A book as ambitious and
directionless as Robert Boswell’s Tumbledown is quite the reading experience.
It can be exhausting and even frustrating, and when it works, you see tiny
moments of a master at work, but one thing this book is not is boring, which is
the greatest sin any book can commit. I became curious about this novel, Boswell’s
most recent, after I learned that he was one of David Foster Wallace’s English
professors, and that really shows in some of the writing here, not the least of
which is the setting replacing a halfway house for drug addicts with a halfway
house for the mentally unbalanced. It has the same disjointed narrative
structure in a smaller form, which kind of hinders much of the book’s
potential, as well as the sense of humor, which is dry, witty and never one to
shy away from an immature joke or two. The main character is James Candler, a
successful therapist who is a few steps away from getting a big promotion at
the facility he works at. He is engaged as well, with a nice house and an even
nicer car. Too bad he is in debt, in love with another woman (when you find out
how he got engaged, you won’t blame him) and he must deal with group of heavily
unstable coworkers and patient, like his sad sack friend Billy Atlas, a beautiful
but mildly retarded girl named Karley, and Mick, the schizophrenic who is madly
in love with her. This book is all over the place, which makes reading it a bit
uneven until the end, where a suicide, one you’ll see coming, brings everything
weirdly together. I liked this book for the most part, I applaud its good qualities
and forgive all of its bad ones, and I’m glad I spent some time in this
off-kilter world.
Rating: 4/5
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