I read a recent guest post by Josh Henkin on Book Club Girl that had an intriguing paragraph in it:
Other highlights of Book Group Expo: meeting Julia Glass, whose work I’ve long admired. At her salon, Julia was asked to name a book she loved, and she said Robert Boswell’s Mystery Ride, which she found years ago on a remainders table. Nothing makes a writer happier than to hear another writer recommend a book they love, particularly when that book isn’t known by enough people. So let me tell you about Mystery Ride, a novel that my then-girlfriend (now-wife) read aloud to each other over the phone the first year of our relationship when we were long-distance, a novel that made such an impression on us that years later we named our dog Dulcie after the teenage daughter in Boswell’s novel. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking book about a marriage and a divorce, about parenthood, about many other things, and since all good fiction takes you somewhere unexpected, the novel also suggests that time does not heal all. I can’t recommend it strongly enough.
Here's the description from Amazon:
This new work makes a brilliant return to the subject Boswell writes about with distinctive tenderness and humor: a marriage that has fractured, although the love husband and wife once felt for each other endures as a touchstone in their lives. The novel reflects Boswell's increasing maturity and wisdom; its characters–especially an exasperating teenager–are vivid and fresh, its truths poignant and penetrating. The "Mystery Ride" (from a Springsteen song) is marriage, and here is "the almost inexhaustible mystery of love found and lost." Brimming with high ideals, Angela and Stephen Landis wed in the '60s and moved to a farm in Iowa, where their daughter Dulcie was born. Later, desperate for a life outside the confines of the farm and its small community, Angela left Stephen. She has remarried, and Dulcie is a rebellious, almost dangerously unstable adolescent when Angela returns to the farm for the first time in a decade to leave the fractious 15-year-old with her father. As Boswell cross-cuts among different events over a 20-year span, he draws a nuanced portrait of decent people striving to connect with each other. A fundamentalist Christian couple in the farm community is sketched with as much empathy as Angela's second, philandering husband and Stephen's understanding girlfriend. Boswell's compassion for his characters, his coherent control of motivation and plot, help him build to a series of tremendously affecting events, followed by Dulcie's quiet epiphany and an unforgettable ending. The dialogue has wit and energy, and the details of farm routine are rendered with impressive authenticity. Most important, the book is charged with insight, resonating with questions about how one leads a moral, fulfilling life and accepts the mystery of love.
Mystery Ride is out of print, which of course gives me yet another reason to visit every used bookstore I pass.
Has anyone else out there read this book? Would love to hear more about it.