Broken Vessels

This book is worth it for the essay "On Charon's Wharf" alone. I can't recommend it highly enough. If you're a Dubus reader, this is the motherlode.

Andre Dubus died in 1999, at the age of 63. He wrote short stories and essays, in a steady, straightforward style that often seems to be with the voice of the heart itself. This collection of essays, written between the years 1977 and 1990, tells of his boyhood in Louisiana, his years as a marine, and his life as a student, writer, teacher, husband and father. He is a mixture of a very proud man who is also humbled by what reflection reveals to him of life's meaning. A practicing Catholic, his writing exhibits a strong moral sense. He reaches consistently for a single, coherent perspective from which to see and understand everything. In an age of hype and self-promotion, his sense of himself as a writer seems very old-fashioned. He wonders, for instance, how the quality of writing is affected when you do it for money. Or, as in The New Yorker, your words appear next to advertisements for luxury products. A celebrator of friendship, he speaks lovingly of the men who are his friends. And he shows a strongly democratic spirit in the respectful attention he pays to the conversations of laborers and Amtrak crew members. He speaks less freely about his love for the women in his life, as if to say much would betray intimacies. The title of the book refers to an accident in 1986, when helping a stranded motorist on a dark highway in Massachusetts, Dubus was struck by another car. Losing one leg and the use of the other, he never walked again. His essays on running, playing baseball as a boy, intervening in an assault of a teenage girl by her boyfriend, a cross-country train trip, yield to descriptions of physical therapy and learning to live in a wheelchair. You read page after page of this account, and you look at your own legs, maybe crossed as you sit or stretched out in front of you, suddenly glad for them and aware that you may never take them for granted again. With luck, you won't take yourself for granted again either. Dubus has that effect on you. He is also author of a more recent and equally fine collection of essays, "Meditations From a Movable Chair."

Andre Dubus' writing is like having a conversation with an old friend. He tells it "like it is." He invites us into his life and the broken people who are present there. He holds nothing back, leaving us to witness his brokenness without any regret on his part. If you've never read essays, or have never enjoyed them before, I highly recommend this book as well as Dubus' "Meditations from a Movable Chair." These two works are wonderful reading! They both move quickly and the literary form of the essay allows one to pick up and read each essay separately, and not have the pressure of reading a whole book. Also, each essay is very reflective and thought-provoking so as to add a spiritual dimension to these works. I would recommend reading "Broken Vessels" first, then any of Dubus' other works, as "Broken Vessels" gives us some insight into who this person, Andre Dubus truly is.

This book is a revealing look at one of the best writer's writers working today. If you've read his fiction, you know Dubus is one of the best male writers writing women characters today, always a fascinating accomplishment and this book reveals more of the man behind the sensitivity in his fiction. Includes itimate details of his life after the tragedy that changed everything.