Trouble with Girls by Shannon Ravenel - Southern Gothic Novel | Coming-of-Age Story | Perfect for Book Clubs & Literature Lovers

This is a well-written but inconsistent collection of short stories, intended to be read in order and therefore attempting a form somewhere in between an anthology and a novel. But I think other books that have used this form or something like it have executed the concept more successfully, in particular Charles Baxter's The Feast of Love and David Schickler's Kissing in Manhattan. Some of the stories here work quite well by themselves, but the device of connecting them to a book-length narrative adds nothing. Besides featuring the same protagonist, an introspective but unremarkable dud of an everyman named Parker Hayes whose life the book tracks in chronological order, there is no continuity. Parker is given such meager characterization and his adventures synthesize so poorly that each story may as well have given him a different name and been presented independently. Other than Parker, only one character appears in more than one story (and she in only two), and no other common threads link the stories together. Sometimes this just seems careless. In one story, Parker has a pet cat, which subsequently disappears altogether, leaving readers silently to question every so often, "Whatever happened to the cat?" (Maybe this cat is Schroedinger's Cat, dramatically sealed in a box disclosing no certain facts about its fate.)Fortunately, readers who resolve to approach each story as its own individual work will be rewarded by several clever and perceptive pieces. "New Wave" was clearly written by someone who has forgotten none of the salient sociological facts of high-school life. The story is a funny and touching account of the teenage tendency to assert one's individuality by thoughtlessly gravitating towards one or another cliquish movement (often based on musical taste) and the existential angst suffered when these affectations challenge one's authentic personality. (I would be remiss not to note a passage running from page 81-82 that hilariously captures the arbitrary allegiances of rock-and-roll fandom. Read the whole story for this bit, if for nothing else.) The other two highlights in this collection for me were "Grub Worm" and "Between Things." The former is a story of modern heartbreak with the usual accompanying self-pity, but Parker picks up almost enough self-knowledge to soften the blues. "Between Things" chronicles another staple of contemporary romance, the post-relationship relationship with the same person with whom one has ostensibly broken up. Which stories resonate best with any given reader will depend on the nature of his own troubles with girls. Female readers may be irritated by the one-dimensional characterizations of the women in Parker's life, some of whom appear to have been written according to Jack Nicholson's advice from As Good As It Gets: "I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability." But Boswell doesn't breathe much life into characters of either gender, and the one-dimensional supporting women prove far more captivating than the zero-dimensional Parker Hayes. Boswell's insights into human relationships would have succeeded more vividly had he developed a persona to which readers could actually relate.