Their surviving child, Emma, has become a teenage mother and refuses to reveal the identity of her child’s father. The suicide of their son, Philip, some ten years before has left the pair emotionally dead, lacking even the courage or initiative to separate from each other. He is a former labor organizer who now works as a garbage collector, and she is a political science professor and the daughter of a prominent Russian émigré. In the small college town of Hayden, Illinois, Morgan and Zhenya have settled into a loveless, stagnant marriage.
Only a handful of Boswell’s contemporaries have written anything better than Century’s Son.”įrom Robert Boswell, one of America’s most acclaimed and gifted writers, the story of a Midwestern family riven and bound together by tragedy, love, and circumstance. “The texture of this replete portrayal of Middle America and its discontents suggests an inspired collaboration between Anne Tyler and John Cheever. “A moving portrait of a family united and divided by a tragic loss, a subtle meditation on moral responsibility, and a slyly funny comedy of errors, Century’s Son is a heartbreaking, ultimately exhilarating novel by one of America’s finest writers.” Century's Son is a moving portrait of a family coping and in crisis, still, after so many years.
For a long time she had not known to stop herself, but she knew how to learn, as well as how to grieve. Anymore, after a few moments, she would stop herself. Still she would catch a whiff of him or the things that smelled of him, and she would begin to pace the halls to find him. Take, for instance, what the family dog knew: She had not forgotten Philip. The characters are fallible, and their normalcy spirits this collection of personalities to express a range of emotions with authority. After a slightly flat beginning, the story is asserted and the novel builds steam. Robert Boswell's novel involves Zhenya Kamenev, a political science professor soured by the tragedy her union-activist-turned-garbage-collector husband, Morgan, and his thug partner in trouble with the law her daughter, who has never disclosed who fathered the son she had while a teenager and Zhenya's father, Peter, who claims to be a century old and is a minor cultural figure since he was once armed and alone with Joseph Stalin, yet chose not to shoot.īoswell's prose is straightforward and unadorned (which turns out to be a good thing). Within the confines of a Midwestern college town, Century's Son poignantly explores all that remains unsaid between family members still mourning the suicide of a teenage son.
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