Townie/Andre Dubus III: Full Reflections

I finished reading Townie today, a book I first wrote of a week or so ago.  It is a long book, not one to be rushed through.  It is a hard book, a tale about the fate of children growing up in the wake of an occasional dad—a talented man, a loving man, but a man who puts his impulses and his writing first.  Dubus II, the author's father has, we come to realize (thanks to the son's tender and non-accusatory telling), no real idea why his children are hungry or chased or being hurt in the world, or why his namesake son doesn't know how to throw a ball, or why that same son turns to beefing up and boxing and lashing out at world that can do tremendous harm.

Dubus II doesn't really understand and Dubus III doesn't really want to blame him, but the life was what the life was—a sister's rape, a brother's suicide attempts, a house open to itinerants and bullies, and a single mom doing everything she can to try to hold it altogether, though who can hold it altogether, really, when the four kids are your responsibility and you're working all day just to pay the rent?  Leaving brings all kinds of heartache in its wake, and Townie does an extraordinary job of taking us inside the fractures and consequences.  It's not that Dubus II doesn't see his kids; a couple of nights a week he does.  It's not that he doesn't pay child support; he gives what he can.  It's just (but not simply) that none of that, in this family, is enough.  Townie hurts to read, but it's essential.

Dubus III, as I have mentioned, overcomes the embattled nature of his adolescent circumstance by clinging to the faith that the only defense he has (for himself, for his family) is muscle and fist.  Time and again we see this kid (and, later, this man) throwing a sucker punch, knocking an enemy to the ground, riding in the back of a police car, sitting briefly behind bars, and hearing, later, that one of his victims was sent to the hospital, that one of the victim's friends is out to get him.  Later in life, Dubus II, a former marine, asks his son how he can take so many assailants on at once, and the author, by way of explaining, says this:

I wanted to tell him about the membrane around someone's eyes and nose and mouth, how you have to smash through it which means you have to smash through your own first, your own compassion for another, your own humanity.

This idea—this history of smashing through  his own humanity—haunts Dubus III throughout these pages.  We are haunted with him.  Seamlessly and urgently written, no boast in it, no politics, no accusations, either, Townie is a reckoning.  It is a brave insider's look at how one moves past fists toward words, past heartbreak toward compassion, past broken family to a wholeness of one's own.

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Townie/Andre Dubus III: First Reflections

Years ago, after I finished writing my third book, Still Love in Strange Places, Andre Dubus III wrote words for that jacket that still stun me.  Quiet and elegant words, beautifully crafted, followed by a note of equal elegance.  You don't forget people (perfect strangers) who do those things for you.  You tuck them into a special place on your shelf of fortunes.

I have read all Dubus books since, watched his House of Sand and Fog on the big screen, wondered where his craft came from (though of course there were the genes, the blood legacy of his namesake author father), and while I knew the bare outlines of Dubus's personal story, I never guessed at what he reveals in his new memoir, Townie.  Dubus was one of four kids left to hardscrabble living after the separation of the mother and dad.  Having left the family to pursue a life as a published, teaching author, Dubus the elder appeared once or twice a week for years—took the kids to dinner, interceded on behalf of bullies, taught his teenager son to toss a ball, but stayed, otherwise, where he was, in his zone of writing and teaching and young and hip friends and outside the circle of his family.  It was Dubus's mom who was left to the overwhelm of single parenthood, and it did, Dubus's reveals, overwhelm her.  Boyfriends came and went, houses were abandoned, much was filth and poverty, alcohol and drugs, and nearly everything was violence. 

I'm going to write more about this book in a few days to come.  But just now I want to share this passage, early in the book—a passage that is, I think, a high example of classic, gorgeous writing.  There's the hard truth here, in other words.  There is also tenderness.  Story and situation, I tell my students (using Gornick's terms).  Here are both, the perfect web.

The house was almost always dirty.  Whatever chores Mom would give us, we just did not do.  But some days, cooped up in that small hot house, one or two of us would finally leave the TV, grab the broom, and start sweeping the floorboards, the narrow wooden stairs and hallway.  We might wash the backed-up dishes in the kitchen, find the mop and scrub the floor.  We'd go up to our rooms and make our beds, pick dirty clothes out of the corners, and stuff them into a garbage bag for when we went to the laundromat.  Sometimes I'd go out to our tiny enclosed yard and sweep the concrete stoop.  In the corner of the fence was a rusty rake and I'd use it on our dirt yard.  I made straight even lines parallel to the fence.  It was still a dirt yard, but standing on the concrete stoop after, looking down at it, our home seemed somehow more orderly, our lives within it more comprehensible.

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