CROOKED HEARTS
Robert Boswell
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987
368 pp., $17.95
If America is a country obsessed with winning - whether the scoring takes place in the Super Bowl, the race in space, the stock market, or the bedroom - the extraordinary new novel Crooked Hearts is about losing. Robert Boswell explores the slow demise of a loving family, aptly named the Warrens, who are at war with one another and with themselves. In this story, set in Arizona and she desert of the human heart, we meet a father who has betrayed his wife, a son who has dropped out of college, and an asthmatic daughter who has trouble breathing and staying awake (not to mention cleaning her room).
The Warren family has a custom of celebrating failures with parties - complete with Christmas lights, balloons, crepe paper, and beer. And there are failures aplenty, big and small, from forgetting lines in a sixth-grade play to hospitalizations for debilitating strokes. There are also the egregious failures of the human spirit - betrayal, infidelity, arson, sexual abuse; this novel surveys the landscape where husbands cheat on wives, where school principals consort with students, and where boys impregnate their brothers' girlfriends. Evil is not elsewhere, alas, but right there within the human heart, and all in the family, unfortunately.
Boswell has written an American tale, replete with the violence and plastic commercialism that infect his characters. Yet somehow the book doesn't quite feel tragic. Despite the inner distress and outer disintegration, despite the sibling rivalry and marital ennui, the characters manage to embrace one another while the reader falls in love with a family that is as courageous and caring as it is helplessly destructive. Even the most extreme violations of morality seem familiar, understandable. Sadly enough, the misfortunes and illnesses the Warrens experience are not so unusual: Existentially, we are al living war-torn lives where disease and death of the body, if not the spirit, eventually triumph. Loss is our ultimate heritage, corruption its frequent companion. So there is something oddly heroic about the attempt by one crippled family to lick its wounds and smile.
The novel is genuinely modern in its psychological complexity and its penchant for multiple perspectives. As in a cubist painting, Boswell refuses to adopt a single viewpoint but instead examines his story from each character's position. Structurally, the novel is divided into sections alternately entitled by person and topic. For instance we begin with a chapter called "Tom's Story," and then proceed to a section named "Coming Home," which has ten subdivisions, followed by "Cassie's Story" and then "Sex and Shelter," which has five subdivisions, then "Edward's story" and so forth. In all, six stories are told: the mother's, the father's, and each of the four children's. In addition, the novel has two parts, both of which end with units entitled "Crooked Hearts." The picture plane is fractured, like the characters' lives. The temptation of simplification - the tendency to resolve ambiguity with partial explanations - is masterfully avoided. The truth in this novel is complex though never confusing. Each character is locked in his own vision, but the reader sees the whole. None of the parts refute the others, even when the perspectives are contradictory. In the end, the stories
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