Andre Dubus 1936-1999, Storyteller par exellence

Many of us involved with books – reading books, writing books, reviewing books - are well aware fiction writing is a unique calling. Therefore, it is something special when both father and son are accomplished authors. Kingsley Amis and son Martin come immediately to mind as do John Updike and son David; actually, we might think of another father-son fiction writing duo: Andre Dubus and son Andre Dubus 111, author of House of Sand and Fog.

This collection of stories by Andre Senior that's part of the 1980s Vintage Contemporaries series is really a treasure since it would be hard to find someone more a born storyteller. Remarkable. Twenty-three slice-of-life stories, some brief, some long, ranging from five pages to fifty pages that flow and flow and flow. We find a story about a catcher from the Dominican Republic who has a psychic breakdown in the locker room after a ballgame; a fight between husband and wife seen through the eyes of their teenage son; a young Puerto Rican wife reliving her husband being shot dead on a hill in Korea; a husband apologizing to his wife over breakfast after giving her a black eye the previous night when he was drunk - rawboned stories of the wounded heart, stories reminding me at times of Raymond Carver and at other times of Anton Chekhov. Here’s my synopsis of two particularly gripping tales from the collection:

THEY NOW LIFE IN TEXAS
A woman is too intoxicated to drive back to her rural Texas home at night in the snow so she leaves the driving to her husband who is also intoxicated but not enough that he can’t hunch over the steering wheel and slowly guide their car back up the hill to their front door. During the drive, in the darkness, snow piled high on either side of the road, she lets her husband know that adult son Stephen told her about his religious experience. Still hunched over the steering wheel, not taking his eyes off the road, her husband notes the religious experience must have worked since he knocked off the booze and started going to AA.

Once in their driveway, she asks her husband to please drive the sitter home, which he does. Alone, she walks down the hall to check on her four-year-old daughter who is sleeping amongst her stuffed bears and then moves to the room of her older daughter, a six-years-old, and observes how she is also asleep, snuggled up with her three beloved stuffed animals.

The woman sits in the kitchen drinking tea when her husband returns and asks her how she’s doing and, half asleep, shuffles off to bed. Alone again, she walks to the living room and reflects on the movies her husband brought home for her to watch: “Man of Flowers,” which she thought beautiful and “Lucia di Lammermoor,” a movie she found both splendid and sad. The one she did not watch is a horror film.

She loads the horror film in the player and settles in after fixing herself more tea. The film is about a divorced woman living in Southern California with her fourteen-year-old daughter, twelve-year-old son and another daughter, age nine. Some unknown presence, something like a poltergeist, attacks the woman at night, a presence she feels as a sinister force.

The unknown force increases, causing violence to not only the mother but also her three children. The woman sips her tea and reflects on the past conversation she had with her adult son Stephen, how he told her that he heard a voice when driving his car, how he then felt a loving presence enter him and how he surrendered to this presence which gave him the strength to quit drinking. Watching the mother in the movie start to cry, the woman also starts crying. When we learn on the last page the movie is based on true events, we realize the woman in the horror film and the woman in our story might, in fact, be one and the same person.

THE CURSE
Mitchell Hayes stands at the cash register at the bar and reflects on how he is forty-nine years old and now knows what it means to be an old man. He is brooding because he helplessly looked on the previous night when a gang of thugs hopped up on coke raped an attractive blonde young lady in a bathing suit who happened to stroll into the bar to get cigarettes from the cigarette machine. The gang raped her right there on the floor of the bar, right before his very eyes and he couldn’t do a thing about it; and if he tried, he would have been beaten senseless.

After the gang left Mitchell uses the phone to call 911. When the police arrive, including Smiitty, a guy he knew since they both went to the same high school in this small town, Mitchell tells him he could have stopped the rape. Smitty, in turn, tells Mitchell it is a good thing he didn’t try or he would be in the hospital right now.

Mitchell goes home and tells his wife, a nurse, what happened at the bar. She rubs his shoulders and back, sensing just how shaken he is by the experience. The next morning Mitchell also tells his teenage son Marty and teenage daughter Joyce, how the girl was crying and taken to the hospital and all the gang members are now in jail.

The next night Mitchell returns to the bar and watches the faces of all the men and women, watches to see if any of them look at him as if to say that he was a coward or didn’t care enough for the girl to do something to stop the rape. No. Nobody says anything or is looking at him in that way. Mitchell peers down at the floor, at the spot where the girl was raped. He feels old and tired. Mitchell now thinks back at how the girl was lying there after the gang left, how she was crying, how he wanted to at least hold her hand but he didn’t. Most of all, Mitchell thinks back at what the girl said to him, words he took as a curse, a curse he now feels moving into his back and spreading down his spine and into his stomach and legs and arms and shoulders, a curse we know as readers he will be hearing every day for the remainder of his life. ( )

FINAL REVIEW


Andre Dubus 1936-1999, Storyteller par exellence

Many of us involved with books – reading books, writing books, reviewing books - are well aware fiction writing is a unique calling. Therefore, it is something special when both father and son are accomplished authors. Kingsley Amis and son Martin come immediately to mind as do John Updike and son David; actually, we might think of another father-son fiction writing duo: Andre Dubus and son Andre Dubus 111, author of “House of Sand and Fog.”

This collection of stories by Andre Senior that's part of the 1980s Vintage Contemporaries series is really a treasure since it would be hard to find someone more a born storyteller. Remarkable. Twenty-three slice-of-life stories, some brief, some long, ranging from five pages to fifty pages that flow and flow and flow. We find a story about a catcher from the Dominican Republic who has a psychic breakdown in the locker room after a ballgame, a fight between husband and wife seen through the eyes of their teenage son, a young Puerto Rican wife reliving her husband being shot dead on a hill in Korea, a husband apologizing to his wife over breakfast after giving her a black eye the previous night when he was drunk, rawboned stories of the wounded heart, stories reminding me at times of Raymond Carver and at other times of Anton Chekov. Here’s my synopsis of two:

They Now Life in Texas

A woman is too intoxicated to drive back to her rural Texas home at night in the snow so she leaves the driving to her husband who is also intoxicated but not enough that he can’t hunch over the steering wheel and slowly guide their car back up the hill to their front door. During the drive, in the darkness, snow piled high on either side of the road, she lets her husband know that adult son Stephen told her about his religious experience. Still hunched over the steering wheel, not taking his eyes off the road, her husband notes the religious experience must have worked since he knocked off the booze and started going to AA.

Once in their driveway, she asks her husband to please drive the sitter home, which he does. Alone, she walks down the hall to check on her four-year-old daughter who is sleeping amongst her stuffed bears and then moves to the room of her older daughter, a six-years-old, and observes how she is also asleep, snuggled up with her three beloved stuffed animals.

The woman sits in the kitchen drinking tea when her husband returns and asks her how she’s doing and, half asleep, shuffles off to bed. Alone again, she walks to the living room and reflects on the movies her husband brought home for her to watch: “Man of Flowers,” which she thought beautiful and “Lucia di Lammermoor,” a movie she found both splendid and sad. The one she did not watch is a horror film.

She loads the horror film in the player and settles in after fixing herself more tea. The film is about a divorced woman living in Southern California with her fourteen-year-old daughter, twelve-year-old son and another daughter, age nine. Some unknown presence, something like a poltergeist, attacks the woman at night, a presence she feels as a sinister force.

The unknown force increases, causing violence to not only the mother but also her three children. The woman sips her tea and reflects on the past conversation she had with her adult son Stephen, how he told her that he heard a voice when driving his car, how he then felt a loving presence enter him and how he surrendered to this presence which gave him the strength to quit drinking. Watching the mother in the movie start to cry, the woman also starts crying. When we learn on the last page the movie is based on true events, we realize the woman in the horror film and the woman in our story might, in fact, be one and the same person.

The Curse

Mitchell Hayes stands at the cash register at the bar and reflects on how he is forty-nine years old and now knows what it means to be an old man. He is brooding because he helplessly looked on the previous night when a gang of thugs hopped up on coke raped an attractive blonde young lady in a bathing suit who happened to stroll into the bar to get cigarettes from the cigarette machine. The gang raped her right there on the floor of the bar, right before his very eyes and he couldn’t do a thing about it; and if he tried, he would have been beaten senseless.

After the gang left Mitchell uses the phone to call 911. When the police arrive, including Smiitty, a guy he knew since they both went to the same high school in this small town, Mitchell tells him he could have stopped the rape. Smitty, in turn, tells Mitchell it is a good thing he didn’t try or he would be in the hospital right now.

Mitchell goes home and tells his wife, a nurse, what happened at the bar. She rubs his shoulders and back, sensing just how shaken he is by the experience. The next morning Mitchell also tells his teenage son Marty and teenage daughter Joyce, how the girl was crying and taken to the hospital and all the gang members are now in jail.

The next night Mitchell returns to the bar and watches the faces of all the men and women, watches to see if any of them look at him as if to say that he was a coward or didn’t care enough for the girl to do something to stop the rape. No. Nobody says anything or is looking at him in that way. Mitchell peers down at the floor, at the spot where the girl was raped. He feels old and tired. Mitchell now thinks back at how the girl was lying there after the gang left, how she was crying, how he wanted to at least hold her hand but he didn’t. Most of all, Mitchell thinks back at what the girl said to him, words he took as a curse, a curse he now feels moving into his back and spreading down his spine and into his stomach and legs and arms and shoulders, a curse we know as readers he will be hearing every day for the remainder of his life.





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Stories are so different from novels, or supposed to be, and it is rare that you find a writer who masters the genre as well as Dubus. One critic once wrote that it was as if Dubus "were able to breathe light into his stories", if I'm paraphrasing it right, and this is so true: it's a bit like looking at a Rembrandt painting and sensing that light illuminating the darker parts, the parts that had remained unseen until the painter made them visible. And so it is with Dubus perhaps. The people in his stories are hurt, damaged, lonely and resentful. They are also yearning for love or redemption. The genius of Dubus was perhaps that he brought light to them, showing them in their wretched emotional nakedness yet making the reader care for them, and forgive them for their sins. No mean feat. And all that within twenty pages or less. ( )

Andre Dubus is my favorite American short story writer. In fact, he is one of my few favorite American writers period. He has the realism of Cheever and Carver, but more warmth than Carver and Hemingway. His prose is understated and never unnecessary; he is one of the few writers I have read where every word in every sentence, and every sentence is not only necessary, but meaningful as well (Tom Robbins and Virginia Woolf are others). He is worth reading for his prose alone. Many, if not most, of his stories take place in the New England area, and as such allow for an interesting portrait of that area. I used to want to live in Maine, before I wanted to live in Savannah, GA, so I have some interest in the area itself. Dubus was apparently born in Louisiana, but spent his later years in Haverhill, Massachusettes. The characters are humanely and fully realized, as if they could be someone you pass on the street. The stories seem like briefly opened windows into the characters' lives. As I said above, Dubus has the realism of Carver and Hemingway, but his prose and his treatment of his characters is much warmer than Hemingway's sparse dialogue or Carver's post-modern coldness. The characters do struggle with how to connect to one another, but it doesn't feel cold, cut off or lifeless; it doesn't feel bleak (even though some of the subject matter certainly is). I don't need warm fuzzies to make me a happy reader, and Dubus offers few of these, but I do need a certain level of humanity to be present in what I read. And it's this, the variety of humanity, that Dubus offers us. ( )

I didn't think I would like this guy since he's part of religion--but his stories are genuinely interesting, heartfelt, and interesting.