What I'm (Re)reading: The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards - Stories
By Robert Boswell
What I’m Reading is a monthly feature of So Much Stuff, offering brief excerpts from contemporary novels and story collections you’ll want to add to your TBR pile.
In the last weeks of 2024, with a gazillion “best of” lists floating around, I still couldn’t find a book that really did it for me—one I’d be excited to recommend. So I’ve been revisiting some of the books that proved most formative for me as a writer.
Not only does The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards sit in a stack of my all-time favorites, but a kind of generational transit at the end of “No River Wide,” the opening story of Robert Boswell’s 2009 collection, also inspired my debut novel Provenance.
Simultaneous timelines, multiple points of view, and Boswell’s exceptional use of imagery are just a few of the stellar craft elements I’ve studied in this piece. But even after countless readings and analysis, this witty, surprising, and moving story remains a sheer pleasure to read. The whole collection is a beaut—I highly recommend!
Here’s the opening of “No River Wide.”
Both things first: Greta Steno is two places at once and walking. She is in a Chicago neighborhood in the early fall on a sidewalk made ramshackle by tree roots, and she is barefoot in Florida on a warm winter evening, the broad leaves of a banana tree swiping at her hair. She is thirty-nine and forty-two years old.
In Chicago, she wears paint-spattered clothes and walks with her husband to the house of Ellen Riley, who is her closest friend and who is about to move to Florida. In Florida, she is in a tight black dress and walks beside Ellen, whose last name is no longer Riley, and they are on their way to a party. In Chicago, the late-morning air still conjures the façade of summer, and Greta’s husband stumbles on the ragged sidewalk, falling to his knees. In Florida, Greta and Ellen drink scotch from transparent disposable cups, the winter dusk as warm as spring, Greta’s husband two years in the ground.
“A good thing we’re wearing our nasties,” her husband says, examining the tear in the knee of his slacks. Duncan is slow finding his feet. The weight of middle age has settled in his trunk and limbs. He’s been awkward lately, wooden in his expressions. He’d been a lanky boy in a rock band when Greta met him in college. Now their son has the gangly build, while Duncan’s body has become thick and ponderous. Their daughter, thankfully, looks like Greta.
You can find The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards HERE.