Fiction Mid-Week: Andre Dubus

Père, that is, not fils.

Andre Dubus was a remarkable writer. My first and still my favorite encounter with his work was in his short novel Voices from the Moon, and its stunning, deceptively ordin ary first line:

"It's divorce that did it, his father had said last night."

The speaker is a twelve-year-old Catholic boy, one of the principal narrators of this wrenching 1984 novel. Interestingly, Dubus himself was divorced when his son, now-author Andre Dubus III, was ten years old.

I think I love him best because of the ways in which he portrays damage and destruction as both inevitable and potentially liberating, yet no less destructive or tragic for all that.

Hence making him the perfect author to represent what seems to have become Compost Week at tth.

Incidentally, there is some deep connection, in my mind at least, between this book of Dubus's and that of Ella Leffland, featured last week. I feel sure in my bones (eventually to be composted) that I probably bought both works one hot Dallas summer in the 1980s at Half Price Books, possibly in the same transaction.