Dancing After Hours: Stories

After finishing this collection of stories I am asking myself just how good was it? The hype on the back of the book compares Dubus to Chekhov, Carver, and Flannery O'Connor. It might be that good. As you're reading the stories, most of which are about spiritual crises, or the equivalent, you begin to see the universality in these microcosms of life. The writer and the characters draw you into a quest for meaning and a struggle to reach into the past and change everything you regret. There are a couple of running characters in the stories who give a collection already united by theme the feel of a novel. Some of the best stories are "Blessings", in which a woman tries to sort through her emotions of a fishing trip in which the boat sank. Her family had to fend off shark attacks until they were rescued. It's a great combination of remembrance and violence. Also, "All the Time in the World" in which a woman is desperately trying to find a husband, not just a lover. I could go on for a 1,000 words about the beauty of the prose of each story but I won't. Suffice it to say that when you read these stories you see yourself reflected back through them or, if not personally, through the experience of someone you know. Whether its the questioning of existence, an affair, the senselessness of corporate America, crime, adolescence, love, regret, or physical disability. Every person seems represented here, like some great Walt Whitman poem singing the unity of everything and everyone. There was only one story that I had trouble with and it involved a woman fighting off two thugs who followed her home to rob or rape her. The way the action was described it seemed like the screenplay for some bad japanese karate movie. And sometimes it seemed as though Dubus uses the setting of a story just as background. It doesnt really matter to the telling of the story but he spends paragraphs describing what's going on as the characters walk and talk for example. I understand that he was trying to show the indifference of the outside world to the internal problems of the characters but it got a little old. But these are minor complaints. Overall, it was a great collection, which settles my own question about how good it was.

I have never had the pleasure of reading any of Dubus' work before. I truly enjoyed his writing style. He has an amazing gift when it comes to capturing a person's thoughts and feelings. I would strongly recommend this book.

If you want to know what it would be like to lose the use of your legs, read this book. In a sparse, Faulknerian style Dubus evokes an emotional landscape that has been violated by pyhsical injury or tainted by advancing age and the inevitable degradation of the body that comes in its wake. Although not every story has at its focus this troubling theme, the penumbra of death and disfiguration permeates the collection.For Dubus, the transition beyond youth and physical splendor is accompanied primarily by a nostalgic longing for past pleasures which are understood as being now out of reach. But the book ultimately rinses through you with a power that leaves you meditating, as the author once did, about the realities that must be faced by all of us for the simple fact that we inhabit bodies that have a trajectory which sooner lr later commands our full attention.

I am in complete awe of Andre Dubus. His passing away last week is a great loss to the writing community. I highly recommend everything he has ever written.

Great stories, some related, always with a sense of loss and redemption. Real insights into the cost of happiness and the benefits or sacrifice and passion.