American Owned Love - Softcover

The title of Robert Boswell's novel, American Owned Love refers to the marquee on the motel where Gay Schaefer and her estranged husband, Sander, meet once a month for a pleasant tryst. "American Owned/Love Covers/All Sins/Couples $20, " the marquee says, and under it Gay and Sander contemplate the many faces of love. Their daughter, Rita, doesn't know about the motel, nor does she realize that her parents aren't actually divorced. In fact, there's quite a lot that Rita doesn't know, including the reason why the river behind her house--the Rio Grande--turns black the night before she starts high school.

The year following the river's inexplicable change sometimes runs as dark as the waters. Rita begins dating her best friend's brother, Enrique Calzado, but also attracts the attention of the violent Rudy Salazar. Meanwhile, Gay's carefully balanced life starts to crumble when she finds herself powerfully attracted to the local basketball coach. Rape, anorexia, and the uneasy race relations along the U.S.-Mexico border are just a few of the issues in American Owned Love. Through it all, love runs like a river, sometimes muddied and black, sometimes translucent, always constant.

ll has a gift for writing people into flagrant, discomfiting existence--as with the incorrigible Dulcie of his acclaimed novel of 1993, Mystery Ride.

Now he conjures up Gay Schaefer, a sultry truck dispatcher who is determined to ignore small-town conventions and possess her life--to make it "original, graceful, adventurous".  Separated from her husband of fifteen years, she meets him once a month at the Desert Oasis Motel for glorious carousing, but pretends they are divorced for the benefit of her teenaged daughter. Meanwhile, hanging around with the local basketball coach sends a strange charge darting through her chest--a casual affair, at first, that threatens to upset the balance of her carefully constructed life.

Gay's daughter, Rita, is muddled, pudgy, obliged to admit that she, unlike her mother, doesn't "know how to dress for disaster".  She doesn't even know whether it actually spells disaster when the river behind her house-