Word: dubus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...LAST WORTHLESS EVENING, Andre Dubus -- O-ZONE, Paul Theroux...
...question matters because Dubus insists that actions, however dumb or careless, create moral consequences. Someone is to blame for wife and child battering, for drug abuse, for racial hatred, for crime, for the sense of dread that is "loose in the land." In Land Where My Fathers Died, a lawyer in a small Massachusetts town takes on the case of a man accused of murdering a local physician. Archimedes Nionakis knows that his client is innocent. He also realizes that in trying to find the real killer, "I was going to confront nothing as pure and recognizable as evil...
This statement lacks the demonstrable authenticity that appears so consistently in all of Dubus' fiction, including the stories in this book. Abstract critiques of U.S. society seem puny amid the welter of details and telling observations that the author provides. In Molly, the title character, a 15-year-old girl, goes riding with her new boyfriend toward a beach on the Atlantic. She looks out the window at a succession of small, working-class houses: "In the faces of a group of teenagers who stood under a tree and watched her and Bruce passing, she saw a dullness she thought...
People like this seldom make it into print nowadays unless they are lumped in with the latest unemployment figures or, even worse, written up in the police blotters of local papers. Dubus may have decided that such wasted lives are America's fault; he may even be right. But the case made by his fiction is far more complex and intriguing. In Rose, a nameless middle-age narrator starts chatting casually about a fellow habitue of Timmy's, a neighborhood bar in a town, once again in Massachusetts, on the Merrimack River. Her name is Rose; she is disheveled, disreputable...
Rose, by itself, is worth the price of this book; it is the most powerful entry in Dubus' impressive canon. Some decades down the road, enough justification will have cohered to call Rose a classic American story. And it is not, in truth, the product of a last worthless evening but of an artist in full control of his sympathies and skill...