The Myths of Promiscuity

...People screwing other people...

...When, finally, it is Miranda alone whom he wants, but Jo alone who wants him, he loses the former and is left hoping to love the latter: "He knows he will love her...

...Similarly, critics are awed by an Updike's impressive vocabulary or a Mailer's baroque syntax, without ever bothering to ask what those unabridged words and convoluted sentences actually say...

...In "We Don't Live Here Anymore, an adulterous wife asks her adulterous husband, "You're not scared of this...

...And he is depressing despite his having a character say, "Depression is a sin, perhaps the only one that many people can commit...

...Because the characters and events are not wrapped up in avant-garde artifices that only draw attention to themselves, and thus away from the content, we see terror and emptiness at their most naked limits...

...Today, however, we expect our writers to startle us in their work, and to exhaust us in their talk-show appearances...

...Then, moving beneath me, she said in a voice so incongruous with her body that I almost softened but quickly got it back, shutting my ears to what I had heard: This is all we ever do, Harry-this is all we ever do...

...a "sexual revolution...

...Reviewed by Charles Deemer Playwright, short story writer The trouble with innovative literary form, Cocteau once remarked, is that it makes its author, like the wearer of a loud suit, stand out in a crowd...

...In "Miranda Over the Valley" a college girl, who under parental pressure aborted the baby she would have chosen to keep, leaves the baby's father, the boy she would have chosen to marry, "lying naked in the dark...

...Form has become its own end, and many of our most fashionable writers seem to have joined Jiminy Cricket in singing, "It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it...

...Literally read, this ending is hopeful...

...What she has learned is this: "Oh yes, I know: there are other guys...

...What Du-bus does instead, and has been doing for a decade, is to tell moving and complex stories that are at the very heart of our times...

...We follow him from masturbation to confession and back again, from backseat lovemaking to confession and back, until the moment at a New Year's Eve party, when he and his girlfriend find themselves on a bed for the first time...

...His sentences lead in an orderly manner to ordered paragraphs...

...Andre Dubus is not a fashionable writer...

...he simply asks the right questions with more power and depth than any contemporary fiction writer I know...

...he ascends...

...It is an older but no wiser protagonist who faces emptiness in "Going Under...

...Of course, Dubus should not be faulted for being more successful when writing about infidelity than about fidelity...

...No liner notes extolling Dubus' "humanity" remove the fact that he is, by and large, depressing to read...

...Will Peter love Jo...

...and he pauses in his passion to gently kiss her brightened eyes...

...All the stories are moving and sad...

...He jogs, since "running is the only act in his life that gives him what he pays for.' He has affairs: "She must be the last, she will be the last, she is the last, because there was death in that repetition of lovers, each goodbye was a little death, and the affairs themselves were too because they were shallow and ephemeral and so he felt shallow and ephemeral too, his soul untapped on his march to death, a stranger between the thighs of a stranger...

...Dubus' achievement, I think, is to put love, sex and promiscuity back into the moral context they have escaped...

...Separate Flights, his first collection, is important, welcome and overdue...

...Love, sex, promiscuity-these are the themes at the center of seven of the eight stories in this collection, and although they are commonplace topics, Dubus brings to them an uncommon moral concern...

...In "If They Knew Yvonne" (which Martha Foley included in The Best American Short Stories 1970), the viewpoint is that of a Catholic boy who struggles with and finally succumbs to aroused manhood...

...He refusis to be "grotesque," except in Sherwood Anderson's sense of the term...

...But in the brilliant title story we leave a middle-aged woman feigning sleep beside her husband, who has just admitted adultery...

...He makes no outrageous puns, uses no obscenities, disdains obscurity...

...he, too, is a product of our times...

...On the night her rapist is electrocuted, Jill, of "In My Life," stares at a "pale light at the window" while her boyfriend makes love to her...

...Miranda will have other guys...

...It is difficult to think of a more unfashionable question during (or is it after...

...In "Over the Hill" a Marine, whose wife has been unfaithful back in the States, faces the brig: "It was at least better than nothing...

...Peter is a disc jockey, divorced, lonely, going under...

...he is Prometheus...

...The ending of "Going Under" actually has a fine irony...

...What hope we find in Separate Flights comes from the fact that sickness must be correctly diagnosed before it can be cured...

...For all their thematic connections, Dubus' stories ptesent a wide variety of situations, contexts, points of view...

...He has no answers, nor is he a prude...

...Dubus asks it repeatedly in this book, and in so doing he shows us what our actions can lead to...

...He will send few readers to the dictionary...

...Separate Flights is required reading for tomorrow's genius who would create-after the challenge by Denis de Rougemont in Love Declared-something that we have never had but may desperately need, "the myth of ideal marriage...