THE WINTER FATHER

Name: THE WINTER FATHER
Author: Andre Dubus
ISBN: 978-1-56792-617-0

by Andre Dubus ; edited by Joshua Bodwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 20, 2018

This set, comprising this volume and We Don’t Live Here Anymore, will likely do much to revive interest in Dubus’ early work.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE CROSS COUNTRY RUNNER
by Andre Dubus ; edited by Joshua Bodwell

- BOOK REVIEW
WE DON'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE
by Andre Dubus ; edited by Joshua Bodwell

- BOOK REVIEW
MEDITATIONS FROM A MOVABLE CHAIR
by Andre Dubus

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.