CENTURY’S SON

The burdens of grief and secrecy borne by the people of a small Midwestern city are analyzed with keen compassion, humor, and insight in this luminous fifth novel from the author of Mystery Ride (1993) and American Owned Love (1997).

The college town of Hayden, Illinois, excitedly prepares for the arrival of Peter Ivanovich Kamenev, a Russian dissident writer most famous for having had (and missed) an opportunity to assassinate Joseph Stalin. Peter, who also claims (falsely) to be 100 years old, plans to live with his middle-aged daughter Zhenya, a professor of political science; her husband, a union activist turned garbageman, known only as Morgan (his surname); their unmarried daughter Emma; and Emma’s young son. Boswell skillfully widens the novel’s scope, layering in the lingering aftershocks of the suicide, ten years earlier, of Emma’s older brother Philip—and the emotional agendas of other Haydenites variously orbiting around the Morgans’ history and continuing individual and internecine conflicts. Unusually full characterizations thus absorb us in the lives of Morgan’s hulking, probably criminal garbage-truck partner Danny Ford; policeman Roy Oberman, a genuine “good man” who nevertheless may have caused Philip’s death, and who harbors additional dark secrets; and Adriana East, the patrician widow who leads an abortive fight against the devastation of urban renewal, and succumbs to the elder Kamenev’s wily Old World charm. These, and several other characters, are vivid originals (Peter Ivanovich is a wonderful combination of egomaniac, charlatan, and genuine visionary intellectual), and Boswell directs them surely toward a celebration climaxed by his characters’ astonished “intuition that their lives had meaning and might still one day be redeemed.”

The texture of this replete portrayal of Middle America and its discontents suggests an inspired collaboration between Anne Tyler and John Cheever. Only a handful of Boswell’s contemporaries have written anything better than Century’s Son.