A welcome gathering of work by a writer always worth reading.
First of a two-volume collection of short fiction by Dubus (Dancing After Hours, 1996, etc.), a Chekhov-ian laureate of silences and secrets.
As Ann Beattie notes in her introduction to this volume, which gathers the collections Separate Flights (1975) and Adultery & Other Choices (1977), Dubus (1936-1999), a Catholic Louisianan so long resident in the Northeast that he is often thought of as a New England writer, was unusually capable of populating his work with believable women, “and it may be more unusual than I realize that he so consistently created and stayed so close to his female characters.” That much emerges from the short stories and novellas gathered here, though in the end the men in them often behave badly. In the title story, a writer on a leafy campus stuns his much-suffering wife with “sordid, drunken adultery”; she remains with him, her suffering continuing, while he continues his miscreant ways, and life goes on, awaiting further betrayals and disappointments. Many of the stories have a military setting, befitting Dubus’ service in the Marine Corps; in one, “Corporal of Artillery,” the title character re-enlists for reasons he himself doesn’t quite understand, then returns to a wife whom he barely seems to know, a woman who behaves “as though she were playing grown-up when here she was with three kids and not even old enough to vote yet.” When Dubus’ characters speak to each other, it is more often to speak past each other. For all that, Dubus finds an elegant sort of theology even in mutual incomprehension and bad behavior; in the meaningfully titled story “Adultery,” a former priest finds profound meaning in lovemaking: “Our bodies aren’t just meat then; they become statement too; they become spirit.” In such moments, Dubus reveals a kinship not with Raymond Carver, with whom he is often paired, but instead with Flannery O’Connor.
A welcome gathering of work by a writer always worth reading.Pub Date: June 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-56792-616-3
Page Count: 478
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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