SUCH KINDNESS

A disabled laborer at the edge of despair learns to find himself.

Tom, the hero of this cloying novel by the veteran Dubus, has lost just about everything. A fall from a roof while on the job led to a painkiller addiction, a foreclosed house, a failed marriage, and an estranged son. Living in subsidized housing in northeast Massachusetts, he’s shaken the painkillers but keeps plenty of vodka handy; his neighbors are loud, sometimes violent products (and creators) of broken homes. He wants to get his car out of hock to visit his son on his 20th birthday, but after his last valuable possessions—his tools—are stolen, he’s financially ruined. Early on, a sunken and understandably vengeful Tom (last name: Lowe) ropes his neighbors into driving his creaky body to the home of the agent who trapped him in a disastrous subprime loan; there, he plans to steal his trash, which he hopes contains blank credit-company checks he can fraudulently cash. This goes poorly, so Tom hits on another idea: What if he just approached the world with a spirit of love and forgiveness? Soon, doors creak open for this “broken-boned dog": Needed car rides are proffered, moral support is delivered, and he appreciates every small favor as a miracle of human generosity. Dubus remains a keen observer of the working class, but this cast of hard-luck types serves a sentimental yarn that unsubtly elevates Tom to the level of a Christ figure. (Asked what he once did for a living, he replies “carpenter.”) Maybe Dubus aspired to infuse working-class fiction with a rare optimistic vibe; perhaps he wished to deliver a Dickensian parable on the virtues of generosity to a hardhearted America. Regardless, this ode to the myth of bootstrapping is unpersuasive.

Dirty realism at its most mawkish.