A winning ensemble cast of therapists and patients make stabs at sanity in Robert Boswell's mordantly funny novel Tumbledown.” —Vanity Fair
“Boswell can write the most refreshingly old-fashioned kind of narrative: one that evokes deep sympathy for all its characters. . . . All the novel's characters know that in adulthood they're supposed to settle for what could pass for a normal life. Maybe it was a C- sort of life, but that was a passing grade. Still, they want to keep hope, wonder and love in their lives. . . . Without a whiff of sentimentality, he shows exactly how elusive such balance can be.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A deft twining of irony and insight on nearly every page. . . . Tumbledown wryly mines the heartache in emotional disturbances, some present from birth and the rest brought on by the business of living.” —The New York Times
“A complicated, nuanced look at human experience and the insights into that experience contributed by people of varying kinds of intelligence. Oh, it's funny, too. . . . What most enlivens Tumbledown is the moving inner life that Boswell imagines for his mentally disabled characters. ” —The Washington Post
“[Tumbledown] blossoms in surprising ways. . . . It's hilarious, sad, messy, and often unintentionally insightful. Boswell manages to treat each of his lost souls—even the most shabby, offensive, and insane among them—with affection and understanding. . . .He's writing excellent books about the complexities, frailties, and triumphs of human relationships in the modern age.” —The Daily Beast
“When most of us think of today's great American novel, we think of Franzen's Freedom or Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad—sprawling stories that comment on contemporary society as we live it. Tumbledown, Robert Boswell's latest, is just such a book—and one you'll stay up until 3 a.m. reading. . . . Boswell is a writer who can see the humanity, and yes, even beauty, in just about anything.” —Oprah. com, "Book of the Week"
“Like a funnier One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, this story focuses on a therapist and his wild yet well-meaning patients, bumbling through life, trying to make sense of the world and one another.” —O: The Oprah Magazine, "Ten Books to Pick Up Now"
“A moving and often darkly hilarious meditation on sanity.” —Houston Chronicle
“[An] intriguing new book. Boswell creates memorable characters with a few well-chosen lines.” —Dallas Morning News
“[Tumbledown] shines a searing spotlight on the human condition. . . [It] is bursting with life. . . . Tumbledown is a welcome return from a grossly overlooked and underrated novelist.” —Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
“With a big heart and a perceptive eye for the layers of wisdom behind the surface kinks of madness, Boswell stands solidly in the literary tradition that brings us understanding through those who don't quite understand.” —Shelf Awareness
“[Tumbledown] is a successful complication of a book: light and dark, difficult and easy, a profound soap opera. . . . From each character's idiosyncrasies, a bustling and believable world emerges.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Dive into Boswell's novel of love affairs, messy friendships, family tragedies, human frailty, and things we don't understand about ourselves. It can make you see the world in a whole new way.” —Bustle
“Within a suspenseful plot spiked with love triangles and flashbacks, Boswell renders each complex psyche and scene with magnificent precision and penetrating vision, fine-tuning our definitions of disorder and healing and deepening our perception of what it is to be normal, what it is to be human.” —Booklist, starred review
“This is a crowded, tender, and captivating novel, the experience of which brings to the fore how reading itself can replenish our love of the imperfect beauty of humanity.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“[An] absorbing tale of modern chaos steeped in moral issues.” —Library Journal
“Boswell displays immense talent for characterization and observation . . . An impressive work.” —Kirkus Reviews
“If you read Tumbledown in public, beware: Boswell's story is barkingly, snort-spurtingly, people-give-you-looks funny. Yet its humor is the most generous kind, uncynical and unsentimental, and woven through an ensemble story so large-hearted it keeps bursting its narrative seams. The result is a brilliant, humane, engrossing argument for how infinitely whacked and contingent life can be, and therefore how desperately we need one another to survive. I finished it with a long contented sigh, thinking, this is why I love reading novels.” —David Wroblewski, author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
“Robert Boswell has always been an extremely appealing writer: uncommonly intuitive, a sparkling observer, graceful yet surprising sentence-to-sentence; and always in pursuit of important complexity in human behavior—a rare gift, which makes his writing increasingly essential.” —Richard Ford
A book that reminds readers that the wages of sin are myriad and include the opportunity to find oneself. James Candler knows better. A counselor at the Onyx Springs Rehabilitation and Therapeutic Center, he seems poised to become the center's youngest director. He has a colorful cast of clients, a fiancee about to arrive from London--he proposed via text message--an expensive car he doesn't respect himself for buying, a drafty stucco McMansion in a bedroom--read bedlam--community, and a roommate, his oldest and best friend Billy Atlas, who can barely get himself out of bed much less hold up the world. The engaged Candler hooks up with a woman he does not realize is his stalker. She, like everyone in the book, is the benevolent avatar of an evil type. Though bad things happen, and Boswell conjures menace with ease, the conclusion of the story will frustrate or please, depending upon your feelings about literary conceits; conceits Boswell handles masterfully. Boswell displays immense talent for characterization and observation, the narrator moving seamlessly among more than a dozen named characters, all with some connection to the haunted and impulsive Candler. Time is elastic, the fate of one character suspended while Boswell moves his attention back to follow a different character through the same few days, hours or minutes. Boswell makes only one misstep in a novel that seems guaranteed to deliver pleasure: Karly Hopper, a client at the rehab center, is drop-dead gorgeous and developmentally disabled, but only enough to make her laugh at everything and flirt with everyone. She's less a character than a waking wet dream, and her redemption--and whom she redeems--is too pat. Boswell (The Heyday of Insensitive Bastards, 2009, etc.), recipient of two NEA Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a PEN West Award for Fiction, shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, writer Antonya Nelson. An impressive work.
