I first encountered the stories of Andre Dubus in the right time and place, I’d say, unemployed in the quiet of northwest Washington, outside Bellingham, to be exact, waiting for the nothing that was Y2K. I was 32, before marriage, before children. I’m curious what I’d think of him now.
As the jones to reread him grows, I find myself wondering, is he seen as a New England writer, after all those years in a dying mill and factory town in northeast Massachusetts, like another Franco-American, Jack Kerouac? Or as a Louisianan, as he hailed from Lake Charles.
He was a Catholic writer, I think would be his response.
It’s difficult to get across how much his stories meant to me — the hypnotic voice, the contemplative stretches in which not much happens, the quiet portraits of domesticity and family life, the Formica and wall-mounted telephones of the kitchens of the late 1970s.
This is a good example of a writer whose life needs to be kept separate from his work. I’m sure his son Andre Dubus III turns out good stuff, like “Townie,” his memoir, it’s just that I don’t care that they didn’t go to a single baseball game together despite his father’s hard-core Red Sox fandom. (An exception would be hearing on “Fresh Air” how the son built his father’s coffin, at one point climbing inside to get the measurements right. Now that’s interesting.)
As for the senior Dubus’s nonfiction, one example is particularly relevant, given the current political climate and New York State’s judicial troubles in grappling with concealed carry — “Giving Up the Gun,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 1997 and was later collected in his book “Meditations From a Movable Chair.” In it, after a lifetime of admiring handguns as objects, from the seamless engineering to the feel of metallic heft in his palm, he finds himself pulling one on a guy outside a bar one night. It does not go well.
He does give up the gun, gives himself over to the hand of God, as he says, to a measure of uncertainty, I might say, which sounds more fatalistic in this inadequate retelling than Dubus ever did.
And this is why every American should read it.