Review by New York Times Review
if folklorists are to be believed, the postnuptial tradition obliging the bridegroom to carry his bride over the threshold of their first home has less to do with ensuring the couple's good luck and more to do with maintaining the bride's good name. Apparently the custom spread from ancient Rome throughout medieval Europe as a politically fraught pantomime of chastity's death at the marriage altar: The new wife, presumably reluctant to relinquish her virginity, had to be physically transported into her new matrimonial setting by her impatient husband. And so a gesture cherished by millions for its sweetness and frivolity is revealed to have roots in a darker pageantry. Assuming we're sticking with the original symbology, newlyweds who cross the threshold in this manner aren't simply walking into a new house, or even into a new social or familial arrangement. They're also walking into an incredibly daunting meshwork of married-folk dialectics: conquest and submission, selfhood and union, lust and shame, rejoicing and regret. Congratulations, you two. Today is the first day of the rest of your disorientation. In "Dirty Love," the new and staggeringly good collection of four not-quitenovella-length stories by Andre Dubus III, we're presented with characters so disoriented by love they honestly can't tell whether they're looking for a way into or a way out of it. Every one of them is standing in a doorway, eyeing that threshold with trepidation. A lonely, overweight woman who had resigned herself to a solitary life glides into a lavish New Year's Eve party on the arm of a man whose devotion she first finds astounding, then unnerving. A husband takes note of how long it's been since he last walked through the front door of his own house, which he bitterly vacated upon learning of his long-neglected wife's affair. A philandering bartender who has no business entering the hospital room of someone he has grievously wronged is driven, by an epiphany, to do so anyway. A troubled high school dropout contemplates slipping out the back door from the only safe haven she can claim, the ghost-haunted home of her recently widowed great-uncle, and into a future she has constructed primarily from text messages and Skype sessions. Each of them is caught between desperately wanting to believe in love's heady promise and - just as desperately - wanting to escape its awesome gravity. In "The Bartender," a newly married man named Robert careens between these two poles over the course of mere minutes. Shortly after he finishes scrubbing off the scent of an adulterous tryst at his bathroom sink, his chest begins to constrict at the thought of being found out by his pregnant wife, and of her walking out on him. But he's surprised when the horrible image gives way to a muted sense of relief, suggesting as it does "a reprieve from husbandhood and fatherhood and all of their weight." Robert's promises to himself and others are as false and calculating as the sensitive-poet persona he projects to get women into bed, but he's self-aware enough to know that there's a better way to live, and that he could live that way if he just made the effort. Later, after deceiving his lover, he berates himself: "He didn't like lying to Jackie; he should not lie to at least somebody." Dubus is in his mid-50s now, but his self-assured, no-nonsense prose has had an undeniably old-school vibe going back all the way to his best-selling 1999 novel, "House of Sand and Fog." Reading these stories is like visiting a classic steakhouse where the coolly professional waiters don't hold your cultivated taste for high-concept haute cuisine against you, but rather decide to remind you what you've been missing by giving you one of the best dining experiences you've ever had. His sentences are like windows of tempered glass : They seem sturdier and more transparent than so many others out there. They're not hard-boiled, exactly, but in a literary-fiction environment where coyness and irony enjoy so much currency, they might scan that way for some. A man senses an attractive woman's attention to him as he works alongside her "like good news in a letter he wasn't opening." When they make love for the first time, he approaches the act with delicacy, "as if he were trying on new clothes he didn't want to spoil in case they had to be returned." These are sentences that, like the waiters at Peter Luger, know exactly what their job is and perform it with consummate grace and quiet pride. Dubus can home in more quickly and efficiently on a character's inner life than any writer I've encountered in recent memory. Consider his description of Marla, an unattached 29-year-old woman who has sadly grown accustomed to getting up and walking away from her circle of married friends whenever the conversation turns to parenting. "Something seemed to come into the air between them that wasn't there just a few moments before; the light in their eyes became more genuine somehow, and they nodded their heads not out of habit or good manners, but because they really did know what the other was talking about." When Marla's luck changes and she unexpectedly finds a lover, she purchases birth control for the first time: "As she stepped out onto the sunlit sidewalk she felt part of the bigger picture somehow, more of a citizen of the world she lived in." People so disoriented by love they can't tell if they're looking for a way into or out of it. Just as Marla is inching toward the doorway that might lead her to erotic fulfillment and social acceptance, Mark, the main character in another of these stories, is exiting through the same. His wife's infidelity has landed in his highly structured world like a live hand grenade. His humiliation is multilayered: Being cuckolded is one thing, but having to move into the garage apartment with your mother, then having to skip a week of work in order to get a handle on your emotions when you've never even called in sick before, well, that's enough to make Mark wonder if he's really the take-charge alpha male he fancies himself to be, or if he has suddenly become, to his horror, "a man things happened to." This fear - of agency robbed, of future choices curtailed - is the force pulling so many of Dubus's characters away from scary, unknowable, dirty love and back toward the familiar baseline of self. It's why Devon, the damaged teenager of the book's title story, prefers the randomly selected degradations that come with nightly visits to chatroulette.com over getting back together with the only boy who ever treated her with respect. It's also why she prefers listening to gangsta rap through headphones over talking and listening to her dear and gentle Uncle Francis, whom she cares for more than anyone else in the world, but whose loving guidance has begun to feel like a harness. Figures who are completely marginal in one story reappear as central characters of other stories, a bit of trickery I was ready to dismiss as a Hollywood-baiting gimmick until Dubus, with his unusual gift for stretching the reader's sympathy, convinced me of his true aim. By the end of "Dirty Love," I understood what he was hoping to convey with these brief walkons and subtle cameos. That woman with whom we just rode up in the elevator? That man who smiled at us in the Starbucks line? All those people we may say hello to every day, but whom we can't really claim to "know"? Dubus is asking us never to forget that they love and hurt and feel every bit as intensely as we do. He's saying, I think, that we have a sacred responsibility to listen to their stories, to try to understand their fears and weaknesses, and to grant them absolution in the event that nobody else seems willing. He's reminding us that we're related to them. Maybe not by blood. But definitely by a kind of marriage. JEFF TURRENTINE is an editor at OnEarth magazine and a critic who writes frequently about fiction and music.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 24, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Award-winning novelist Dubus (The Garden of Last Days, 2008) debuted as a short story writer nearly 25 years ago. He now reclaims the form in an incisive collection of subtly linked tales set in a changing New Hampshire coastal town. With fresh energy and conviction, Dubus explores the demands and disappointments of desire and marriage, generating a critical mass of sensory detail and refined suspense. A desperately orderly man hires a detective to follow his longtime, suddenly unfaithful wife. Two overweight loners attempt to find the intimacy other couples seem to take for granted. A bartender posing as a poet and living on charm and evasiveness suddenly faces the realities of fatherhood. In the unforgettable novella Dirty Love, Devon is hounded out of high school when a dirty cell-phone video, recorded without her permission, is posted online. She seeks sanctuary with her great-uncle Francis, a retired teacher haunted by his experiences in the Korean War. Dubus' emotional discernment, sexual candor, penetrating evocation of place, sensitivity to family conflicts, and keen attunement to the perils of our embrace of iEverything from online sexual roulette to cyberbullying and violent video games are electrifying, compassionate, and profound. These are masterful and ravishing tales of loneliness, confusion, betrayal, the hunger for oblivion, and the quest for forgiveness. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A seven-city author tour and major national media coverage will support the latest provocative book by best-selling Dubus.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The master of naturalistic New England fiction returns with a book of four loosely connected short works that showcases his Dreisarian abilities at their most trenchant. In the superb "Listen Carefully as Our Options Have Changed," Mark Welch is a middle-aged project manager who suspects that his wife is having an affair. How he finds out and what he does about it form the core of this novella, which is affecting for all the ways the author shows how difficult it is to accept that sometimes we know the least about those we think we know best. Credit Dubus for taking a hackneyed premise and making it seem new through the specificity of his observations. One shorter work deals with Marla, an overweight bank teller, and the surprising things she discovers about herself after she falls in love for the first time; another follows Robert Doucette, a bartender-cum-poet who cheats on his pregnant wife in a way that has repercussions for their unborn daughter. In The Scarlet Letter-ish title novella, teenage Devon Brandt, after an Internet indiscretion went viral, goes off to live with her great-uncle Francis, a recent widower and Korean War veteran, and develops an online relationship with Hollis, a 27-year-old Army vet. But will she ever be able to escape her past? Once again, Dubus creates deeply flawed characters and challenges the reader to identify with their common humanity. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The latest from the best-selling author of The Garden of Last Days and House of Sand and Fog is a collection of loosely linked novellas that explore, with devastating detail, the failings and never-ending needs of people who search for fulfillment in work, food, sex, and love. Dubus's characters are flawed individuals who discover how life is easy to screw up. Marla, an overweight young woman, at last finds love but loses herself. Robert, a bartender and aspiring poet, betrays his pregnant wife. Mark, a controlling manager, catches his wife of 25 years in an affair. And Devon, a teenage girl in the astounding and timely title novella, flees the fallout of an intimate image of herself posted online. She escapes to her uncle's house, seeking his respect, and befriends a soldier on the Internet who offers her redemption. VERDICT Filled with heartbreak, slices of happiness, and unrelenting hope, this expertly crafted collection depicts human weakness and our amazing capacity for forgiveness. Dubus fans will embrace this latest work, as will lovers of the short story and fiction. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 4/22/13.]-Lisa Block, Atlanta (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Dubus anatomizes personal--especially sexual--relationships brilliantly in these loosely concatenated novellas. At the center of the characters' world are the small, economically depressed towns in Massachusetts where waiters, waitresses, bartenders and bankers live and move and have their being. To Dubus' credit, he doesn't feel he has to solve their personal problems and the intricate twists of their relationships. Instead, he chronicles what's going on with sympathy but without any sense that he needs to rescue them. In the first narrative, we meet hapless Mark Welch, who's recently found out his wife, Laura, is having an affair with a banker. Although occasionally picking up and hefting a piece of lead pipe, Mark ultimately finds himself powerless to change the circumstances of his life. In the second story we follow Marla, a physically unprepossessing bank teller (yes, she works at the same bank as Laura's lover) who feels her life slipping away from her. She begins a desultory affair with a 37-year-old engineer whose passions tend toward video games and keeping his house pathologically clean. The next story introduces us to Robert Doucette, bartender and poet manqu, who marries Althea, a sweet but reticent upholsterer. In the final months of Althea's pregnancy, Robert has hot sex with Jackie, a waitress at the restaurant, and Althea finds this out and simultaneously goes into labor. The final narrative focuses on Devon, an 18-year-old waitress at the tavern where Robert works. To get away from an abusive father, she lives with a considerate great uncle (who harbors his own secrets), but she has to deal with the unintended consequences of an untoward sexual act that was disseminated through social media. First-rate fiction by a dazzling talent.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
