Trouble with Girls

by Marshall Boswell

Book Overview

This is about Parker, from Memphis, who is trying to become a man. He's twelve going on thirteen when we first meet him and suffering through an inning of Little League baseball. He's playing right field, in position and praying a ball won't come his way. It's a scene that sets the theme of his young life-he's ready, but he's terrified. Parker's progress through middle-class life-high school, college, graduate school (he drops out), paying job in...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565123441
• ISBN13: 9781565123441
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Great Collection

This collection is for all you lovers of Paul Weller, all you readers of Trouser Press. It will make you wonder where all the friends of your youth have gone, those who grew up 'in various and sundry ways' without you. Lovely.

troubled by girls

Marshall Boswell's TROUBLE WITH GIRLS is a well written, emotionally compelling, and just plain smart collection of stories. By poignantly revealing the ennervated soul of the post-modern American male, he creates a protagonist that we want to grab by the collar and shake ("You're blowing it!) and yet sympathetically cheer on to find fulfillment. Propelled by prose both Proustian in its circumlocuitous convolutions and yet obviously contemporary in diction and manner, these stories unfold in sequences reminescent of the slo-mo scenes of your favorite relationship car crash. Boswell knows his material--boys and girls, the seventies, eighties, and nineties as the threshing floor of American malehood, dating, grad school, "the real world"--and in these ten pieces, he uses that knowledge to engage the reader fully in the plight of his narrator's movement from naivety to experienced naivety. A great book.

Sadam May Be Dead But Boswell's Sure Not

Marshall Boswell's collection of stories is simply wonderful, but they are wonderful in a painfully poignant sort of way. They focus on the life of a likeable young man alternately struggling and delighting in the quakes and throes of youth in Memphis, Tennessee during the eighties. These stories give the reader a jolt of pleasure and recognition--they take you back to those days, whether you were a parent, a child or an ageless hanger-on. There is not a whiff of false nostalgia here, either. Boswell is such a careful observer that one is translated back in almost Proustian fashion--swiftly, indelibly, body and soul. The tone, true to the collection's protagonist, is unassuming, cautious and at the same time full-blooded. But brooding over the work is Boswell himself, who knows very well--as his protagonist does not yet--that those aches and terrors of teenhood are worth the price that must be paid. The story "Born Again" is a masterpiece. To read it is to yearn mightily to return to one's youth, eyes and heart wide-open. Splendid.

In Between Venus and Mars

The ten stories in Boswell's debut book of fiction had me howling with laughter and sympathy from the first page. Uncannily, through ten interrelated stories, Boswell manages to capture the feel - exactly - of growing up in a certain time period, in a certain part of the country (not too close to the action, not too far), while listening to certain forms of pop music. And the music is important, forming as it does a motif that appears in practically every story, charting not only the central character's taste but also establishing what is "in" as the years click by - a cultural gauge made all the more heart-wrenching by Parker's repeated failure to connect to that volatile "coolness." Novelistic in its scope, the underlying theme of the story collection seems to be nothing less than the sexual initiation and maturity of the hero. The first story, "Ready Position," begins with puberty (and brings to mind David Foster Wallace's "Forever Overhead"), and the last story, "Spanish Omens," ends with marriage. Along the way, our hero is launched from the comfortable but unsatisfying nest of his childhood home into the world of sexual warfare, the hero always "in between" the latest romantic disaster and the next still-idealistic, hopefully tranquil union. An impressive read. Brings to mind Nick Hornby's High Fidelity and also early Updike, specifically Pigeon Feathers. Also plays on some of the themes in Philip Roth's My Life as a Man.

Stories that read like a novel

Trouble With Girls is a super collection of stories that flow together to form what reads like a novel. The stories tell (the majority of) the life of Parker Hayes, starting at age thirteen at a little league baseball game through to his mid-thirties, all the while telling of his (lack of) readiness to handle the tasks of life, and more specifically, the task of landing the perfect woman.Set in the 1970's and 1980's we see Parker grow from a child to a man, stumbling from one learning lesson to another (all in a hilarious manner), with each story thrown against the backdrop of the rock music of the days (msuic being his escape, we get a good dose of that backdrop).The stories are written in a such a way that you will recall your own fumblings of youth and find yourself laughing with him along the way. The female characters here (and there are many) tend be a tad stereotypical (and a tad repetitive) but the reader will quickly see Parker is drawn to the same types, doomed to repeat his mistakes. It all builds to a comfortable closure and leaves you feeling content, and ready to start over and read it again.An excellent read. Well worth the cover price.