Gay’s 15-year-old daughter, Rita, thinks her parents are divorced, but Gay, who has suffered breakdowns, sees her “careful, considered, artful arrangement” as the key to freedom and sanity. To Gay Schaefer, it’s a symbol of the amplitude of possibilities she can pursue Persimmon’s new basketball coach, Denny Redmon, while maintaining her unconventional long-distance relationship with her husband, Sander. The black river means different things to others. Watching the river literally run black one night-from toxic waste?-Rudy sees it as “a current of blood cutting its own wound.” Rudy Salazar, the violent youth who is Apuro’s self-appointed avenger, notes that these kids are stigmatized as negras because of the dark line left on their pants even after the water dries. They refuse to build a footbridge, forcing the children of illegal immigrants to wade the river to attend school. They plant trees so they don’t have to look at Apuro’s adobe shacks, which lack sewer lines, electricity or running water. Apuro is 30 miles north of the border, but Persimmon’s residents behave as if it’s part of Mexico. Persimmon, N.M., sits across the Rio Grande from the colonia, or squatters’ settlement, of Apuro. “American Owned Love” describes the private motions of individual souls and, with equal ease, a place and a political situation. His people are so real that we’re reminded of what readers usually manage to ignore-that the characters in most novels are just bundles of stock attributes, snapped together like pieces of a Lego set. Boswell’s prose never strains, but it’s capable of delicate and powerful effects. Why is “American Owned Love” good? It’s tightly plotted-no detail goes to waste-but it also flows as loosely and unpredictably as life. He teaches at New Mexico State University and has written three other works of fiction-the novels “Mystery Ride” and “Crooked Hearts” and a collection of stories, “Living to Be 100”-which you’re advised to go ferret out at your nearest used bookstore.
The novel is called “American Owned Love.” The author’s name is Robert Boswell. I’ve just read a very good novel by a writer who’s not nearly as well-known as he ought to be-and a way of remedying that situation lies as close at hand as the computer keys I’m tapping on right now.
In a book reviewer’s life, it doesn’t get much better than this.
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