Century's Son: A Novel

by Robert Boswell

Century's Son is a piercing and visionary novel that explores the surprisingly diverse lives of one midwestern American family. In the years following the suicide of their teenaged son, husband and wife Morgan and Zhenya have settled into a staid and loveless marriage. Morgan is a one-time union leader who is now happy as a simple garbageman; Zhenya is a professor at the local state university, whose balance is about to be offset by the arrival of her famous father, a Russian political dissident-cum-American cultural critic who, among other things, claims to have had the chance to murder Stalin and now celebrates his hundredth birthday.

Genres: Fiction, Literature

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Robert Boswell is the author of eleven books, including The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, a story collection with Graywolf Press, in April 2009. His novels: Century's Son, American Owned Love, Mystery Ride, The Geography of Desire, and Crooked Hearts. His other story collections: Living to Be 100 and Dancing in the Movies. His nonfiction: The Half-Known World, a book on the craft of writing, and What Men Call Treasure: The Search for Gold at Victorio Peak, a book about a real-life treasure hunt in New Mexico (co-written with David Schweidel). His cyberpunk novel Virtual Death (published under the pseudonym Shale Aaron) was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award.

His play Tongues won the John Gassner Prize. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, and the Evil Companions Award. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Best Stories from the South, Esquire, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Colorado Review, and many other magazines.

He shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, Antonya Nelson.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this one. Boswell manages an interesting story and individualized characters who interlock, but not such that they're all gears in the same exact machine. They turn within themselves and sometimes catch on each other. The book moves, but it isn't a single central puzzle that is either solved or not. Some things progress, and others don't. That just made it feel more realistic to me, much more like an individual and actual family of somewhat broken somewhat not people.

[Kristen Claiborn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Every now and then I have the opportunity to really dig into some books on my TBR backlist. It doesn’t happen as often as I’d like, but my reading lists are self-imposed so I only have myself to blame. This book has been hanging around my house for years…it followed me from Albuquerque to Indianapolis, from a crappy apartment to the house I now share with my now-husband. I’m not entirely sure why it stuck around as long as it did, however, I finally decided to pick it up and read it. After I finished, I had some regrets.
Books aren’t THAT big. One book doesn’t take up THAT much space, and by itself it’s certainly not even very heavy. Yet after I finished this one, I felt the weight of every book that I kept around for no logical reason. I have a copy of The Catcher in the Rye that I’ve held onto since high school and I have no idea why. Is it because I need to revisit it every now and then to remind myself how terrible it is? I dunno. This particular book wasn’t huge, thank goodness. If it had been a big one, I might have abandoned my love for reading altogether. None of the characters in this book seems happy. They all appear to hate their lives and current situations. They don’t even seem to like each other. Is that the lesson of this book? To remind us that life is just a series of tolerances until we die? Why did Boswell write a book about nothing very specific except unhappiness and inevitability?
I genuinely didn’t like this book. It was a struggle to get through. I felt like I was watching old episodes of Seinfeld…except every now and then the cast of Seinfeld laughed. I can’t get the hours it took to read it back, but I assure whoever has to move my books in the future that this tome will not be amongst them.

[Marvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peopled by a set of wonderful characters: a married couple--he, a garbage man; she, a political science professor at a university in an Illinois college town; their 20-year-old daughter & her 6-year-old son; the wife's eccentric elderly father (the "century's son"), who claims to have lived the entire 20th century & witnessed many of its key events, including an opportunity to assassinate Stalin; and a number of other richly portrayed lesser characters. The couple's son, then 12, committed suicide years earlier, and the marriage has suffered since. It seems like a sad, uneventful story, but it's one of those fundamentally life-affirming stories because of the wonderful characters & the very keenly observed domestic details, which made me smile in recognition. The intimate details include 4 brief but brilliant passages from the perspective of the family's aging, suffering dog. A brilliant book.

[Marguerite Hargreaves · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling portrait of a family divided and united by loss. The family members are both ordinary and exotic. Their moral dilemmas are navigated with grace, ambiguity and humor. Robert Boswell moves events along at a thoughtful pace; his characters are nuanced and memorable. He turns a phrase nicely, too:
"Wisdom that fit into a lunch box, that was what the public wanted. Here and everywhere. Americans were no more shallow than any other people, just more pampered, so they had come to treasure their shallowness, making pop singers and television actors their most revered leaders. Pampered but lovable. He loved America, even though he held it in contempt. Love and contempt were not incompatible. In fact, one was rarely found without the other."
I'll be looking for more of Boswell's work.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Everyone you knew was merely a coincidence in your life--except for your family. Whose blood you shared. Whose story was your story. There was no escaping family."

The story was that of a couple couping with life and I'd say drifting apart. Never really brought back together but never abandoning the other. Their daughter still leading a life set in motion by someone long dead (her brother) continuing along the path she envisioned was dictated to her. Not sure how the grandfather fit into all of this.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a moving portrayal of a family in crisis. The family copes with dealing with a death, and after a few years, are still coping. Also a commentary on memory, change and how we perceive the truths of our lives. My favorite quote from the book: "For what is the world, after all, for anyone, but the accumulation of images that change as we record them and change again as we recall them and change again as we speak them, the words disappearing at the same moment we give them life?"

[Louis Sylvester · Rating 4 out of 5]

I took my time reading this one. I'm not sure why. It's well written and for the most part enjoyable. I think at times Boswell loses focus, but he's handling the POVs of numerous characters and that can tend to pull a story in unexpected directions. Still, an engaging tale of a family dealing with the death of a son. Worth you time.

[Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

The depth of emotional underpinnings, the increasing levies of misunderstanding, as well as certain details (Morgan's faceprint in Zhenya's dress, "as if it had leaked out of her," was a detail I've been chewing on for some time now since I've finished the novel), all make this a wonderful novel.

[Stephen rubin · Rating 4 out of 5]

the boz is a great writer and teacher

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boz. Wow. You read something like this, and it's so tight, so pulled together, that you despair of ever being able to write anything worth a damn. Read it.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting look into how losing a child colors everything else in your life for the rest of your life. Worth the read but nothing I'd rave about.

[Jody Sperling · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I felt this was the most flawed book I've read by Boswell to date, I also found myself deeply moved by the central exploration of love and loving deception. Certain secrets are kept out of deep love, and this book showed that with clarity.