The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Trouble with Girls, by Marshall Boswell
reviewed by Nicholas Birns

Marshall Boswell. Trouble with Girls. Algonquin, 2003. 306 pp. $22.95.

Boswell, already well known as the author of one of the most incisive books on the Rabbit tetralogy, here tackles growing up in the late 1970s and eighties. This ground, already well furrowed fictionally, has rarely been assayed by someone who knows as much about the art of fiction as does Boswell, and this really helps. Despite misdating that crucial artifact Flashdance, Boswell’s sense of the period’s pop culture is sure and almost painfully exhilarating. The scene is surveyed with amiable irony and a tolerance for different life-choices (Boswell writes well about a strip club in “Stir Crazy,” a difficult challenge). In “Born Again” we see a tribute to the deployment of the Krugerrand in Rabbit Is Rich, a meditation on Bob Dylan’s Christian conversion, and an elegiac notice of the transition from the funky seventies to Reaganite winter. Trouble is not a conventional bildungsroman. The need to “be a whole person at last, fully integrated, all problems solved” is teased, not mimicked, by the book’s loose structure, which implies that the self is always a work in progress. The plot ending is happy, as the titular issues of our protagonist, Parker Hayes, with the opposite sex are resolved in marriage to Rachel, one of whose most appealing traits is having owned a cat named Margery Kempe. Yet a honeymoon rental-car catastrophe lets us know that the anarchy of life will not thereby be stilled. Boswell renders the mentors, friends, ex-friends, and girlfriends in these stories as an ensemble cast, not an undifferentiated backdrop against which Hayes’s journey to maturation is staged. This forestalls any “narrative governed by symbols and carefully orchestrated leitmotifs.” Trouble with Girls has a poise that makes it brainy as well as fun.