Was shooting for about 1.5 until the final two

books:


	• Selected Stories (Picador Books) Andre Dubus Picador, 1990 - 496 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews
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highly recommended

Morality, Religion, and Family

Andre Dubus's stories, as they wrestle with the issues of religion, morality, and familial duty, captivate the reader with strong narration and elegant foreshadowing. They also employ various shifts in point of view, and sustain the reader's interest while taking detours for lengthy description and interesting back-story.

A greater writer.

By writing the stories from every character's point of view, Dubus gave me an understanding of why people do the things they do. It sounds simple enough, but it obviously isn't. People we know or read about, suddenly explained.

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Was shooting for about 1.5 until the final two

Andre Dubus never seems to have quite made the splash Raymond Carver did, but the two are similar in style and concerns. Carver's strengths and weaknesses are seen in this collection. I found most of the writing overwrought and overdone. Way too often I was thinking, "Oh, come on, no one thinks like that except a writer trying to create a 'character'." The occasional deft detail or intriguing quirk was lost in a level of introspection that would exhaust Molly Bloom. Good writing overdone is as bad as dreadful writing; the legs get tired from slogging through the piled on adjectives and morose reflections. And if you hated the film of "In the Bedroom", as I did, wait until you read its source. Even worse!

I was ready to toss the thing, but for whatever reason (psychotic completion syndrome, I would guess) I plowed on to the end. And discovered two mega diamonds. The final two stories would rank among the best I've ever read. "Adultery" is just about perfect. Clearly this is a geography Dubus knows well, and wow, does he portray it with devastating power. The small details pile up as we watch a self-absorbed Dostoevskian jerk destroy life and love while gaining plaudits and producing (we assume) mediocrity. What a story; it is easy to see how even fine writers become such megalomaniacal fools. And the conclusion, "A Father's Story" (a prefect title for this gem) wrenches and tears and torments the gut and the conscience. The two final tales show what could have been; the preceding ones left me, at least, annoyed and bored, and, when reading the greatness achieved, sad.

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Human and humane

I was unable to finish the book all in one shot because I found I needed to stop and reflect in between stories, so moved was I--mostly because Dubus had a way of taking our simple understandings of the world--juxtaposing violence and innocence, faith and the faithless, priests and adulterers, sinners and the redeemed, the dead and the living--and making them complex.

I was bowled over by some of the first stories in the selection, "Killings" and "The Pretty Girl", which take horrible, violent situations and try to make some sense of them by offering the protagonists the opportunity for revenge. But the satisfaction in that revenge is fleeting for it takes almost as much out of those who have acted out of revenge than the original crime did.

"If They Knew Yvonne" is another story of revenge--except this time it is a young man who at one point seeks to wash away his sin (masturbation) by doing himself physical harm. He does not like that he is weak in his body and seems to believe that his sin taints the rest of his life. That is until a priest sets him straight. In the end, he is left reflecting on his two young nephews and hoping for a better understanding for them.

At his best, I think, is Dubus when he took the POV of a woman or girl. In "Anna" , the protagonist, Anna Griffin age 21, helps her boyfriend, Wayne, to rob a drugstore and is then weighed down by guilt (although she never names it as such--either she is incapable, unaware or avoiding the truth). After the robbery, Anna and Wayne go to their local bar and get drunk--out of a sense of exhilaration and fear. In a poignant moment, Anna walks outside to clear her head and briefly reveals her youth and, perhaps, her sense of hopefulness (which one imagines will never be fully realized)--almost as though she is reborn. With the money they have stolen, Anna and Wayne buy a bunch of things at the mall (instead of filling their fridge). But neither of them can fully enjoy these things as they imagined they would. They are still the same, poor desperate couple but with a vacuum cleaner, television and stereo. It would be easy to project their path as one of disaster, but Anna's hopefulness in the end leaves the door open for a breakthrough. In the Laundromat, she washes their clothes and seems to cleanse them both of their sins and bring them back to the beginning.

"A Father's Story" is the last story in the book and the only one I had read previously. It is deserving of its location and an intense and moving story--once again how man can become his own God and thus be forgiven for what he does to protect his children.

Still, the story that left me most breathless was the second to last one, "Adultery." It is a complex story of a husband--Hank (a writer)--and wife--Edith--who have fallen into an open marriage (the husband sort of springs it on her several years in that he believes in fidelity but not monogamy). For a few years, Edith takes revenge on Hank by taking several lovers, but he is nonplussed and brings his own girlfriends by the house on occasion. It is not until Edith commits adultery with the ex-priest Joe--whose frail body comes to embody their sin--that she is awakened. It is when Joe becomes ill with cancer and has his final point of communion (the night before he is admitted to the hospital for good they have sex one last, fevered time) that Edith realizes what she must do--still it takes a while for her realization to live and it is not until the very end that she speaks it: she will divorce Hank--thus signaling the death of her true love. She sacrifices their marriage to condone for the sins they have all committed.

What is most beautiful about Dubus's writing is his love of his characters. He seems not to judge them. He seems to see their faults, allow them their failings, ask that they redeem themselves and then offer them forgiveness. He is, then, their God--but not a pure God, not a God without sin himself. A God who can empathize because, in the end, that's all we really have that makes us human.

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Worth reading again and again . . .

I just finished reading Dubus's Selected Stories for the fourth time. I've also read his other books, and I'm glad to report that Dubus is one of the few writers whose work can be read again and again with increased pleasure, a rare enough thing.

So many kinds of stories are packed into this volume -- short stories and novellas, deep character studies ("A Father's Story"), topical stories ("The Fat Girl"), "high concept" stories ("Killings"), stories with a deep knowledge of the intersections among family, sex, and faith ("Voices from the Moon"), stories that understand compassion and forgiveness ("Rose"), and stories that explore love in the midst of reckless violence ("The Pretty Girl")

Although many of these stories are thrilling enough, plot-wise, to keep you reading, it's the deep knowledge of the motivations, the pecadillos, the generosities, the anger, the unease, the longings, and most of all the love we are all capable of holding in our hearts, all at once, that makes these stories so worthwhile. Andre Dubus does not shy away from the dark places, and he writes his characters with such empathy that we are willing to go there with them, with him.

Selected Stories is an important book, and a book well worth a patient first read. I think it is a book that will stand the test of time. If there is any justice in the world, it will be read a hundred years from now, a necessary bit of news about what it was like to live in the twentieth century, no less indispensible than Hemingway, Faulkner, or Fitzgerald, and ten times as wise.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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. Books by Andre Dubus also in Vintage Contemporaries paperback: Dancing After Hours.

"Like some of the most satisfying storytellers of the past (Dubus has been compared to Chekhov), he is munificent, spinning out whole lifetimes and recounting events from many characters' viewpoints. For the lyricism and directness of his language, the richness and precision of his observations and the generosity of his vision, he is among the best."--Village Voice

"Dubus's characters resemble those of Raymond Carver...but the stories stand alone in their idiosyncratic spiritual cast, occasionally religious, more often expressive of devotion to the people he lives among."--New York Times Book Review

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