"Townie,' by Andre Dubus III

At first glance, Townie doesn't look like a book that merits a review in an arts publication. It's the story of a young man who responds to a violent milieu by becoming a brawler himself, discovers he likes fighting and becomes trapped in a cycle of violence. His weapons of choice are fists, not guns, but his story duplicates the plot line of countless Westerns.

It's a relevant book for arts aficionados because Andre Dubus III is the son of one of the best short story writers America has produced in the last 50 years. His story is a good example of the surprises we encounter when we peek at the puppetmaster hiding behind the curtain.

George Orwell once wrote that the typical modern novel was a novel about a novelist. Today, the typical literary novel is a novel about a creative writing teacher.

The senior Dubus spent most of his life teaching creative writing at Bradford College in Massachusetts, but he sidestepped the pitfalls academia typically sets in the path of writers. Dubus wrote a couple of stories about English professors who play around with their female students, but most of his work looks at life outside academia.

An obese woman's soul

His stories delve into military life (Dubus was a marine officer), small town violence, the special concerns of Catholics, and universal sorrows like divorce and adultery. In his tight little gem entitled The Fat Girl, Dubus even manages to take us inside the soul of an obese woman, as she progresses from overweight wallflower to alluring thin woman to rejected overweight divorcee.

His story Killings (filmed as In the Bedroom) looks like it will follow a familiar path. A husband and wife have lost their son, and the wife is falling apart because she must watch the killer walking around their small town while he awaits a trial that will probably send him away for only five years. A more conventional writer would have told how the parents come to understand the young murderer or recognize that revenge doesn't solve anything. Dubus charts a harsher course.

Andre Dubus III embarked on his violent odyssey when his parents divorced while he was a child. He grew up in the fading industrial town across the Merrimack River from his father's college— a rough place whose young men seem to have spent most of their leisure time fighting. He responded in his early teens by taking up body building, acquiring muscle and becoming a fighter himself.

Just across the river

The senior Dubus provided support money and engaged in parental visits but never learned about the violence his children were experiencing. The biggest shock in Townie, for me, was the revelation that his academic perks included married quarters on campus. Dubus the elder lived in a comfortable cottage with his second and third wives while his first family struggled with violence and drugs on the other side of the Merrimack River. Thus the author of all those humane, understanding short stories comes across as an irresponsible, obtuse human being.

There was more to him than that, of course. He was a social explorer who hung around bars and talked to younger people long after most of his academic contemporaries had given up that sort of thing. Had he been a different kind of person, his children would have enjoyed happier childhoods. But he might not have written all those stories.

Reconciliation

Andre III recounts his relationship with his father without any trace of bitterness. He became a writer himself (the striking Ben Kingsley movie House of Sand and Fog is based on his novel of the same name) and achieved a rapport with his father during the years in which the elder Dubus was confined to a wheelchair after he was hit by a car. The son's picture of his father was profoundly altered at 18, when he began reading his father's stories, and the relationship included a healthy mutual respect for their mutual achievements as writers.

Townie is a fascinating reminder that most of the work that captivates the literary and artistic audience involves struggles and tensions that alter the lives of dozens of people. Behind every story— there's a story.♦


To read a response, click here.