What makes these stories so valuable is the way Dubus follows the strains of his characters’ muted hope. Like Mark in the first story, Robert feels that “suffocating awareness of his own worthlessness,” but the literary marketplace is flooded with cheap despair like that. He’s got a transparent, easy style that’s never self-consciously lyrical but constantly delivers phrases of insight and gentle wit that lay open these characters without scalding them with irony, as we’ve come to expect from so many clever novelists. It’s that just-out-of-reach desire that creates such poignancy in each of these stories, including one about a philandering bartender named Robert, who likes to pretend he’s a poet. ”Dirty Love,” by Andre Dubus III (Norton/Norton) And so he was ordering his wife - for she was, by definition, a member of his team, wasn’t she? - to stay home.” By the time he gets a full sense that he’s “a grasping failure of a man,” it’s awfully late, but what choice does he have other than to throw himself toward the possibility of redemption and reconciliation? “It was the same he used when ordering a poorly motivated team member to do one thing or another. Confronting his wife, “Mark recognized the tone of his voice,” Dubus writes. The real pain of this story is that Mark isn’t completely clueless about his destructive behavior it’s just that he’s defined himself for so long as a blunt solver of problems that he doesn’t know any other way to act. Reviewing a surveillance tape of his wife having sex with another man, he imagines that this perverse piece of evidence will somehow shame her into repentance rather than make her flee in horror. But Mark is so filled with self-righteous anger that he can’t quite comprehend that his long marriage is over - has been over for a long time. “He began to see this as an opportunity and not a threat,” Dubus writes, “a positive risk that must be managed and monitored and controlled.” Unfortunately, Laura is not a project she’s his spouse of more than 20 years. Mark Welch is a 56-year-old project manager at a software company, a man trained to identify, isolate and solve problems - like, say, his wife’s chronic unhappiness and subsequent adultery. ![]() Spiked with grim comedy, “Listen Carefully as Our Options Have Changed” is a sharp story about the way work culture has infected our lives. One of Dubus’s great talents is his ability to shift our allegiances, to inspire our affection for obnoxious men, turn us against them and then finally bring us back with enlarged sympathies. There’s an echo of Richard Russo’s work here, though these are tougher, more calloused situations. Each story features someone looking for love - and carelessly mishandling it. The four lightly connected stories take place north of Boston in a small coastal town like the one Dubus described in his recent memoir, “ Townie.” It seems always chilly and overcast in these tales, an expres sion perhaps of the inability of anyone to feel the warmth they need. Sullied by their own sense of failure, these characters ask: “How can anyone ever be clean with family? Blood is too dirty, dirty with love that can so easily turn to hate.” “Dirty Love” is a quieter book, in which people’s desires are smothered in frustration, their anger left to sputter in loneliness rather than erupt in acts of violence. Millions know Dubus from his 1999 novel, “ House of Sand and Fog,” a National Book Award finalist that was also chosen for Oprah’s Book Club and made into a movie starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. ![]() Besides, there’s plenty of grungy sex between these covers, if that’s what you’re looking for it’s just that Dubus is so starkly honest about our flailing attempts for connection that he drains away any eroticism and leaves only painful longing and regret. But whatever it takes to get you into his fantastic collection of novellas is fair game. The title of this new book by Andre Dubus III, “ Dirty Love,” is a bit of a tease.
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