A welcome gathering in a worthy project to bring Dubus’ work to a new generation of readers.
Third volume in the Godine series reissuing the short stories and novellas of Dubus (1936-1999).
Originally published in 1984 and 1986, the volumes that underlie this collection represent Dubus at perhaps the apex of his career. The stories and novellas gathered here are often topical and even everyday; many of them speak to Dubus’ preoccupations, including racism and the military life. “Deaths at Sea” addresses both, its protagonist an African-American naval officer at sea on a ship where, in the early 1960s, he is still a rarity, recalling incidents of racial collision among sailors at the dawn of the civil rights era. “He’d hang on like they say a snapping turtle does,” writes Dubus of one justice-bent sailor, “and even if you beat him on strength alone, you’d end up wishing you had never seen him, and you’d make certain you didn’t see him again.” The story “Dressed Like Summer Leaves” is a smaller vignette and less interesting except as a near-journalistic account of a barroom squabble between Vietnam veterans: “I ate chow with nightmares,” one says bitterly, with the inevitable plea to the bartender, “Al, will you shut off that shithead so we can drink in peace?” The set piece is effective enough, but Newton Thornburg made more of the same elements in his novel Cutter and Bone a few years earlier. Another constant interest of Dubus’, namely religion, figures in several pieces, including the hitherto uncollected title piece: “A misfit has to live long enough to stop being a misfit,” says the disaffected protagonist, for whom communion isn’t providing the necessary answers. All of Dubus’ characters are searchers—and some find what it is they’re looking for, which isn’t necessarily a good thing.
A welcome gathering in a worthy project to bring Dubus’ work to a new generation of readers.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-56792-627-9
Page Count: 470
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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