Word: dubus
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Forget the business about novellas and stories in the subtitle. Author Andre Dubus' latest collection of short fiction contains six pieces, four of them somewhat longer than the other two. It is Dubus' main title that calls for scrutiny. The Last Worthless Evening is not taken from any of the works included in the book; it alludes instead to a passage from William Faulkner's The Bear that amounts to a dirge for man's despoliation of the New World. In the past, Dubus has called his collections names such as Finding a Girl in America (1980) and The Times...
...TIMES ARE NEVER SO BAD by Andre Dubus Godine; 180 pages...
...several moments in this collection of eight short stories and a novella, characters turn on a radio or record player and listen to country and western music: Crystal Gayle, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson. Author Andre Dubus, 47, makes this C & W name dropping seem more than a bid for easy topicality. He writes about people whose lives evoke sad songs and wailing pedal steel guitars. They work at checkout counters, wait on tables, tend bar or fry hamburgers at fast-food outlets. All are somehow stranded, searching for a pattern to their existence beyond the wet circles left behind...
...them succeed, but Dubus never condescends to their often inarticulate yearnings. In The Pretty Girl, for instance, there is clearly something terribly wrong with Ray Yarborough. He rapes his ex-wife Polly at knife point and severely beats the man she had slept with during the bad last days of the marriage. Dubus gives Yarborough his say, allows him, in fact, to tell much of his own story: "They would call it rape and assault with a deadly weapon, but those words don't apply to me and Polly. I was taking back my wife for a while...
These bleak emotional landscapes will look familiar to readers of Dubus' three earlier collections of short fiction. Yet there is something new here: a religious sense, largely implicit in previous stories, that is now explicitly Roman Catholic. The narrator of A Father's Story, the last and best piece in this volume, is a devout believer whose wife has left and divorced him, making it impossible for him to marry again with the church's blessing. And he will not do so without it: "For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular...