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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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TUMBLEDOWN

Robert Boswell

A conversation starter, a big book, and a great novel that, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, finds its quintessential setting in a mental health center.

Tumbledown is about happiness and how to get there, and about how few of us manage to be happy despite our overwhelming material comfort and (occasional) romantic success. In its spectacular characterizations of clients and counselors, it explores how happiness can elude us equally - the apparently powerful, and the apparently powerless - and grace the least likely. It is funny, full of life, and masterful. Robert Boswell is the author of The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, a collection of stories that was a finalist for the 2010 PEN USA Literary Award in fiction. He is the author of six novels (including Century's Son, Mystery Ride, and Crooked Hearts), three story collections, a play, a cyberpunk novel, and two books of nonfiction. He has received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, the John Gassner Prize for Playwriting, and the Evil Companions Award. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Esquire, Colorado Review, and many other magazines. He is married to the writer Antonya Nelson and they have two children.

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Book Published 2013-08-06 by Graywolf Press

Comments

Robert Boswell has always been an extremely appealing writer: uncommonly intuitive, a sparkling observer, graceful yet surprising sentence-to-sentence; and always in pursuit of important complexity in human behavior—a rare gift, which makes his writing increasingly essential.

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. Read more...

Boswell favors a sonorous, Middlemarchian omniscience. He can swoop into any character's thoughts and memories and also provide external commentary, exhorting, teasing, and philosophizing... Tumbledown neither demonizes mental illness nor glorifies it as a purer, more creative state. All the novel's characters know that in adulthood they're supposed to settle for 'what could pass for a normal life. Maybe it was a C- sort of life, but that was a passing grade.' Still, they want to keep hope, wonder and love in their lives, as well as, Boswell suggests, 'some manner of accommodating the impossible, some way of covering up for the failures of the rational world. This might actually be a reasonable definition of sanity.' Without a whiff of sentimentality, he shows exactly how elusive such balance can be.

If you read Tumbledown in public, beware: Boswell's story is barkingly, snort-spurtingly, people-give-you-looks funny. Yet its humor is the most generous kind, uncynical and unsentimental, and woven through an ensemble story so large-hearted it keeps bursting its narrative seams. The result is a brilliant, humane, engrossing argument for how infinitely whacked and contingent life can be, and therefore how desperately we need one another to survive. I finished it with a long contented sigh, thinking, this is why I love reading novels.