This set, comprising this volume and We Don’t Live Here Anymore, will likely do much to revive interest in Dubus’ early work.
Second of a two-volume collection of short fiction by Dubus (Broken Vessels, 1991, etc.), gathering the previous volumes Finding a Girl in America (1980) and The Times Are Never So Bad (1983).
In his lively introduction, Richard Russo posits that Dubus’ (1936-1999) often awkward, often confused characters “are too shy or inarticulate or uneducated or lacking in self-awareness to speak for themselves.” A fine case in point, as he notes, is Dubus’ story “Anna,” in which the title character, long envious of the good luck of those who can buy the things she can’t afford, spends part of the proceeds of a clumsy robbery on a “round blue Hoover vacuum cleaner” whose cord is longer than her apartment and that, in the end, doesn’t do much to elevate her from a humdrum existence of drugs, beer, and laundromats that toss her clothes “like children waving from a ferris wheel.” If literature is populated, in the main, by unhappy characters, Dubus’ are unhappier than most, caught up in cheerless lives as bank branch managers or dollar-store cashiers; there’s a kinship with Raymond Carver in Dubus’ attention to working-class people, but he is the greater master of meaningful compression, in which a whole novel is packed into a couple of sentences: “He bled to death, so even then she could have done something. I want to hate her for that. I will, too.” Dubus’ bleakly proletarian settings, featuring such things as a dumpster “on whose lee side teenagers on summer nights smoked dope and drank beer,” are themselves whole universes, as are the military environments in which his stories are sometimes set; all offer a kind of rough humor (“sometimes she disliked him for being alive”) in the face of the endless dissatisfactions and disappointments of life.
This set, comprising this volume and We Don’t Live Here Anymore, will likely do much to revive interest in Dubus’ early work.Pub Date: June 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-56792-617-0
Page Count: 440
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
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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