About Robert Boswell: A Profile

In many ways, Robert Boswell fits the mythology of the contemporary man in the American West. Known as Boz, he's a lanky, laconic six-footer with a closely cropped beard. Typically garbed in jeans and rumpled shirts with rolled-up sleeves, he drives a pickup truck and listens to Bruce Springsteen. He lives in an adobe house near the Rio Grande in Las Cruces, New Mexico, less than fifty miles from the Mexican border. His voice is a baritone, coming from way deep, and he's a slow talker -- slower still with strangers. He claims the desert as his landscape of preference, insisting that the sky really is larger out there, and too much time away from the West makes him claustrophobic.

But the stereotypes end there. The acclaimed author of three novels and two collections of short stories, Boswell is no cowboy, and certainly no redneck. The lonesome highway may be the chosen path for some of Boswell's characters, but not him. He's a devoted family man, married to the writer Antonya Nelson since their graduate-school days at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and their two young children, daughter Jade and son Noah, are the center of their lives; Boswell even helps out one day a week at Jade's school, running a writers' workshop for the fourth graders, going over what the kids call their "sloppy copy." Moreover, Boswell, a card-carrying member of the ACLU, is an activist and supporter for a number of liberal organizations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, Planned Parenthood, NOW, and Share Our Strength.

He was born in Sikeston, Missouri, in 1953 and spent his childhood on a tobacco farm in Wickliffe, Kentucky, a literary landmark of sorts. The town is where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers meet, a dramatic turning point in
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a book that Boswell says changed his life, forever instilling in him the desire to become a writer. When he was in sixth grade, his family moved to Yuma, Arizona. There, his father, formerly an elementary school principal, taught high school government, and his mother worked mostly as a realtor. Alongside two brothers and a sister, Boswell grew up to be a "shy extrovert," a member of student government and the basketball team, but also a brooder, frequently depressed and insecure. A child of the sixties, he was preoccupied with the draft and Vietnam and was heavily involved in recreational drugs. "If you go the long way," he says, "Yuma is fifteen miles from the border, and there were a lot of drugs available cheap, a lot of people running across the border, and I found that an interesting pastime."

Chemically distracted, it took Boswell five and a half years to finish his undergraduate studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "I finally made a conscious decision to quit doing drugs. I thought I'd never get through college otherwise, and I knew I wanted to accomplish something. But it took me years, really, to quit." Another protractive factor was his indecision about his major. He started in government, thinking he might become a lawyer, as his father had always wanted to be, then switched to psychology, to English, and then to creative writing. He had so many credits in psychology, he graduated with a double major.

Still not ready to commit to writing fully, he continued at the University of Arizona for a master's degree in rehabilitation counseling. "I was looking for a way to have a life that wasn't an obscenity, and this seemed like a possibility, doing important work," he says. In 1979, he was hired as a counselor just outside of San Diego and guided immigrants, schizophrenics, and the poor into job training programs. The experience radicalized his politics, and would later deeply inform his writing. Pointedly, he remembers seeing single mothers who were trying to attend college while supporting their kids with part-time jobs, then having the Reagan administration change the eligibility rules, forcing the women to quit working in order to keep their welfare benefits. "The government had plenty of programs," Boswell says, "but at the same time the programs were compromised, so there seemed to be a genuine effort to keep people from getting the benefits they were entitled to. A very strange and frustrating
experience, Kafkaesque in some ways."

His job began to consume him, and after two years, he decided to return to the University of Arizona to pursue his abiding love, entering the M.F.A. program in creative writing. His class had quite a few incipient stars, including David Foster Wallace and Richard Russo, but Boswell wasn't among them. Concentrating on poetry at first, he admits he was near the bottom of the talent pool. During one conference, his teacher, Steve Orlen, told Boswell, "It seems to me you're always trying to tell a story," then added, "It seems to me that there's not much music in your poetry." Laughing, Boswell says, "It was a euphemistic way of telling me that I was writing one clunker after another, and the light bulb came on over my head that I should be writing fiction."

He might have had a natural instinct for storytelling, but he knew next to nothing about the craft, and he invested himself in learning it. The summer after his first year in the M.F.A. program, he maniacally wrote for sixteen to eighteen hours a day, then would go to a dive called The Country Club Lounge, drinking and dancing to a rock 'n' roll band, Los Lasers, until closing time. "I wrote one bad thing after another, but after that my work got better. I think it had to do with finally understanding something writers were often saying -- when you're writing fiction, what you pursue is truth. I managed to get ruthless, and hack away at the things that were dishonest in my stories." It's an attitude, a work ethic, that has held true to this day. "To write good fiction, typically I have to push it beyond any point I could have anticipated, and then be willing to give up on the story as
my story, and work back into it on its own terms." Thus, he will sometimes sacrifice favorite scenes or entire novel chapters as he is churning out draft after draft. "I have to write about thirty drafts of a book, or a story, or a letter, to get something I'm happy with," he says.

His efforts that long-ago summer quickly paid off. Larry McMurtry, while visiting the University of Arizona campus, read a story of Boswell's and then met with him. "He said we didn't need to talk about the story itself, we just needed to talk about having a life as a writer." The short story, "The Right Thing," became Boswell's first publication, appearing in
The Antioch Review in 1983. Around the same time, he met Antonya Nelson in a workshop. He was in his last year of the three-year program, and she was in her first. "Tony and I first started going out in November, and we were engaged in January, got married in July. It was really quite a whirlwind affair."

His literary career moved rapidly as well. Submitting many of the stories from his thesis, he won the Iowa School of Letters Award for Short Fiction in 1985, and his collection,
Dancing in the Movies, was published by the University of Iowa Press the subsequent year. His agent, to whom he was introduced by McMurtry, sold his first novel,
Crooked Hearts, about an eccentric Arizona family, to Knopf, and it came out to phenomenal reviews in 1987.
Geography of Desire, a novel about a Californian in Central America, was released in 1989, followed by his breakthrough novel,
Mystery Ride, which became a bestseller in 1993. A second story collection,
Living to Be a Hundred, was released in 1994.

Most of Boswell's work explores the themes of family, fidelity, morality, and the nature of love, and by and large, his characters are intelligent, ordinary, middle-class folk trying to live decently, with "integrity" (an obsessive principle in Boswell's lexicon), but of course failing for one reason or another. A hallmark of Boswell's fiction is the extraordinary empathy he generates for each character, even those who have beliefs antithetical to his -- the pro-life, born-again Christians in
Mystery Ride, for instance. In that novel, Boswell weaves together twenty years with brilliant technical skill, portraying an idealistic couple, Stephen and Angela Landis -- who meet in the sixties and have a daughter, Dulcie -- through their marriage and divorce, through their separate lives in Iowa and California. The original title for the book was
Fidelity. "Although this couple has been divorced for twelve years," Boswell explains, "in the most important ways, they're still faithful, they're still true to the things they believe in, the things that had brought them together."

In the haunting final scene of the first chapter, Stephen and Angela set a mound of trash afire. They've just bought their first piece of property, a farm in Iowa, but they've discovered that the cellar of the house is filled with years of accumulated garbage -- coffee grounds, liquefied vegetables, piles of rotting filth. They haul everything outside to burn:

   The fire rose high over the dark field, high over the rancid mound. Above the blue and yellow center, flames twisted red and orange. Shards of pure green appeared and vanished. The fire did not crackle but howled, a wall of sound, heat, and color. . . .

   Their love was young enough and powerful enough for each to think it: we have taken something putrid and made it into something beautiful.

   Years later, a decade after Angela left him, Stephen would remember the great flame burning behind the house, how it had seemed to push against their faces like a wind, how the raw heat had finally made them turn away.

   The memory of those days would come back to Angela as well, rising up before her whenever she felt doubt or longing, looming over every disappointment -- the inexhaustible mystery of love found and lost.

Boswell's new novel,
American Owned Love, which will be published in April, takes place on the Rio Grande and examines the area's unique border culture. The title came to him looking at roadside marquees for motels, many of which proclaim they are American-owned. "It's their little racist way of letting you know that there won't be a Pakistani running the place," Boswell says. The marquees often include spiritual messages as well, and one said, without any punctuation: "American Owned Christ Gives Eternal Life Couples $20."

Life is hectic for Boswell these days. After two years at Northwestern University, he began teaching at New Mexico State University in 1989, splitting teaching duties with his wife. Along with Antonya Nelson, he also teaches at Warren Wilson College, and he is dedicated to the students in both writing programs, viewing them as an extended family. He writes when he can, tapping away on a laptop computer while watching his children, sometimes sneaking away to the guest house, which was once used to dry chili peppers. Owing to his schedule, and also to a blown anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee, he can no longer really indulge his passion for basketball, which he had played at least twice a week.

Yet Boswell wouldn't change his life in any way. He knows he is lucky. He is universally well-liked and respected. He has a family he loves, a teaching position that excites him, good friends, an enviable writing career with the same publisher, Knopf, and the same editor, Ashbel Green, since 1986, and each summer, he is able to relax at a second home in Telluride, Colorado. He might launch into a diatribe about the sociopolitical injustices in this country, but he would never suggest he himself is wanting for anything. To do so, he believes, would be an outrage. "My life has already exceeded my expectations by a long shot."