Life's a mystery

They were on the ride together, Rox thought, feeling the thrill of it. The mystery ride.

Robert Boswell, Mystery Ride

Life is a journey, so we say. So is marriage or any kind of relationship. You start in one place and end up somewhere else, and how you get there is something of a mystery even after you've arrived at the end.

Robert Boswell's 1992 novel Mystery Ride is not read much today — try finding it in a bookstore — but in the 1990s it was a bestseller. The title may have been a bit deceptive. One wonders how many people bought it assuming it to be a murder mystery, perhaps taking place during a drive across the country. There's plenty of travel in Boswell's story, yet the ride of the title takes place mostly on an Iowa farm.

Very much in love when they buy the farm in 1971, Angela and Stephen Landis each envision a different kind of future. She sees the farm as just a youthful fling, a charming place to live during their extended honeymoon. He actually wants to become a farmer. And so she divorces the man she still loves and moves west with their young daughter, hoping he will follow her. He doesn't.

The story skips forward a number of years when their daughter, Dulcie, has become a troubled teenager whom Angela can no longer manage. She decides to take the girl back to the farm for the summer to see if Stephen can control her. Meanwhile she has remarried to a dashing but unfaithful man named Quinn, while a woman named Leah and her own teenage daughter, Roxanne, have just moved into the farmhouse with Stephen.

In other hands this plot could easily turn into a comedy, but Boswell has other, better ideas. Readers, like the characters themselves, have no idea where this ride might take them.