseling center and sheltered workshop, this story focuses on the emotionally disrupted lives of its large set of characters. Candler is a counselor in line for the center's directorship but isn't sure he wants the responsibility or even knows who he really is. Lise is a former patient of Candler's, whose life was changed through a single counseling session and who believes she is in love with him. Highly intelligent and acutely troubled adolescent Maura is in love with teenage Mick, a schizophrenic struggling to get back to the life he knew before his illness. Toward the end of this brimming novel, Candler is reading an epic of "survival after the world has fallen apart..., a lively messy book, full of characters," which is also an apt description of the novel in hand. VERDICT Recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a PEN West Award for Fiction, Boswell (The Century's Son) crafts a compassionate, compelling, and ultimately affirming tale of "tumbledown" lives--the human struggle to find "some manner of accommodating the impossible." Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 2/4/13.]--Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2013
James Candler is a therapist at a private rehabilitation center for people with physical, mental, emotional, or psychological challenges, and he himself is about to become unhinged. Drawn to therapy by the painful questions raised by the tragically short life of his artistic, autistic brother, James is now tumbling down into chaos, saddled with a huge house he can't afford, recklessly driving a ridiculously expensive car, and engaged to a virtual stranger. He is also being stalked by a woman who changed her name, appearance, and life after one counseling session with him, and he's about to be betrayed by his lifelong friend. This alone is grounds for a powerful tale. But celebrated novelist and short story writer Boswell (Century's Son, 2002) goes further, empathically inhabiting the hampered minds of various rehab clients. Beautiful, heartbreakingly vulnerable Karly's extremely low IQ is belied by her exceptional aptitude for kindness and happiness. Handsome and promising Mick has been derailed by schizophrenia. Maura, furious, suicidal, often stoned, is also astute and hilarious. Within a suspenseful plot spiked with love triangles and flashbacks, Boswell renders each complex psyche and scene with magnificent precision and penetrating vision, fine-tuning our definitions of disorder and healing and deepening our perception of what it is to be normal, what it is to be human.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)