Norton
Review by Walter Cummins
Andre Dubus III explores his vulnerabilities throughout the essays in this collection. Despite his literary regard and economic success as a writer and university teacher since the publication of House of Sand and Fog in 1999 when he was forty, his subject in this book is the legacy of traumas faced in his early years—the insecure poverty faced by his divorced single mother and three siblings, his hours of physical labor, and the frequent violence of his teens in a working class Massachusetts community where he became bulked with muscles. His memoir Townie tells of that period of fighting, and the imprinting of confrontation that lingers in the urges of a man in his sixties.
He cannot shake the fear of impending danger, not allowing a gun in his house, but sleeping close to a baseball bat to fight off any attack on his home and family. As much as he teaches his children to be nonviolent, he suppresses a buried impulse to strike out at danger. Even though he had gone many years without giving in, he comes close in the book’s final essay, “Relapse,” when a drunken man in a restaurant bar shouts a sexual slur as a friend’s wife. Dubus’s reaction inflames the harbored memories of lashing out.
Although his conscious goal in writing Townie had been to expose a street fight as a “colossal” human failure, “[a]nd yet, there was—and still is—that small boy living inside me who is a bit shocked and proud of how he was able to change his life, how he was able to stop being anyone’s victim, and, to be as honest here as possible, how a piece of him enjoyed fighting.”
The essay “If I Owned a Gun” begins with this statement: “The summer I turned seventeen, I nearly killed my younger brother with a 12-gauge shotgun.” His father years before had taught him how to shoot a rifle: “I loved holding a loaded gun in my hands. I loved shooting things.” When Dubus’s older sister was raped, his father bought pistols and admitted to almost shooting second wife in the head. Later on, this father almost killed Andre III with another misfire.
When living with a girlfriend, after a young woman nearby in the city was murdered, Dubus slept with a loaded rifle that he used to kill a bird in the apartment. Dubus’s later father-in-law kept a gun, but when it came time for the in-laws to move into an apartment attached to Dubus’s house, Dubus would not let the man bring the gun with him. He chose to avoid the lure of the weapon: “One day it may be just me and Fontaine out here in the woods. And maybe it’ll be my time to be old and frail, and I’ll want that loaded gun in my hands. I will. But I can’t and I won’t. I will not have it there calling to me the way guns do.”
Such complex reactions run through the essays in which his moral sensibility confronts his visceral underbelly. Ultimately, he manages to control the instinctive lure of violence. He is, at heart, a civilized, loving father, husband, and son. His ability to love and care dominates, but the revelations of these essays help us understand the mentality of the many who cannot control the urge to strike out at others when hostile nearness provokes fears of threat. Does Dubus survive because he possesses the intelligence to judge his impulses, the talent to express them in words, and the depths of positive emotions that overpower the negative?
The circumstances of his upbringing may be unique when compared with other writers who escaped the pain of poverty. For one thing, he is the son of Andre Dubus II, one of America’s most important short story writers. That Andre divorced his son’s mother and left son and siblings after a ten-year marriage. Yet the father was an occasional presence who truly cared for his children. Andre II, a marine captain before he became a writer, stood out as a masculine model even after he lost a leg and spent years in a wheelchair before he died of a heart attack at sixty-two.
The mother, once alone, tried to support four children working in low-paying jobs. They changed address many times after being evicted for failure to pay rent when the choice was food or rent. Even after the mother received a degree, her social worker income was limited. Yet she had the strength to offer emotional security to her children. Technically, Andre III grew up in what would be designated as a broken family. For a time he might have felt broken, but at the core his parents were not. They became the source of a moral power underlined during hard-work visits to his grandfather’s farm in Louisiana.
The collection’s title essay, “Ghost Dogs,” reveals Dubus’s long-time inability to love the family pets, primarily because of an early childhood memory of his father shooting a disobedient German shepherd. From that and subsequent hurts he associates dogs with death and loss. But one such loss, euthanasia of Dodo, makes him break down into crying so hard he has to pull over from driving. Finally, his ability to accept his daughter’s Chihuahua comes as an acceptance and a release of long-suppressed caring—for dogs as he does for people.
Out of curiosity, I did a count of the time Dubus used the word “love” and came up with a computer list of around 140. Although a few of the things he loves are objects or actions, in the great number of occasions it’s love of people and also love returned. Despite the hardships of his early years and the draw of violence, Dubus describes a life filled with love. That emotional capacity is his real triumph.
Writing a letter to his two sons about love, he concludes: “And, my sons, it is my love for this one woman all these years that has carried me into some eternal village of spirits, where I have not died but lived far more fully and acutely than I would have otherwise, and it never would have happened if I had not surrendered to the deep and terrifying and exalting mystery of love.”
