Dancing After Hours

National Catholic Reporter, May 24, 1996 by Tim McCarthy

When I interviewed Andre Dubus for a profile in 1990, writing had become an excruciating ordeal for him. A brutal accident had cost him his legs and nearly his life and he was still wrestling the stranglehold that nightmare had locked onto his days.

I said in the profile that, like an aging pitcher whose fast ball has failed him, Dubus would have to learn how to throw a knuckle ball to regain the writing form that had carried him into the major league of American letters. This new collection of storie's tells me that's exactly what he did.

Many of these stories are about working people, common folk, so-called, with common concerns -- yours and mine -- elevated to art with an uncommon intensity. They smoke a lot (or want to smoke) and drink a lot and make a lot of love, remnants, some might say, of what we were before we forgot how grittily good life can be at times, even in the worst of times -- before so many of us went all tame and tepid with our fat-free flavorless food, our condoms, clean air and compulsions to exercise. No doubt many of those changes are necessary and beneficial, even wise, but these stories let us know some of what we lost along the way. No idyllic past, to be sure, but a past all the same, a time when ordinary people did not seem quite so afraid to live.

We are not talking hedonism here. Dubus has a religious sensibility, a sacramental view of life rooted in the Cajun Catholicism of his youth, that without didacticism or dogma informs and sometimes inspires much of what he writes. He is close to Flannery O'Connor on that score.

"Out of the Snow" is the most openly religious and also the most violent story in this collection. The irony is severe, deep, dangerous and hard, and it characterizes much of Dubus' work, but in this story it cuts especially close to the bone.

LuAnn Arceneaux is 44. We know her at younger ages from earlier stories. Along with her husband, Ted Briggs (a lawyer who survived Vietnam with a permanently crippled knee), LuAnn vivifies some of the best stories in the book. This one opens with a typical middle-class morning in a New England household. Dubus chronicles it with the same unerring eye for detail that underpins this collection like a fieldstone foundation.

Then there is this: "Watching the brown sugar bubbling in the light of the flames, smelling it and the cinnamon, and listening to her family talking about the snow, she told herself that this toast and oatmeal were a sacrament, the physical formn that love assumed in this moment, as last night's lovemaking was, as most of her actions were." With that in her mind, in her heart, she becomes a priest, spoons the oatmeal "into bowls her family came from the dining room to receive from her hands."

But later, alone in the house, back from a trip to the market, two intruders confront her in the kitchen and she finds herself battling like a leopard for her life. Rape and murder riddle her reality.

A sacrament without love is sin. But when it comes to the dreadful crunch, who can control it? LuAnn and Ted are part of the middle-American program. A reformed boozer, he hasn't smoked for years; she hasn't smoked for 83 days (though she still dreams about it) and she worries about the contents of the food she feeds her family. So what happened?

Late that night, sitting before the fire, she tells her husband: "But I have to know this, and remember this, and tell it to the children: I didn't hit those men so I could be alive for the children, or for you. I hit them so my blood would stay in my body; so I could keep breathing. And if it's that easy, how are we supposed to live? If evil can walk through the door, and there's a place deep in our hearts that knows how to look at its face, and beat it till it's broken and bleeding, till it crawls away. And we do this with rapture."

Don't tell me aging, ailing hurlers can't learn how to throw a knuckle ball.

Dubus writes a lot about love in this collection. It is as if love has become for him a form of walking, or dancing, because when he writes about walking or dancing a special care comes into his craft. Describing the everyday act of a woman walking down the street is a celebration of health and happiness, in part because writing that description is probably the closest Dubus will ever again come to performing those simple acts most of us take for granted. He can still love, of course -- and he does, maybe more fiercely than ever, because affliction has taught him how precious love is, no matter what the pain. These stories testify to that.

Yet, that observation is somewhat unfair to Dubus and to his work. Most readers do not know that he is pinned to a wheelchair. Nor do they need to. The quality of his art transcends all that. But a man in a wheelchair is crucial, for example, to the title story of this collection, "Dancing After Hours," and the piece is especially poignant for me.

A quadriplegic wheels into a restaurant in a small New En land town. He man, with him. They spend a rousing night eating and drinking.