Conversations with Andre Dubus

The Outrageous Andre Dubus

69 The Outrageous Andre Dubus Jesse Kornbluth / 1985 Horizon 28 (april 1985): 16–20. reprinted with the permission of the author. “I don’t know how I feel till I hold that steel.” O Lord, I think at the end of that first sentence of “The Pretty Girl,” the novella which opens Andre Dubus’s We Don’t Live Here Anymore, what’s more unpromising than a weight lifter with a penchant for interior rhyme? A paragraph of this and I will abandon the book. Only I don’t. Because what follows in that paragraph is as precise a description of the pleasures of pumping iron as I have ever read—and not just emotionally and physically accurate, but something else, something that, in modern fiction, is actually astonishing. For though Ray Yarborough is a bartender—a man who doesn’t have much of a future in a white-collar world—he’s not stupid. He can’t be patronized. He knows what he feels and why. And he can tell us, directly and without artifice. Indeed, by the second page, I find I’m agreeing with him. Life in New England is good, what with the Celtics and Patriots and Red Sox and Bruins to watch, and the ocean, and the pretty country, and the hunting and fishing and skiing. And it’s better not to have a credit card if you’re the sort who doesn’t have a line on ready cash. But this isn’t Ray’s recitation of blessings. Although he’s treated his wife well, helping out with the cooking and cleaning and such, Polly has left him for Vinnie DeLuca. “Never marry a woman who doesn’t know what she wants and knows she doesn’t,” Ray concludes. Or wishes he could conclude. For earlier this summer, he has raped Polly. And now he’s about to stomp Vinnie DeLuca in a parking lot. Which will only propel him deeper into his obsession with his wife—an obsession that will end in a cabin overlooking a lake in New Hampshire with a question, a gun, and a tragedy. In sixty-five pages, “The Pretty Girl” tells a more complete story than most novels. Considerably impressed, I turn the page and begin the title 70 conversations with andre dubus story, the first of three about the Linharts and the Allisons, two couples living outside Boston. Both husbands teach at a small college on the New Hampshire border, where they make too little money, smoke too much, drink just enough beer to make their five-mile runs necessary, and, because they married too young, are adulterous—mostly with the other’s wife. Halfway through “Finding a Girl in America,” the last of these three novellas , I must leave my home. Yet I can’t leave without knowing whether Hank Allison (divorced and consorting with students) will marry Lori (who loves and understands him but is, after all, nineteen). So I read as I walk, circling my destination twice to get to the finale. No writers since James Salter and Peter Handke have taken me over this way. But Andre Dubus is different from those novelists—he comes unannounced . No one I talk to knows him. Of my literary friends, only two have read him. In the next few weeks, I read everything he’s written: four collections of stories and one short novel, Voices from the Moon—all published by David Godine of Boston. All hold up. Hold up so well that it’s impossible to understand why the mass market was denied Dubus until Crown issued We Don’t Live Here Anymore as a $7.95 paperback last year. Hold up so well that it soon becomes imperative, in the name of justice, to discover why, if Andre Dubus is so good, so few of us have ever heard of him. The campus of Bradford College reminds a visitor of more-celebrated New England institutions. But Bradford is set in Haverhill, an hour outside of Boston, and many of its 360 students come from the neighboring community . When I visited Andre Dubus there, he had resigned his job and was packing his books and preparing to move. He suggested that I arrive around eleven. He’d be back from morning mass by then, he said, so when I reached the faculty houses, all I had to do was look for the yellow Subaru. In his book-jacket pictures, Dubus is a kindly, round-faced...