Andre Dubus, R.I.P

Commonweal, April 23, 1999 by John B. Breslin

A writer's writer

In a review of Andre Dubus's Selected Stories, fellow novelist Anne Tyler commented about the risky ending of perhaps Dubus's best short work, "A Father's Story": "He has a way of stepping forth, however thin the ice." A risky image itself since three years before the book appeared, Dubus had been struck down in a late-night hit-and-run accident on a lonely stretch of I-93 north of Boston. Dubus had stopped to aid two motorists in distress and suffered the loss of one leg and the use of the other.

But the ironies go deeper. The plot of "A Father's Story" turns on a similar accident and the father's cover-up to shield his only daughter from criminal charges. Like several other Dubus protagonists-and indeed like Dubus himself-Luke Ripley nurtures a richly idiosyncratic spiritual life. Every morning he spends a meditative hour before riding off to a 6:30 a.m. Mass celebrated by Father Paul, whom he calls "my best, in truth my only, friend." And so Luke must confront his multiple guilt about the accident: failing to call for emergency medical help, denying the victim's family a slayer's name and face, once concealing his sin from Father Paul.

Dubus's risky ending, his treading on thin ice, comes in a concluding dramatized dialogue between Luke and God in which Luke defends his action as that of "the father of a girl," a role God denied himself in sending his Son to suffer for our sins:

I could bear the pain of watching and knowing my sons' pain, could bear it with pride as they took the whip and nails. But You never had a daughter and, if You had, You could not have borne her Passion.

So, He says, you love her more than you love Me.

I love her more than I love truth.

Then you love in weakness, He says.

As You love me, I say....

Risks were part of Andre Dubus's life, from his youthful years in the Marine Corps (another rich source of story material) to that brave moment on the highway when he likely saved the life of a woman by pushing her out of the swerving car's path, further endangering himself. Dubus found his recuperation almost intolerably painful and frustrating, and wrote no fiction for several years. Instead, he published a collection of personal essays, Broken Vessels. Tobias Wolff has written of it, and his comment applies to all of Dubus's writing: "His is an unapologetically sacramental vision of life in which ordinary things participate in the miraculous, the miraculous in ordinary things. He believes in God, and talks to him, and doesn't mince words.... He is open to mystery, and of all mysteries the one that interests him most is the human potential for self-transcendence."

Dubus found this self-transcendence in carefully chosen venues that reflect his own life experience: Catholic schools in Louisiana; the male-dominated military; and in his later work, the Merrimack River Valley, northwest of Boston, an uneasy meeting point of town and gown amid the rubble of obsolete mills and factories. What his stories have in common is an assurance of authenticity, not just for the places, with their bayous or ward rooms or desolate winter roads, but more importantly for the troubled human beings-Dubus's stock in trade-who with their distinctive accents, prejudices, and graces, attempt to puzzle out the meanings of the lives they've been dealt and have frequently messed up.

A consciousness of sin permeates Dubus's stories, which is not surprising in a writer who, when asked for a proper adjective to describe his work, answered "Catholic." Dubus accepts our flawed condition as a given, but he manages to present his characters' failings with an equal conviction that grace is powerfully at work in the world. In a number of his stories, this pattern of sin and grace is played out within a specifically Catholic setting (as with Luke Ripley); but just as often, the characters have no religious convictions or, at most, exhibit a vestigial sensibility of the divine in lives otherwise determined by an overtly secular culture. Moral questions remain, nonetheless, questions shaped and colored by family values, ethnic heritage, military ethos, intellectual training. It is to these moral issues that Dubus relentlessly returns, exploring their demands and paradoxes in the lives of middle-class Americans of the mid-twentieth century.

Dubus's characters are apt to take the law into their own hands to avenge or protect family or friend. He makes no abstract moral judgment on these visceral tribal loyalties, but it is clear that the psychic price of such action comes high. As the man who has just murdered his son's murderer in "Killings" tells the story to his wife, "the words had no images for him, he did not see himself doing what the words said he had done; he only saw himself on the road." And later, as his wife sleeps beside him, "he shuddered with a sob that he kept silent in his heart." Whether or not the murder is ever discovered, Matt has been marked, like Cain.

In his three decades as a published writer, Andre Dubus produced a baker's dozen of books, mainly collections of short stories. While many of his contemporaries were experimenting with minimalism or pursuing an academic aloofness, he stuck to a realism that goes back to Chekov, his great hero. Flannery O'Connor, he admitted, frightened him; but from another Southerner, William Faulkner, he took the rhythms of his long sentences and his focus on details. For the rest he trusted his instincts and the authenticity of the lives he observed.