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Selected Stories of Andre Dubus
These twenty-three stories represent the best work of one of the finest and most emotionally revealing writers in America. Andre Dubus treats his characters--a bereaved father stalking his son's killer; a woman crying alone by her television late at night; a devout teenager writing in the coils of faith and sexuality; a father's story of limitless love for his daughter--with respect and compassion. He turns fiction into an act of witness.
476 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
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About the author
Andre Dubus
93 books268 followersAward-winning author Andre Dubus II (1936–1999) has been hailed as one of the best American short story writers of the twentieth century. Dubus’s collections of short fiction include Separate Flights (1975), Adultery & Other Choices (1977), and Dancing After Hours (1996), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Another collection, Finding a Girl in America, features the story “Killings,” which was adapted into the critically acclaimed film In the Bedroom (2001), starring Sissy Spacek, Tom Wilkinson, and Marisa Tomei. His son Andre Dubus III is also a writer.
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November 21, 2022
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.
October 9, 2011
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.
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.
Read
March 13, 2012Probably the last time I read this book straight through was sometime early in the last decade; I bought his kid's memoir on Kindle, and then saw the Selected Stories on sale and snapped them up. The best of Dubus on my ereader: how could I resist?
"Rose" remains as much of a heartstopper as when I first read it, in....God could it have been 1987? 1986? I think so, my copy of The Last Worthless Evening dates to then. My dad read me "A Father's Story" at around the same time, an amazing experience for both of us (my dad would read me stories by Flannery O'Connor, Ring Lardner, Eudora Welty, and then we'd talk about them....). I am still amazed "Molly" is not in his Selected, it's probably my favourite story he ever wrote. And Dubus's portrayal of women remains amazing in stories like "The Fat Girl," "The Pretty Girl," "Voices from the Moon," and even slight efforts like "Leslie in California" and "They Now Live in Texas." Dubus's natural length was obviously the novella; his sentences are long and elegant, circling around an idea or theme before beginning to develop it. And yet his characters work at places like Sunnycorner and Timmy's bar, drink Miller and Bud, go fishing and shooting. A surprising number of them are soldiers; Dubus served six years in the Marines, and there's that constant sense of being shoved up against and forced to understand people radically different from you which comes from institutionalism. His son would later experience the same kind of thing, and write about it too, working with addicts and prisoners. Dubus doesn't so much plot his stories as send his characters into dire situations to record the results: a wife is raped by her husband, a father tries to avenge his son's killing, a daughter grows up with her permissive mother and absent father, a boy's father marries his older brother's ex-wife. What you remember are the extraordinary people, with their ordinary, usually diminutive names: Rose, Polly, Anna, Molly, Richie, Wayne, Steve.
....And yet, after reading Townie, his son's wrenching, disturbing memoir, it's a little hard to see Dubus as the voice of the working class he was once held up as (I had the same difficulty with Raymond Carver after reading his biography). It's like Dagoberto Gilb saying Carver's characters weren't like the actual construction workers he knew who snorted heroin and got into fights. Once you hear it, you can't quite tune out the false note, the tone of middle-class romanticization of addiction and poverty. What saves Dubus more than Carver are his amazingly vivid characters, and keen, emotionally tinged observation: he can turn a young girl opening a pack of cigarettes into a life-defining moment. (Moral: It is probably never a good idea to learn too much about your favourite writers.)
"Rose" remains as much of a heartstopper as when I first read it, in....God could it have been 1987? 1986? I think so, my copy of The Last Worthless Evening dates to then. My dad read me "A Father's Story" at around the same time, an amazing experience for both of us (my dad would read me stories by Flannery O'Connor, Ring Lardner, Eudora Welty, and then we'd talk about them....). I am still amazed "Molly" is not in his Selected, it's probably my favourite story he ever wrote. And Dubus's portrayal of women remains amazing in stories like "The Fat Girl," "The Pretty Girl," "Voices from the Moon," and even slight efforts like "Leslie in California" and "They Now Live in Texas." Dubus's natural length was obviously the novella; his sentences are long and elegant, circling around an idea or theme before beginning to develop it. And yet his characters work at places like Sunnycorner and Timmy's bar, drink Miller and Bud, go fishing and shooting. A surprising number of them are soldiers; Dubus served six years in the Marines, and there's that constant sense of being shoved up against and forced to understand people radically different from you which comes from institutionalism. His son would later experience the same kind of thing, and write about it too, working with addicts and prisoners. Dubus doesn't so much plot his stories as send his characters into dire situations to record the results: a wife is raped by her husband, a father tries to avenge his son's killing, a daughter grows up with her permissive mother and absent father, a boy's father marries his older brother's ex-wife. What you remember are the extraordinary people, with their ordinary, usually diminutive names: Rose, Polly, Anna, Molly, Richie, Wayne, Steve.
....And yet, after reading Townie, his son's wrenching, disturbing memoir, it's a little hard to see Dubus as the voice of the working class he was once held up as (I had the same difficulty with Raymond Carver after reading his biography). It's like Dagoberto Gilb saying Carver's characters weren't like the actual construction workers he knew who snorted heroin and got into fights. Once you hear it, you can't quite tune out the false note, the tone of middle-class romanticization of addiction and poverty. What saves Dubus more than Carver are his amazingly vivid characters, and keen, emotionally tinged observation: he can turn a young girl opening a pack of cigarettes into a life-defining moment. (Moral: It is probably never a good idea to learn too much about your favourite writers.)
Currently reading
October 27, 2007Only two stories in so far (short stories are my solace when grading papers, so I grade a certain number then read a story, and so on). I might sell my soul to be able to write like this. Wow.
May 18, 2018
Picked this one off my abundant shelves(I got even more books today from the transfer station!) and read the first story last night. My first awareness of the writer came from reading about the movie version of "In the Bedroom" a few years ago. I MAY have read something(s) of his in The New Yorker. Goodreads is acting up right now and I'm getting PISSED OFF! Screw it.
1 - "Miranda Over the Valley" - a mournful take on the risks of love and sex. Be careful out there! Includes a few words borrowed from Joyce. I see that some comparison has been made between Mr. Dubus and Raymond Carver, but this story reminds me more of Alice Adams.
2 - "The Winter Father" - More mournful Massachusetts middle-class melodrama. The price of divorce and how we adjust and muddle along.
3 - "Killings" - An excellent, tense, grim and mournful story that was the basis for the acclaimed film "In the Bedroom." After reading the next story I'm thinking that AD had a bit of obsession with lower-middle-class/blue collar relationship/emotional dysfunction and the tendency toward violent conflict "solutions" by men with guns.
4 - "The Pretty Girl" - Another violent tale set in NE Massachusetts. He doesn't name the town, but I'm thinking Haverhill. This was a long story(60 pages) and after a while the long interior monologue paragraphs focusing on the "narration" of the two protagonists began to wear on my patience. Something of a cross between Raymond Carver and William Faulkner(stream of consciousness) I'd say. I just wanted the crazy-violent ex-husband to depart one way or another(the violent way as it turned out) and have the story end. About 20 fewer pages would have sufficed and I found myself skimming the last 20 pages or so. Boring ... I think I understand what the author was after and that to do his concept(casting a light on the inner-lives of two blue-collar nobodies) justice he had to follow his nose to the end. To me, however, these were just two clueless, boring, emotionally and intellectually limited people. Again I say ... boring. Updike did this magnificently in his Rabbit series, but from the outside looking in. AD tried from the inside out and for me it didn't work. Boring and annoying ...
- Kittery and the Trading Post get a shout-out. My parents(and my) home town for a while.
5 - "Graduation" - another story about the perils of youthful sex, particularly for young women who get labeled as "available." I don't know how it is these days but it seems from what I've read that the atmosphere in Jr. High and H.S. is more charged and dangerous than ever because of social media. The gal in this story deceives her future husband, but she had a good reason for doing it. Society DOESN'T(still) treat men/boys and women/girls equally when it comes to sex. Boys are supposed to go out and get it, while women are supposed to hold on to it. Crazy ...
6 - The Pitcher - and yet another story about the perils of life-love-sex-marriage. A lonely young gal finds herself to a 1950's, youthful, minor-league baseball version of Bill Belichik(sp?). Like our BB, the kid is obsessed with his own path towards success(winning). So she takes a powder and he soldiers on. Funny how much we "admire" people like BB, who are successful in areas that get a lot of attention because of his own "No days off!" mantra. HIS wife finally took a powder after the kids grew up. I assume she was tired of living with a human video-tape watching machine. I'm GLAD that we NE Pats fans(five Super Bowl trophies) have had two obsessed perfectionists to root for, but by their openly expressed political leanings both have shown themselves to be far less than admirable human beings - to me anyway.
7 - "After the Game" - years later in the baseball life of the guy from the previous story. Not really a story. A quick sketch on trauma(?). Not his ...
- I was reminded of Russell Banks a few stories ago. At seems at times to have that kind of earnest awkwardness in his style. Not a smoothie ...
8 - "Cadence" - this one's a very effective invoking of the boot camp experience and how it affects the protagonist and his can't-cut-it friend. I was in Navy basic training back in 1965 but it wasn't like Marine boot camp I'm sure. ICK! The author was in the Marine Corps, so he knows whereof he writes.
9 - "If They Knew Yvonne" - the perils of sex, love, marriage, divorce, sin and repentance all wrapped up in a Catholic upbringing. Good stuff ...
10- "Rose" - a longish story with the beat remaining the same: young love, marriage, sex, the Church, birth control(or lack thereof), kids, no money, the blue collar dead end blues, bad luck in spousal selection, abuse leading to outright nasty violence and death. Made me shed a few tears.
11 - "The Fat Girl" - of particular interest to me because I've been a compulsive eater for pretty much all my life. The cover photo indicates that AD was one of us as well. I'm not so sure his psychological depiction of the woman in question is accurate. It's not ME anyway. But, he might be right that this is ONE person's story of addiction. She's "one of those unfortunates" as Bill W. would put it. Constitutionally incapable of being honest with herself ... in love with food and eating - it's her Higher Power.
12 - "The Captain" - something about Marine Corps/male mythology. Not one of my favorites so far.
13 - "Anna" - the third story(and second straight) that I'm not that crazy about. AD stays on the dysfunctional semi-lower depths of the Merrimack Valley(a bar named Timmie's makes yet another appearance) as he gives an impressionistic view of the lives of two young losers. The title gal is a young lady heading for alcoholism. Well-written but ho-hum ...
14 - "They now live in Texas" - another shortie, and another one about female drinking problems. AA gets a mention. Meh ...
15 - "Voices from the Moon" - a long story in the same general vein as many of the others in this collection: relational/social/emotional dysfunction in NE Massachusetts in the Merrimack Valley. Bars, booze, kinky/compulsive sex, endless cigarettes, drugs, gratuitous male violence, Catholicism, etc. A real-life saga of a blue-collar-middle class family. But ... I didn't care for it, particularly the writing, which tried very hard to GET me to care about all this essentially boring and trivial stuff. Who does this better? How about Richard Ford, Alice McDermott, William Trevor, Alice Munro, Alice Adams, Raymond Carver, John Updike, Tobias Wolff - to name a few. The writing in this story put me into my skim mode over the last 20 pages or so. I just couldn't care about this bunch of dopes and burn-outs. Boring ... tedious ... sonorous ... over-written ... pretentious - a mediocre "sex" novel of the 1950's tarted up with "serious"-sounding prose. So far this is at least the second long story that hasn't worked for me. I noticed that only two of these stories appeared previously in magazines. Is that a giveaway? I've lowered my rating to 3.5* for now. Still time to get back up to a 3.75! I HAVE enjoyed many of these stories but overall it's been a mixed bag.
"Townies," "Leslie in California," "The Curse" = more in the same hopeless, blue-collar downer vein. Does anybody NOT smoke cigarettes in these stories? AD is a cap[able enough writer, but to what purpose? I'm now convinced that this collection has been overrated by his fans.
"Sorrowful Mysteries" - a bit of a welcome change of pace, but still a downer. Visits the Emmett Till murder.
"Delivering" - I liked this one a bit better as it sets itself in a familiar(to me) setting of kid's dealing with divorce(and not wanting too). I could have used a close-in big brother myself. Does a good job of visiting a boy's life: summer, delivering papers, riding a bike, going fishing, baseball and the Red Sox, going to the beach.
"Adultery" - The title has a nice double meaning but the story is back in the all-too-familiar drone-on narrative(to0 long - again!) milieu. Boring ... adult ... middle class ... melodrama. Trying to follow Updike's "Loving"? The setting's the same ... Paragraph after paragraph of piffling, boring blah-blah masquerading via the author's portentous style as being of emotional/spiritual significance. The big reveal at the end is a big ... MEH!
- "She never lied to Hank and now everything was a lie." - a sentence straight out of Harold Robbins!
"A Father's Story" - The late Mr. Dubus finished in much the same vein as previous meandering, sonorous, too-long boring stories. Paragraph after paragraph of the inner musings of an aging, morally challenged, religious bore. Another smoker and drinker(OF COURSE!).
-The continuous eschewing of commonly-used contractions is a dead giveaway of someone(the father) who takes himself way too seriously.
- More pointless spiritual/Catholic blather. Does this dope(we never really learn why his wife left him and took the kids) think that his pal God is OK with his smoking? How about with how he and his daughter deal with a crisis that screams out for them to behave differently at the end? I wound up hating both of them.
- So, finally I lower my rating to 3.25*, which rounds down to 3*. A disappointing finish after a promising beginning. AD had his style and he was a pro at it but he stuck to it way too closely from story to story. Now ... if the style had been consistently better ... the long stories, except for "Rose," seemed to be a bridge to far for him.
1 - "Miranda Over the Valley" - a mournful take on the risks of love and sex. Be careful out there! Includes a few words borrowed from Joyce. I see that some comparison has been made between Mr. Dubus and Raymond Carver, but this story reminds me more of Alice Adams.
2 - "The Winter Father" - More mournful Massachusetts middle-class melodrama. The price of divorce and how we adjust and muddle along.
3 - "Killings" - An excellent, tense, grim and mournful story that was the basis for the acclaimed film "In the Bedroom." After reading the next story I'm thinking that AD had a bit of obsession with lower-middle-class/blue collar relationship/emotional dysfunction and the tendency toward violent conflict "solutions" by men with guns.
4 - "The Pretty Girl" - Another violent tale set in NE Massachusetts. He doesn't name the town, but I'm thinking Haverhill. This was a long story(60 pages) and after a while the long interior monologue paragraphs focusing on the "narration" of the two protagonists began to wear on my patience. Something of a cross between Raymond Carver and William Faulkner(stream of consciousness) I'd say. I just wanted the crazy-violent ex-husband to depart one way or another(the violent way as it turned out) and have the story end. About 20 fewer pages would have sufficed and I found myself skimming the last 20 pages or so. Boring ... I think I understand what the author was after and that to do his concept(casting a light on the inner-lives of two blue-collar nobodies) justice he had to follow his nose to the end. To me, however, these were just two clueless, boring, emotionally and intellectually limited people. Again I say ... boring. Updike did this magnificently in his Rabbit series, but from the outside looking in. AD tried from the inside out and for me it didn't work. Boring and annoying ...
- Kittery and the Trading Post get a shout-out. My parents(and my) home town for a while.
5 - "Graduation" - another story about the perils of youthful sex, particularly for young women who get labeled as "available." I don't know how it is these days but it seems from what I've read that the atmosphere in Jr. High and H.S. is more charged and dangerous than ever because of social media. The gal in this story deceives her future husband, but she had a good reason for doing it. Society DOESN'T(still) treat men/boys and women/girls equally when it comes to sex. Boys are supposed to go out and get it, while women are supposed to hold on to it. Crazy ...
6 - The Pitcher - and yet another story about the perils of life-love-sex-marriage. A lonely young gal finds herself to a 1950's, youthful, minor-league baseball version of Bill Belichik(sp?). Like our BB, the kid is obsessed with his own path towards success(winning). So she takes a powder and he soldiers on. Funny how much we "admire" people like BB, who are successful in areas that get a lot of attention because of his own "No days off!" mantra. HIS wife finally took a powder after the kids grew up. I assume she was tired of living with a human video-tape watching machine. I'm GLAD that we NE Pats fans(five Super Bowl trophies) have had two obsessed perfectionists to root for, but by their openly expressed political leanings both have shown themselves to be far less than admirable human beings - to me anyway.
7 - "After the Game" - years later in the baseball life of the guy from the previous story. Not really a story. A quick sketch on trauma(?). Not his ...
- I was reminded of Russell Banks a few stories ago. At seems at times to have that kind of earnest awkwardness in his style. Not a smoothie ...
8 - "Cadence" - this one's a very effective invoking of the boot camp experience and how it affects the protagonist and his can't-cut-it friend. I was in Navy basic training back in 1965 but it wasn't like Marine boot camp I'm sure. ICK! The author was in the Marine Corps, so he knows whereof he writes.
9 - "If They Knew Yvonne" - the perils of sex, love, marriage, divorce, sin and repentance all wrapped up in a Catholic upbringing. Good stuff ...
10- "Rose" - a longish story with the beat remaining the same: young love, marriage, sex, the Church, birth control(or lack thereof), kids, no money, the blue collar dead end blues, bad luck in spousal selection, abuse leading to outright nasty violence and death. Made me shed a few tears.
11 - "The Fat Girl" - of particular interest to me because I've been a compulsive eater for pretty much all my life. The cover photo indicates that AD was one of us as well. I'm not so sure his psychological depiction of the woman in question is accurate. It's not ME anyway. But, he might be right that this is ONE person's story of addiction. She's "one of those unfortunates" as Bill W. would put it. Constitutionally incapable of being honest with herself ... in love with food and eating - it's her Higher Power.
12 - "The Captain" - something about Marine Corps/male mythology. Not one of my favorites so far.
13 - "Anna" - the third story(and second straight) that I'm not that crazy about. AD stays on the dysfunctional semi-lower depths of the Merrimack Valley(a bar named Timmie's makes yet another appearance) as he gives an impressionistic view of the lives of two young losers. The title gal is a young lady heading for alcoholism. Well-written but ho-hum ...
14 - "They now live in Texas" - another shortie, and another one about female drinking problems. AA gets a mention. Meh ...
15 - "Voices from the Moon" - a long story in the same general vein as many of the others in this collection: relational/social/emotional dysfunction in NE Massachusetts in the Merrimack Valley. Bars, booze, kinky/compulsive sex, endless cigarettes, drugs, gratuitous male violence, Catholicism, etc. A real-life saga of a blue-collar-middle class family. But ... I didn't care for it, particularly the writing, which tried very hard to GET me to care about all this essentially boring and trivial stuff. Who does this better? How about Richard Ford, Alice McDermott, William Trevor, Alice Munro, Alice Adams, Raymond Carver, John Updike, Tobias Wolff - to name a few. The writing in this story put me into my skim mode over the last 20 pages or so. I just couldn't care about this bunch of dopes and burn-outs. Boring ... tedious ... sonorous ... over-written ... pretentious - a mediocre "sex" novel of the 1950's tarted up with "serious"-sounding prose. So far this is at least the second long story that hasn't worked for me. I noticed that only two of these stories appeared previously in magazines. Is that a giveaway? I've lowered my rating to 3.5* for now. Still time to get back up to a 3.75! I HAVE enjoyed many of these stories but overall it's been a mixed bag.
"Townies," "Leslie in California," "The Curse" = more in the same hopeless, blue-collar downer vein. Does anybody NOT smoke cigarettes in these stories? AD is a cap[able enough writer, but to what purpose? I'm now convinced that this collection has been overrated by his fans.
"Sorrowful Mysteries" - a bit of a welcome change of pace, but still a downer. Visits the Emmett Till murder.
"Delivering" - I liked this one a bit better as it sets itself in a familiar(to me) setting of kid's dealing with divorce(and not wanting too). I could have used a close-in big brother myself. Does a good job of visiting a boy's life: summer, delivering papers, riding a bike, going fishing, baseball and the Red Sox, going to the beach.
"Adultery" - The title has a nice double meaning but the story is back in the all-too-familiar drone-on narrative(to0 long - again!) milieu. Boring ... adult ... middle class ... melodrama. Trying to follow Updike's "Loving"? The setting's the same ... Paragraph after paragraph of piffling, boring blah-blah masquerading via the author's portentous style as being of emotional/spiritual significance. The big reveal at the end is a big ... MEH!
- "She never lied to Hank and now everything was a lie." - a sentence straight out of Harold Robbins!
"A Father's Story" - The late Mr. Dubus finished in much the same vein as previous meandering, sonorous, too-long boring stories. Paragraph after paragraph of the inner musings of an aging, morally challenged, religious bore. Another smoker and drinker(OF COURSE!).
-The continuous eschewing of commonly-used contractions is a dead giveaway of someone(the father) who takes himself way too seriously.
- More pointless spiritual/Catholic blather. Does this dope(we never really learn why his wife left him and took the kids) think that his pal God is OK with his smoking? How about with how he and his daughter deal with a crisis that screams out for them to behave differently at the end? I wound up hating both of them.
- So, finally I lower my rating to 3.25*, which rounds down to 3*. A disappointing finish after a promising beginning. AD had his style and he was a pro at it but he stuck to it way too closely from story to story. Now ... if the style had been consistently better ... the long stories, except for "Rose," seemed to be a bridge to far for him.
June 15, 2020
I lost interest in the stories 2/3 of the way through. There were a lot of Catholic guilt, sex, and relationship stories taking place sometimes in New England and sometimes in the Bayou.
May 27, 2013
Dubus is often called a "writer's writer," which in general seems a dubious compliment. Are writers truly capable of identifying subtleties in a colleague's work that the average reader can't? When a writer is granted this appellation, I think it's more likely his work is viewed as stylish but slow-paced, elliptical, the equivalent of an art house film or avant-garde play. A select few--the cultured--will enjoy it; the rest of us stumble through wishing we were reading John Grisham. This is particularly true of Dubus's stories. Let me admit I'm biased by having read Dubus's son's memoir "Townie," in which Andre Dubus III paints an ambivalent portrait of his father. "Townie" is in some ways the polar opposite of Dubus's "Selected Stories." Where the stories are meandering and contemplative, "Townie" is tightly focused, compulsively readable. But maybe the larger issue here is the treatment of the subject matter. Both books address divorce, for instance, but come at it from different angles. Dubus's son, in "Townie," suffers the collateral damage of his parents' divorce. His evocation of this time, when he and his siblings were thrust into a hardscrabble life, is visceral and moving. But the senior Dubus, though returning to the themes of divorce and infidelity repeatedly, approaches them as though from a great distance. There is no immediacy, nothing at stake. His characters are almost exclusively working class--soldiers, waitresses, stable owners--yet their thoughts emerge on the page as poetical abstract philosophical inquiries. I'm not saying working class people can't think deeply; it's that these reveries intrude on the narrative momentum of the stories. It's as though Dubus feared his story wasn't "literary" enough, so he thought he better incorporate a flowery interlude to wow the critics. But it's the old adage of "show don't tell." Dubus does too much telling, not enough showing, and it's what separates him from better writers like Raymond Carver and Richard Ford, who explored the same alienated working class people in their stories. Dubus's stories drag on too long; he doesn't seem confident about where to begin or end. And he can't seem to escape his preoccupations: divorce and infidelity, as mentioned, but also Catholicism and Marine culture. The facts of Dubus's life, the failed relationships, he tries to transpose into art but without any of the attendant emotion. One almost gets the sense none of it caused him undue grief. The essays in "Broken Vessels," written after the accident that confined him to a wheelchair, seem more plainspoken, closer to the truth. The stories are okay, but I would recommend reading the essays instead, then read "Townie."
July 30, 2023
Got interested in him after finding this in a little free library in Nashville and because I've always heard good things about him and because he actually did the opposite of me in terms of life.
He started out in south Louisiana, though not NOLA, and went up and settled in the Merrimack Valley in Massachusetts. Not just anywhere in Mass, either; pretty much exactly where I grew up. Apparently, my parents knew a couple who were friends of his back in the 90's.
I have longtime friends in some of the towns where these stories are set, and so I can get the special kick out of picturing the locations in that unique way you can when you've actually been where the fiction takes place.
You can tell how respected he was from the blurbs. His reputation was solid among his contemporaries and it's easy to see why. He has a finely tuned sense of pacing and of dialogue and he certainly knows these people well.
There's a sort of wintry lyricism that pervades the sentences, a little touch of maybe Carver and more of Hemingway (everyone's drinking and fatalistic and just this shy of inarticulate and too many things are often referred to as "fine") but apparently Chekhov was his number one hero. It's all about the internal drama, the lives more or less unlived in a conventional sense, and the small gestures that speak volumes.
I understand why these absorbing, nuanced, acutely observed stories lend themselves so easily to movies. In The Bedroom is an exquisite work of art. The visual sense is there, and there's a deep understanding of the characterization that I'm sure an actor would love to sink their teeth into.
I like how multifaceted his sense of drama is. There's the Rashomon effect always in play, toggling between the finely shaded gradations of emotion and motivation between the characters. That's very much how it is in life, isn't it? Everyone is mulling over the existential raw stuff of life while they leave to go for a walk or make toast or commit adultery or contemplate the infinite.
I've always been a fan of the old saying, not sure who said it, that in the greatest dramas no one is wrong. That's of course not always true but at the same time you know what that's about. Renoir, Jean not his painter pops, used to say that the terrible thing in life is that everyone has their reasons. No doubt about that. They also say to know all is to forgive all, which I'm not totally sure about, but I'd like to give it a try.
For me, the stories that stood out the most were: Miranda Over The Valley, Cadence, The Fat Girl, The Curse, and the closer A Father's Story which I admit did not wound me as much as it did when I first encountered it maybe twenty years ago now. Even though I'm actually a father now, which is maybe a little weird. I don't know. But the general level of quality is very consistent, something that I appreciate more lately.
At times it does seem like he's always going over pretty much the same old ground, men and women and infidelity and the church and the struggle to make it through the loneliness of life. One starts to want a little more variety, a little change in the register, and some new locations to sketch out.
Not bad topics, though, are they? I don't necessarily agree with the character who says "we don't have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we've got." A bit modest for my taste, and who decides what a great life is, anyway?
You see what she means, though. Reading Dubus (rhymes with 'abuse' in the original Cajun) feels good for my brain, it's encouraging even, and the voice in my head that narrates these pages is almost soothing, in terms of how much it sees and understands about these ordinarily desperate, sensual, silently questing people, humming through the long quiet operas of their lives.
August 16, 2020
One star deducted only because all the stories were so grim that after a while I found myself avoiding the book although the writing itself is without any wavering - simply brilliant at all times.
Andre Dubus is a writer I hadn't read before. I was tipped off by Richard Yates biography - Dubus was his student at Iowa. I am a great admirer of Yates and thought that this is probably as grim as it gets.
Apparently not. Every story of the 23 in Dubus Selected Stories deals either with murder, rape, death, terminal illness, divorce. violence, stalking or self-loathing. After some time I became cautious and afraid - a story that had quite innocent first few pages always had a turn for the worst eventually.
Dubus characters are working-class through and through. Everybody smokes, everybody drinks, many have no dreams apart from getting through the day and making ends meet. His prose isn't as sparse as Carver's to whom he is often compared. But it is economical enough to make it crystal clear. There is not a sentence or paragraph amiss. Some stories are so good that you can't help but be in awe of his ability to pinpoint a character, to make him or her so believable that you are certain - he exists somewhere or has existed. Something this real can't be made up.
Despite the depressiveness, the stories are not sentimental. They walk the very fine line of not judging but simply observing with a very watchful eye. All the characters are playing with the cards they have health with and doing it the best way they can. A recurring theme in the book is a father's relationship with his children, especially with their daughters. There are some scenes that are heartbreakingly moving and some that I would really prefer to forget. Dubu himself had a tough life and some of what he experienced has clearly affected his work.
This a very powerful and strong short story collection but it definitely isn't for everyone. But if you can see through the actions of characters and understand the pain that almost always proceeds and leads to evil, then those stories are interesting analysis on that.
Andre Dubus is a writer I hadn't read before. I was tipped off by Richard Yates biography - Dubus was his student at Iowa. I am a great admirer of Yates and thought that this is probably as grim as it gets.
Apparently not. Every story of the 23 in Dubus Selected Stories deals either with murder, rape, death, terminal illness, divorce. violence, stalking or self-loathing. After some time I became cautious and afraid - a story that had quite innocent first few pages always had a turn for the worst eventually.
Dubus characters are working-class through and through. Everybody smokes, everybody drinks, many have no dreams apart from getting through the day and making ends meet. His prose isn't as sparse as Carver's to whom he is often compared. But it is economical enough to make it crystal clear. There is not a sentence or paragraph amiss. Some stories are so good that you can't help but be in awe of his ability to pinpoint a character, to make him or her so believable that you are certain - he exists somewhere or has existed. Something this real can't be made up.
Despite the depressiveness, the stories are not sentimental. They walk the very fine line of not judging but simply observing with a very watchful eye. All the characters are playing with the cards they have health with and doing it the best way they can. A recurring theme in the book is a father's relationship with his children, especially with their daughters. There are some scenes that are heartbreakingly moving and some that I would really prefer to forget. Dubu himself had a tough life and some of what he experienced has clearly affected his work.
This a very powerful and strong short story collection but it definitely isn't for everyone. But if you can see through the actions of characters and understand the pain that almost always proceeds and leads to evil, then those stories are interesting analysis on that.
Read
October 8, 2014This was my introduction to Dubus' work and I was mightily impressed, particularly by the longer stories ('Rose', 'Voices From the Moon'), particularly 'Adultery' which, to me, artfully conveyed the difference between sin and crime. In al of the stories, the love they make and the drugs they take were insightfully described. Some readers seem to pick up on this line from 'Voices From the Moon' and I can see why: '...we don't have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we've got' and, when you read these tales, you'll understand how apt that is in the world of Dubus' characters.
November 15, 2010
It's about Catholicism, and the Northeast and once the South, and boys and girls and the things they do to each other. I will be reading more Dubus, for sure.
Read
March 10, 2023"We don't have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we've got." (355) "Voices From the Moon"
"It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand." (463) "A Father's Story"
Dubus is a great storyteller. Highlights include: "Miranda Over the Valley", "The Winter Father", "Killings", "The Pretty Girl", "If They Knew Yvonne", "Rose", "Anna", "Voices From the Moon", "Leslie in California", "Delivering", and "A Father's Story".
"It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand." (463) "A Father's Story"
Dubus is a great storyteller. Highlights include: "Miranda Over the Valley", "The Winter Father", "Killings", "The Pretty Girl", "If They Knew Yvonne", "Rose", "Anna", "Voices From the Moon", "Leslie in California", "Delivering", and "A Father's Story".
April 10, 2015
"...We don't have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we've got…"
It took me weeks to read Andre Dubus’ “Selected Stories” because they were very good and very sad. Many of the stories left me reeling from the visceral fears and pains that could not be sidestepped. I had to take breaks and return when I felt ready for more raging sorrow.
Dubus excelled in his vivid and sympathetic rendering of the inner life of his characters. It was as though he had lived each of their outsized emotions and could tell them like they were. He was very convincing.
The stories centered mostly on dysfunctional individuals struggling to survive. Some were stories about young people living dissipated lives lost to drugs, alcohol, and promiscuity (e.g., “Townies”). Heartbreaking tales were told of troubled adolescents fighting a losing battle against the “terrible enemy of (their) body and souls” (“If They Knew Yvonne”), dealing with pregnancy (“Miranda Over The Valley”), or coping with obesity, dieting, self-loathing, and social rejection (“The Fat Girl”). Dubus also had a way of writing about little observations that was unsettling – e.g., dropping live crabs into boiling water and "waiting for them to scream".
In several stories, infidelity, adultery, and divorce loomed large. In “Adultery”, a couple who professed to love only each other openly took lovers; the husband justified his adultery on his disbelief in monogamy when it was pure lust. This story left me quite livid. Dubus described with great understanding the "deep and helpless sorrow, and the anger" children experienced in the throes of their parents' divorce (“Voices Over The Moon, “Delivering”. It was unconscionable that children should be made to bear burdens beyond their years.
The most powerful stories were on fatherhood (e.g., “The Winter Father”, “Killings”, and “A Father’s Story”). Dubus wrote movingly of the extent to which a father would go to defend or shield his children. If you read nothing else, read “A Father’s Story”. It was outstanding as many reviewers too had noted.
There was nothing maudlin about Dubus' prose. The complexities of the life issues were immense as were the strong reactions they generated. They felt excessive and yet they did not seem exaggerated.
How did Dubus’ characters muster the strength to survive when their lives fell apart? They picked up the pieces even when, like Humpty Dumpty, things could not be put together again. The boys in “Voices Over The Moon” dealt with their parents’ divorce by going about their routine paper routes, surfing, and eating donuts. This, I thought, was remarkable - living in the needs of the day, "a moment at a time, a day, a night."
It took me weeks to read Andre Dubus’ “Selected Stories” because they were very good and very sad. Many of the stories left me reeling from the visceral fears and pains that could not be sidestepped. I had to take breaks and return when I felt ready for more raging sorrow.
Dubus excelled in his vivid and sympathetic rendering of the inner life of his characters. It was as though he had lived each of their outsized emotions and could tell them like they were. He was very convincing.
The stories centered mostly on dysfunctional individuals struggling to survive. Some were stories about young people living dissipated lives lost to drugs, alcohol, and promiscuity (e.g., “Townies”). Heartbreaking tales were told of troubled adolescents fighting a losing battle against the “terrible enemy of (their) body and souls” (“If They Knew Yvonne”), dealing with pregnancy (“Miranda Over The Valley”), or coping with obesity, dieting, self-loathing, and social rejection (“The Fat Girl”). Dubus also had a way of writing about little observations that was unsettling – e.g., dropping live crabs into boiling water and "waiting for them to scream".
In several stories, infidelity, adultery, and divorce loomed large. In “Adultery”, a couple who professed to love only each other openly took lovers; the husband justified his adultery on his disbelief in monogamy when it was pure lust. This story left me quite livid. Dubus described with great understanding the "deep and helpless sorrow, and the anger" children experienced in the throes of their parents' divorce (“Voices Over The Moon, “Delivering”. It was unconscionable that children should be made to bear burdens beyond their years.
The most powerful stories were on fatherhood (e.g., “The Winter Father”, “Killings”, and “A Father’s Story”). Dubus wrote movingly of the extent to which a father would go to defend or shield his children. If you read nothing else, read “A Father’s Story”. It was outstanding as many reviewers too had noted.
There was nothing maudlin about Dubus' prose. The complexities of the life issues were immense as were the strong reactions they generated. They felt excessive and yet they did not seem exaggerated.
How did Dubus’ characters muster the strength to survive when their lives fell apart? They picked up the pieces even when, like Humpty Dumpty, things could not be put together again. The boys in “Voices Over The Moon” dealt with their parents’ divorce by going about their routine paper routes, surfing, and eating donuts. This, I thought, was remarkable - living in the needs of the day, "a moment at a time, a day, a night."
June 6, 2022
Having read "Killings" multiple times over the years and never failing to be moved by it, I had expectations of a similar emotional response to the rest of the stories contained in this selection. There is no question of the excellence of Dubus' writing. The influence of Cheever, Chekov and Hemingway in both style and content is abundant. What lost me were the issues on which the (in)actions of the characters revolved; premarital sex, pregnancy/abortion, jaded parents, domestic abuse, petty crime and guilt as the primary response. Perhaps it's my fault for not having read these stories 30 to 40 years ago when they were first published because in the age of ugly political extremism,daily mass shootings, government coups, paramilitary law enforcement and the impending loss of abortion rights Dubus' themes seem quaint and the responses from his characters naive. Dubus' displays deep compassion for his characters which is beautiful and increasingly rare in all facets of life. Yet I am left with the feeling that Dubus' time of relevance has most passed.
July 22, 2011
Dubus's acute eye pinpoints human behavior, cleanly and realistically. Credit has been given to Peter Yates, his mentor in Iowa, for development of his spare style, nailing with a few words situations that others have spent pages on. The writer he reminds me most of is Raymond Carver -- each was a chronicler of his age, but their stories are universal, never stale.
Read
December 4, 2009he's kind of a creep.
October 12, 2017
Some of these are five plus stars: Miranda over the Valley; the Pretty Girl; the Fat Girl; Rose; Adultery; A Father's story.
November 22, 2018
Imagine a cuddlier Raymond Carver and you have something of Dubus’ appeal. ‘A Father’s Story’ and ‘Killings’ are essential reading.
August 25, 2021
I would describe this as old-school literary fiction: imbued with the author's viewpoint and life experience, saturated with his spiritual outlook (in this case, Roman Catholicism), expressed from a white male point of view in a conventional white male world. That said, Dubus has a wonderful and distinctive voice; there's a rhythm to his writing that is lyrical without being flowery. And he has the unusual virtue for a male writer of being highly sympathetic toward women in the sense of seeing them as real, three-dimensional beings. Many of these pieces were masterful in the way they presented the most unusual and pivotal events, choices, and characters, the kinds we all face at times, as a normal part of life--no superheroes or super powers, and yet characters met challenges in ways that showed the power of sacrifice and the potency of love and the human spirit. Especially recommended: 'Killings' (from which the movie 'In the Bedroom' is drawn), 'Voices From the Moon', and the final two stories in the volume, 'Adultery' and 'A Father's Story'--all are perfect, and perfectly extraordinary.
October 5, 2023
It is perhaps true that not too many readers have heard of Andre Dubus (pronounced like "dabuse"). With the exception of one early novel, he has devoted himself exclusively to writing short stories and a few novellas. But what stories he can write! I first encountered him in the collection Dancing after Hours, for which I wrote a GR review. This current compilation of Selected Stories is equally as good and contains some of his most memorable stories. Some of these are dark and complex with characters that exhibit all of the human frailties and moral shortcomings. But even in the least admirable characters, Dubus is generous in reminding us that they are not all bad and retain some hope of redemption. Such human compassion and empathy is a hallmark of his work and never waxes into sentimentality. He cares deeply for people and tries to get us to recognize that many of his characters show us a mirror of ourselves. Another unique feature of Dubus' stories is their remarkable compression. He is said to have produced drafts of considerable length only to have the final story be just a few pages. He apparently believed that what you leave out is often just as important as what you put in. Another notable feature is his ability to describe his female characters as if he were inside them, without any sentimentality or male condescension. I would rate Adultery, A Father's Story, The Curse, and Voices from the Moon among the best in Selected Stories. In Adultery, a woman senses the slow dismantling of her marriage, when her husband announces he wants to take other lovers. Although the wife is allowed to follow suit, she finds this open marriage concept to be shallow and demeaning. She eventually meets a man (an ex-priest) who she falls in love with even though he is dying of cancer. In the end, she resolves to leave her husband and embrace the new and genuine love she has found. A Father's Story concerns a divorced, but religiously devout, man who is forced to make an agonizing choice. His daughter, who is visiting, hits and kills a man while driving intoxicated. The father must decide whether to report the incident or cover it up to save his daughter. Even though his religious beliefs would urge the former, he decides that protecting his daughter is morally justified and refuses to "confess" this act as sinful. The Curse is a gripping story in which a bartender encountered a group of motorcycle bums when he is alone in the bar one night. A little later, a young girl comes in and the bikers proceed to rape her. They prevent the bartender from intervening and subsequently leave. Even though he tries to help the girl, she has hatred in her eyes and curses him for not preventing the rape. The man is consumed with guilt from then on. Lastly, Voices from the Moon is one of Dubus's finest stories and is actually a novella. It is an excellent example of a story told from multiple perspectives involving a wife, her ex-husband, their two sons and a daughter, and one son's former wife. Their entangled world is fractured when the husband takes up with his elder son's ex-wife. As one commentator puts it, the story exhibits elements of "religion, guilt, compassion, sex, spirituality, tenderness, acceptance, violence and morality." In the end, the wife consoles her eldest son and tries to make him accept his father's apparent betrayal so as to keep the family's mutual love and acceptance together. Andre Dubus must surely rank among the most gifted of modern American story tellers. I recommend him highly.
December 31, 2020
Gah, this dude is dope! He's like an urban Hemingway from another dimension!
September 21, 2023
*3.5 stars
November 16, 2011
A truly regional writer, Dubus manages an expansiveness that comes out of an almost intimate understanding of his character's inner lives. He provides us with an example of a writer who makes what might have been unnecessary backstory relevant to the events of his narratives, as the psychological groundwork shaping his characters' attitudes and motivations. While at times Dubus seems to espouse a narrow view of gender relationships and can become at times a little reductive when writing about women, I'm not as troubled by his representations of women as I am of other male writers', and I think this is because of Dubus's willingness to explore aspects of his characters that exist beyond the demands of his plots.
This collection shows the ways in which Dubus manages both the short and long story forms. Two of the more engaging stories reach beyond sixty and seventy pages, and read less as narratives than as extended diagnoses, as if Dubus were more interested in tracing out the motivations of all of the characters involved with the story. He reluctantly settles down on just one character. This makes for an almost argumentative insistence of the complexity of events. No story, Dubus seems to suggest, is the product on one individual's experiences of events, but rather is the alagamation of various viewpoints, various perspectives, conflicting sets of values and motivations. One review calls Dubus "democratic," and this seems a sharp assessment of his achievement.
This collection shows the ways in which Dubus manages both the short and long story forms. Two of the more engaging stories reach beyond sixty and seventy pages, and read less as narratives than as extended diagnoses, as if Dubus were more interested in tracing out the motivations of all of the characters involved with the story. He reluctantly settles down on just one character. This makes for an almost argumentative insistence of the complexity of events. No story, Dubus seems to suggest, is the product on one individual's experiences of events, but rather is the alagamation of various viewpoints, various perspectives, conflicting sets of values and motivations. One review calls Dubus "democratic," and this seems a sharp assessment of his achievement.
Want to read
May 17, 2025(The stories are not listed according to the collections in which they originally appeared. They are notated to show their publication:
Separate Flights (1975)--SF
Adultery & Other Choices (1977)--AOC
Finding a Girl in America (1980)--FGA
The Times Are Never So Bad (1983)--TANSB
The Last Worthless Evening (1986)--LWE)
Read so far:
Miranda over the valley (SF)--
*The winter father (FGA)--
Waiting (FGA)--
Killings (FGA)--2
*The pretty girl (TANSB)--
Graduation (AOC)--
*The pitcher (FGA)--
After the game (LWE)--
*Cadence (AOC)--
If they knew Yvonne (SF)--4
Rose (LWE)--
The fat girl (AOC)--3
The captain (TANSB)--
Anna (TANSB)--
They now live in Texas --
Voices from the moon (novella published alone)--
Townies (FGA)--3
Leslie in California (TANSB)--
*The curse --
Sorrowful mysteries (TANSB)--
*Delivering (FGA)--
*Adultery (AOC)--
A father's story (TANSB)--3
***
from Dancing after Hours (1996):
Blessings
Dancing after hours --2
The intruder --3
Separate Flights (1975)--SF
Adultery & Other Choices (1977)--AOC
Finding a Girl in America (1980)--FGA
The Times Are Never So Bad (1983)--TANSB
The Last Worthless Evening (1986)--LWE)
Read so far:
Miranda over the valley (SF)--
*The winter father (FGA)--
Waiting (FGA)--
Killings (FGA)--2
*The pretty girl (TANSB)--
Graduation (AOC)--
*The pitcher (FGA)--
After the game (LWE)--
*Cadence (AOC)--
If they knew Yvonne (SF)--4
Rose (LWE)--
The fat girl (AOC)--3
The captain (TANSB)--
Anna (TANSB)--
They now live in Texas --
Voices from the moon (novella published alone)--
Townies (FGA)--3
Leslie in California (TANSB)--
*The curse --
Sorrowful mysteries (TANSB)--
*Delivering (FGA)--
*Adultery (AOC)--
A father's story (TANSB)--3
***
from Dancing after Hours (1996):
Blessings
Dancing after hours --2
The intruder --3
March 30, 2015
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.
November 4, 2021
This was my first foray into Dubus. Everyone talks about his excellence in writing, but I was not that interested in the style of writing, the stories, the whole thing. I think his flowery sentences may hit the mark for some, but I thought there were a lot of needless words here.
I am a huge fan of the short story - Carver is my favorite author ever - but, to me, these stories by Dubus lacked the immediacy of Carvers works.
There were a few stories in here that I enjoyed, a few I could say were Okay, and the rest I could do without.
I am a huge fan of the short story - Carver is my favorite author ever - but, to me, these stories by Dubus lacked the immediacy of Carvers works.
There were a few stories in here that I enjoyed, a few I could say were Okay, and the rest I could do without.
March 27, 2008
I know that he's gotten a lot of acclaim. I just can't find room in my heart for this, the only book of his I've read. Pointless character studies abound, mostly they are slice of life stories. Nicely written at times, but still...gah. There is one story about a janitor that is perhaps one of the most boring things I've ever read. Is he lucid? Mostly. He is the next Chekhov? No. NO.
May 19, 2021
Andre Dubus is one of the most talented writers I have ever read. His mastery of the short story form of story telling is astonishing. He also gets dark and goes deep into the human psyche to tell tales of suffering and wounded humans. His stories are worth the deep dive.
But so much baseball in this collection!?
But so much baseball in this collection!?
September 8, 2008
Dubus' characters are original and his sentences are smart, well-crafted and direct. He writes generously and realistically about pain and hope in such stories as: “The Pretty Girl,” “If They Knew Yvonne,” “The Fat Girl,” “Adultery,” and “A Father's Story.” A strong collection of stories.
February 27, 2017
Just my kind of book. I usually choose to read women writers; yes, I know, I'm prejudiced. I've found that most men writers are plot driven. But this guy "gets" nuance, quiet desperation, inner thoughts. Think Alice Munro, Carol Shields, Ann Patchett.
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