The Last Worthless Evening
Breslin, John B.
BITTERSWEET SIDES OF LIFE THE LAST WORTHLESS ETENIHG Andre Dubus Godine, $15.95, 214 pp. John B. Breslin Being a book addict has its rewards. I first dis- covered Andre Dubus's stories two...
...still, he is anything but cynical...
...Similarly, Claire, the abandoned wife, builds her new life around her daughter Molly, offering attention and understanding but also a premature adulthood that in turn invites a bittersweet loss of innocence...
...In his pain, he felt relief too: now on this couch his life would end...
...Then the fuse was off, resting bent in the chief's hand, looking as lethal still as it 390: Commonweal had on the ground...
...In ordinary lives lived in ordinary places, Dubus finds his own kind of high seriousness where souls are made and unmade by human choice and the surprising actions of grace...
...Ties of family and friendship occupy the highest positions in Dubus's scheme of things despite their frequent betrayal...
...Somehow he knew his childhood had ended...
...The book was Dubus's last collection of stories, The Times Are Never So Bad, and one of the first pieces I read was the finale, "A Father's Story...
...Anyone visiting my brothers' houses will be given a drink and food, and always there are feta cheese and olives, and my brothers' wives keep stuffed grape leaves and spinach pies in the freezer...
...The dark side of existence certainly gets its fair share of attention in these stories...
...and, finally, an acutely and self-confessedly Catholic sensibility that seeks and finds redemption in the sacramental union of matter and form — the physical world in all its beauty and imperfection transformed by ritual into prayer...
...In inviting our moral responses to his stories, Dubus consciously aligns himself with a long and honorable, if recently neglected, tradition in fiction...
...Both are reasons to rejoice...
...Several months later when a former publishing colleague asked me to put together an anthology of contemporary Catholic fiction, I knew right away one story that would be in it...
...The linking of those last two and the pervasive concern for the humanizing effect of ritual reveal how deeply Catholicism has informed Dubus's imagination...
...Chekov is there, and Conrad, and in this collection, especially, I hear echoes of Faulkner from whom Dubus has taken his title...
...Or it may appear as a doctor who preys on women obsessed with weight or as a passionate archaeologist who abandons the wife and child in whom he has no personal interest...
...I first dis- covered Andre Dubus's stories two years ago on one of my compulsive prowls through a local bookstore noted for half-price review copies and other literary bargains...
...Author and narrator sound most nearly at one in "Rose": for observation and moral passion serve here the conviction that only our truest stories, carefully attended to, can achieve communion...
...Or this low-keyed account of disarming a live shell at sea: They worked quietly...
...They murmured to each other, passed and received screwdrivers and pliers, finally spoke hardly at all: Okay, they said, or That's that, and once Stark picked up the open manual and look at a diagram and showed it to the chief who nodded and leaned over again with his screwdriver...
...Dubus makes you see and hear his stories as he makes you feel your pulse quicken at our human ability to inflict and suffer life's violence as well as defuse it...
...a remarkable sense of place, especially of the deep South and the mill area of New England northwest of Boston, as well as Marine bases and Navy ships anywhere...
...His mastery of form and psychological sureness of touch in this volume indicate how broad and deep that imagination is...
...I was hooked...
...Such total comprehension does indeed breed forgiveness, or, at least, it challenges our often heedless rush to judgment...
...but he wanted to cry this deeply, his body shuddering with it, doubling at his waist with it, until he attained oblivion, invisibility, death...
...And their hands, their fingers...
...With the exception of an early novel, The Lieutenant, and the more recent Voices from the Moon (1984), Dubus has stuck to briefer forms, novellas and short stories...
...But it is the narrator who sees this, not Rose, who considers herself justly punished in the loss of her children...
...a confident ability to enter into the consciousness of the estranged, women as well as men...
...What astonishes is the range of mood and sensibility Dubus controls within an essentially naturalistic, even old-fashioned, narrative style...
...The fireworks here are sparked not by innovative techniques but by a sharp eye, a resonant ear, and a passionate mind...
...Then I smiled...
...The pleasures Dubus offers are considerable: a lyrical realism often focused on the aching gaps of incomprehension and infidelity that mark intimate relationships...
...It may take the shape of an insensitive, cruelly sentimental white officer who forces on a junior black officer his "enlightened" views about race in the noble Southern tradition...
...I watched them...
...Dubus's lyricism comes without blinkers...
...There was such concentration in their faces that it seemed their bodies existed only to keep their faces alive...
...He was crying as, in his memory, he had never cried before, and he not only did not try to stop, as he always had, with pride, with anger...
...The Last Worthless Evening is the fifth collection of such works, tilting heavily this time toward novellas...
...And Rose, the mother of the battered child, achieves redemption for years of passive acceptance of paternal brutality in one selfless act of maternal instinct...
...What shines through in this novella, as in each of the other three in its own way, is clear-sighted compassion, the teller's ability to enter into the compromised, evolving, enfleshed world of the protagonists and give them their due...
...He touched the flesh, the bone beneath it...
...Then at once Stark and the chief started laughing...
...Archimedes Nionakis, full-time runner, part-time lawyer, and occasional private investigator, avoids commitments himself but recognizes their spiritual and tangible rewards: My brothers fled to beautician school, then borrowed money and opened a shop and married Greek women, lovely Greek women who bore children who are respectful, beautiful, and well behaved, not at all like American children, though they speak English without the accents of their parents...
...Take this description of a five-year-old's stunned reaction to being thrown across a room by his enraged father: Nothing in his body had ever broken before...
Vol. 114 • June 1987 • No. 12
