These stories have a quality that is almost impossible to find in anyone's writing, and I don't think it really has a name; the voice that speaks to us in every single story is the same, yet each narrator seems to have something indescernible, unidentifiable, that makes them their own person, unique from whoever told the last story. This is something that can only come from deep, personal engagement in the activity of experience, but it also comes from aloof distancing, objectively observing, watching—cataloguing human events and behavior over the course of many years. Since virtually every story is concerned with romantic love and its shock effects, we read with pleasure when we pick up traits of our own romantic partners, such as when we find "a woman with silk panties yet who complained about the cost of bread, who in fact went without bread in order to afford the panties". Now, the question of the boundaries between memoir and fiction, as we all know too well, are greatly in the spotlight these days. Several of the narrators in Loverboys are Latinas from Chicago, academics (Castillo teaches at DePaul) who reminisce about a lover from one sex while they currently enagage in a new relationship with a new lover of the sex opposite that of the previous lover. Check this: "I have a friend who is a writer. She says her lovers hate the fact that she fictionalizes everything that happens between them." It is, though, the author's relentless experiments with both form and content that guarantee this is fiction. One story carries an odyssey of a man who happens across a blond (or a golden) cockroach, captures it, and mates it with an ordinary roach in the hopes of reproducing many more of the light ones. (Enthusiasts of symbolism will love that one!) Another takes the form of numbered paragraphs—a second-person, one-way conversation with a (gone?) lover. A couple of stories are concerned with the movies in a way that only an intellectual who came to maturity and adulthood in the '60s and '70s can be (Fassbinder is mentioned, specifically, but you get the feeling Castillo knows all about Antonioni, the French New Wave and, perhaps, some of the Hollywood films that Kolker discusses in A Cinema of Loneliness).

The title story, which opens the collection, introduces many of the themes, motifs, and scenarios that are explored again and again in the stories that follow and, in order to be concise, I'm going to concentrate on it by listing and discussing some of those. I don't mean the list to be definitive or all inclusive, as the full richness of this work cannot possibly be done justice in a short piece like this. They are: 1. an involvement with academe; 2. sexual relationships of all kinds—hetero-, homo-, bi-; 3. dealing with the pain of a relationship that's over; 4. Mexican-American issues; 5. drinking as a means of coping. (Castillo's fiction, here, is not politically engaged in an overt sense in the way that some of the recent entries on her blog have been.)

In fact, the first paragraph of the story introduces four of the five, with only Mexican-American issues being left out:

So much is implied in this passage that it's hard to know where to begin. The sentence "I ain't got nothing else to do, so I watch them" functions not only in reference to the fact that she's got nothing else to do in the bar but that she's got nothing else to do but hang out in the bar doing nothing (my italics), in the first place. In short order in the story, we're offered links to such existentialists as Camus, Sartre, and Kierkegaard; and, so, we connect the dots. (More on this theme of existentialism shortly.) The comment about the brandy demonstrates that place where she's hanging out can't be very high. The observation that she's seen the two guys "on campus maybe" but "not making out" hints at the idea that the relationship may be dangerous, perhaps that of a student and teacher, or perhaps one of them is married—something. (We can pretty safely conclude something is not 100% kosher if they have to be in the throes of passion in a public watering hole, can we not?) The reference to "on campus" must mean that she's either a student or teacher, herself.

Surely this is what a great writer does—engages the reader in a partnership, provokes and stimulates thinking, connections, implications, possiblities. It is as if the author creates the outline of the paint-by-numbers picture in pencil and then the reader colors it in with her own sensibility.

Very soon after, we see the introduction of Mexican-American identity, and I'd like to comment, briefly, on the way Castillo employs the intermingling of Spanish words with English—a thing that used to be called 'Spanglish'. She does so by ignoring the convention which, in the context of the middle of an English sentence, dictates that the foreign words be italicized. Everywhere in the book, Spanish words and phrases just run together in the same font as the English; they're indistinguishable. I don't believe this is some kind of declaration about languages but, rather, a faithful artistic rendering of the content of the lady's consciousness; it's simply how she thinks, the concrete flow of her thoughts. Earlier, I mentioned Castillo's coverage of Chick Lit on her blog. In that same discussion, she cites an absolutely inane, pathetic observation that some marketing department made about a Latina Chick Lit novel: "Although the novel is peppered with Spanish (there's a glossary) and includes Latin recipes, the authors say the novel deals with universal questions."You can imagine Castillo's reaction to this nonsense; the point I want to make is that her authenticity requires no glossaries, apologies, or explanations, and that her handling of the marriage of the two languages is sterling. Hers is a genuine habitation of an actual consciousness.

The narrator of the story has a joint propreitorship in a bookstore in Chicago with her female lover, then buys her out when the relationship ends, and becomes the sole owner. One day, a flirtatious boy comes in, looking for a book by Camus. He comes back again and again and, eventually, they go out for a taco. They get drunk and become involved. She fears he will be appalled when she reveals that she has only had female lovers for many years, but he seems to be OK with this, at first. However, his very traditional Catholic family cannot tolerate one of its own being with a known lesbian, and he disappears. She's quite hurt, and in order to ease the pain, on the rebound, she tries another lesbian relationship, only to be berated for drinking too much.

The critical passage is:

This is very bleak, but the story prepares us for it by name-checking throughout: Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Crime and Punishment all come up in the course of the tale. Our narrator simply can't see, while the affair is in progress, that he's just a silly boy out for the quick thrill of being with a much older woman (although, later, she does; the use of the very term "loverboy" is derisive, like calling a brainwashed fan of a musical group a "fanboy".) Her stereotypical, cliched response to bad luck in her relationships is to drown her sorrows in booze and wallowing—"between books and booze, there's only him in my head". A very real kind of existential frustration is revealed, almost by accident, when, at one point, she remarks that she and her loverboy mate like rabbits "with the one big difference that I don't reproduce"; yet later, in an almost throwaway aside, she remarks that she recently spoke at a pro-choice rally. Why? Most of us wouldn't be so fervent about someting that doesn't affect us directly. Perhaps this is what Is life even supposed to make sense? refers to: illogical choices about which we nevertheless have conviction. Certainly Camus thought along these lines, himself; the narrator and her lover only meet when he cannot find a copy of The Rebel in her bookstore. The point of the story seems to be that only love, only relationships, can give us relief from "our usual comatose state of being".

I'll conclude with some observations brought up in a somewhat unfavorable review of Loverboys by Louise Titchener that appeared in The Washington Post around the time of publication (most reviews were positive), because these observations represent what is, doubtlessly, the point of view of many readers. Titchener wrote:

The storytelling model that Titchener lays out is, of course, Aristotelian in nature, and there's nothing wrong with it. Many of the most memorable fictions in history proceed accordingly, and I must say, with complete frankness, that the "show-don't-tell" model, as she calls it, definitely engages the reader at a more emotional, visceral level than some other methodologies; if you like, it goes for the heart rather than the head. Excellent, but to be a champion to the point of excluding other ways of storytelling might be a bit depriving, as I feel this collection of stories shows. Sometimes, when you work a little harder at reading, the payoff is that much greater.