Mystery Ride by Robert Boswell

First published: 1993

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1966-1988

Locale: Rural Iowa, suburban Los Angeles, Tucson, and Chicago

Principal Characters:

• Stephen Landis, a suburbanite who buys an Iowa farm
• Angela (Landis) Vorda, Stephen’s former wife, remarried and rearing their daughter in Southern California
• Dulcie Landis, the teenage daughter of Stephen and Angela

The Novel

Mystery Ride is primarily the story of the marriage and breakup of Stephen and Angela Landis, a couple who purchase an Iowa farm in 1971 with idealistic notions about living in the country. The novel focuses on the events of 1987, eleven years after their divorce, when Angela decides to return to the farm in Iowa from her home in Southern California in order to help their daughter, Dulcie, sort out her teenage angst. Intermittent flashbacks to the late 1960’s and mid-1970’s fill in the background of the couple’s earlier relationship and their growth apart.

The novel opens in 1971, when Stephen and Angela decide to try farming in what seems the idyllic Iowa countryside. The farm they purchase appears perfect until they smell and soon discover years worth of trash decaying in the cellar. The trash must be removed and burned after the rats in the cellar are gassed, and in the light and heat of the fire, both Stephen and Angela think of their young love and its strength in overcoming this dirty job. That optimism is soon undercut, however, because it is the farm itself that will eventually define Stephen’s identity but drive Angela away.

The novel then moves to 1987 and for the next several chapters describes the current situations in Stephen’s and Angela’s lives. Southern California has been comfortable for Angela because her second husband, Quin Vorda, is a successful agent for screen actors. Angela has been working for a volunteer organization serving low-income families. Her interest in social issues has led to a desire to write a shopper’s handbook to encourage consumers to purchase products from only those companies with responsible social, political, and environmental standards. Yet Angela is having increasing difficulty handling Dulcie’s teenage dabbling in drinking and reckless behavior, and she becomes aware of Quin’s most recent infidelity, his fourth. Angela is also newly pregnant. Meanwhile, Stephen, after six years of living alone on his barely solvent farm, invites Leah Odell and her teenage daughter Roxanne, whom he met on a trip to Chicago, to see his farm and consider moving in with him. Leah likes the farm and appreciates Stephen’s gentle demeanor toward his cows, and she and Roxanne decide to settle in shortly before Angela, at her wit’s end with both Quin and Dulcie, decides to bring Dulcie out to her father’s farm in the hope that it will improve her behavior.

The novel then flashes back to 1976, the year of the Landises breakup. It is Stephen’s thirtieth birthday, and they have a party on the farm with his brother, Andrew. In the course of the evening, standing around a bonfire and ritually burning tokens of youth, Stephen throws in his college textbooks and confesses that he has become a farmer, wed to the land, unable to resist its power over him. Angela is devastated by this revelation because she has just received an acceptance into law school. She is shocked to find that what she had thought of all along as an experiment in country living has settled into Stephen’s heart and mind and completes him.

The next several chapters, set in 1987, detail Dulcie’s growing friendship with Roxanne, Stephen’s life of farming, Angela’s return to California, and Quin’s affair with Sdriana. Roxanne falls in love with a neighbor boy, Will Coffey, and they conceive a child. Angela stops to visit Andrew in Tucson, Arizona, on her return trip to California and considers the time she dated Andrew before meeting Stephen. She thinks over her decision to leave Stephen and Iowa. Angela and Quin reconcile after he has broken off his relationship with Sdriana, and he is overjoyed at Angela’s pregnancy.

In another flashback to 1976, the novel describes the days around Angela’s leaving Stephen. She realizes that to stay on the farm will stifle and destroy her goals and aspirations.

Returning to California after the summer, Dulcie meets Sdriana through an arrangement on Sdriana’s part to get back at Quin through his stepdaughter. Dulcie becomes involved with Sdriana’s partying-life neighbors, and she lives more dangerously than ever until Roxanne asks her to return to Iowa to be with her because her baby is not expected to live after its birth. The baby’s death is an epiphany for Dulcie, who realizes the seriousness of life and love, and the surrounding events confirm for Leah that she cannot stay with Stephen. Dulcie elects to remain in Iowa with her father, away from the exaggerated oddities of her life in Southern California. That Christmas, Stephen and Dulcie meet Angela and Quin at Andrew’s house in Tucson, and Angela experiences a strong false labor that throws Stephen into a wash of memory of Dulcie’s birth.

In one last flashback to 1966, the novel describes Angela and Stephen’s first meeting, when she has had an accident on the icy freeway in Chicago and Andrew sends his brother to pick up his stranded girlfriend.

The novel closes with one of Stephen’s cows dying with an unborn calf inside her. Stephen has been futilely trying to keep the animal alive for many weeks, even getting new credit cards to pay the mounting veterinary bills. The cow dies, and in desperation, he hoists her up on a barn beam to butcher her in an attempt to at least use the carcass for meat. As he opens her abdomen, a calf’s form emerges, but at that moment the barn beam holding her gives way, dropping the carcass and killing the unborn calf. Yet in all the harrowing physical and emotional exhaustion of the scene is the confirmation that, even without success, father and daughter have found something meaningful to do with their lives together.

The Characters

Boswell rounds out the novel with friends and family of the Landises who help to define the identities and goals of Angela, Stephen, and Dulcie. Angela’s second husband, Hollywood agent Quin Vorda, is nearly as different from Stephen as a man can be. He is clean, sophisticated, and a fine dancer whose dreams are populated not with concerns about dairy cows but with plans for extravagant dinner parties. While his magnanimous personality has led him to great success managing a variety of personalities and their acting careers, his philandering has jeopardized his most important relationships. Angela’s semitolerance of Quin’s attraction to other women is ironically compared to her intolerance of Stephen’s love for the land and his commitment, sacrifice, and care for the things that live on his farm.

Murry Glenn is an appliance salesman whom Angela meets while shopping for a refrigerator. Murry has wide knowledge of appliance-manufacturing companies, and Angela enlists him in her mission to inform consumers about the dangers of the products they buy. Murry and Angela set out to write a shopper’s guide to responsible buying. Writing the book is a trial for both, and the subject’s inherent self-contradictions, inconsistencies, and idealism leave Angela feeling less than successful in her attempt to make a difference.

Stephen’s relationship with Leah Odell eventually fails for many of the same reasons that he and Angela could not stay together. Stephen is absorbed in his cows’ needs and in working on the farm to pay bills; combined with Roxanne’s pregnancy and other concerns, Stephen’s absorption leaves neither Stephen nor Leah the energy to make their relationship work.

Stephen’s neighbors are a diverse lot. Former University of Illinois English professor Ron Hardy is a brilliant cynic to whom Boswell gives some caustic, tragicomic, drunken lines that undercut the idealism of Angela and the other characters. On the other hand is Major Coffey, the father of Will Coffey, whose fundamentalist Christian beliefs determine Roxanne and Will’s quick marriage and decision to have the baby in the futile belief that the baby might miraculously live despite the doctor’s diagnosis.

Dulcie’s character is drawn through the distinction between her friendships in California with Maura Yates and Judy Storm, and those in Iowa with Roxanne Odell and Will Coffey. Maura is Dulcie’s age, but she is more promiscuous sexually and more involved with drinking and drug use. Judy lives in the trailer next to Sdriana’s with her vicious dogs and spends most of her time drinking and riding her motorcycle. Dulcie’s teenage rebellion against what she sees as Angela and Quin’s boring, conservative, adult world leads her toward Maura’s and Judy’s behaviors. When she comes to Iowa, Dulcie first mocks Roxanne and Will’s simplicity and naïveté, but through her experiences of the stark and sometimes brutal reality of life and death on the farm and in the lives of friends her age, it becomes apparent that Dulcie will make a successful transition to responsible adulthood.

Critical Context

Mystery Ride’s concern with family life is a common theme is Boswell’s fiction. In novels such as Crooked Hearts (1987) and Dancing in the Movies (1987), he also explores the dynamics of family relationships. Yet given Boswell’s ability and curiosity in writing about very diverse characters and very different kinds of families, there is little more than a general similarity among the families in the novels.

A more interesting comparison may be to consider Mystery Ride in the context of other writers who are concerned with contemporary farm life. Although some of the action in Mystery Ride takes place in suburban and urban settings, it is the farm around which the characters gather, and they define themselves in relationship to it. Family life on the farm has long been an important subgenre of American literature, and the subject continues to be of interest to current novelists. Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991), Jim Harrison’s Farmer (1976), Douglas Unger’s Leaving the Land (1984), Martha Bergland’s A Farm Under a Lake (1989), and Don Kurtz’s South of the Big Four (1995) are a few of the better-known recent novels that explore the lives of characters living on farms. Like Boswell, these writers consider the tremendous changes occurring on the farm and look at the lives of farmers in original ways. Mystery Ride is an important part of this collection of novels that reconsiders what it means to be a farmer and work the land.

Mystery Ride also effectively reflects some important issues confronting teenagers. Especially in the character of Dulcie, and to some extent in those of Roxanne and Will, Boswell is able to portray the difficulties of growing up. One reviewer of the novel compared Dulcie to J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, as she is a kind of cutting-edge teenager faced with all the complexities of modern family life in the most progressive of American cities. It is interesting that Dulcie finds some kind of understanding and maturity through her experiences on the farm and as a witness to the realities of life and death in cows and in people.

Bibliography

Boswell, Robert. Interview by William Clark. Publishers Weekly 240, no. 4 (January 25, 1993): 65-66. Boswell discusses his fascination with dysfunctional families and his portrayal of them in Mystery Ride and his other fiction.

Boswell, Robert. “So Much Survives a Marriage.” Interview by Susannah Hunnewell. The New York Times Book Review, January 24, 1993, p. 3. Boswell discusses his interest in examining married life and explains that he took the title of Mystery Ride from the lyrics of a song by Bruce Springsteen, whose storytelling abilities he admires.

Kakatuni, Michiko. Review of Mystery Ride, by Robert Boswell. The New York Times, January 22, 1993, p. B2. A lengthy and useful discussion of the novel.

Lee, D. “About Robert Boswell: A Profile.” Ploughshares 22, no. 4 (Winter, 1996): 216-221. A good overview of Boswell’s life and fiction.

Schofield, Sandra. Review of Mystery Ride, by Robert Boswell. The New York Times Book Review, January 24, 1993, p. 3. A provocative discussion of the novel.