What insights does Dubus show us about human relationships
with others and impressions of ourselves? How does sexuality play its part?
- FYI his website says he will be at
Brookline Booksmith on June 4 in Boston, MA.
Quick Summary from
Goodreads
In this heartbreakingly beautiful book
of disillusioned intimacy and persistent yearning, beloved and celebrated
author Andre Dubus III explores the bottomless needs and stubborn weaknesses of
people seeking gratification in food and sex, work and love.
Thoughts from Our
Book Group
- Not so “dirty” as “messy.”
- Some critics say the characters weren’t “real,” but we
thought the stories rang true.
- Dubus doesn't feel he has to solve everyone’s
personal problems, endings are left hanging, just like life.
- He has insight into damaged
relationships and real people begging for love.
- Beautiful writer with wonderful
sentences.
Narratives
(summaries from http://www.mercurynews.com/entertainment/ci_24460781/review-andre-dubus-examines-damaged-relationships-dirty-love,
http://andredubus.com/dirtylove.html,
and http://andredubus.com/dirtylove.html)
1. “Listen Carefully as Our Options Have
Changed," the opening story, explores an unhappy
marriage and two cheating spouses. On the Massachusetts coast north of Boston,
a controlling manager, Mark Welch
discovers his wife’s infidelity after twenty-five years of marriage. His wife, Laura, is having an affair with a
banker. Although occasionally picking up and hefting a piece of lead pipe, Mark
ultimately finds himself powerless to change the circumstances of his life.
- Reflecting back, we noticed that this first story sets the
stage with names and relationships that are picked up throughout the novel.
- This felt more like a writing technique, than a planned
integration. He probably had separate
stories and reused characters from one story to the next so there would be more
cohesion between them.
2. In “Marla,” an overweight young
woman, Marla, gains a romantic
partner but loses her innocence. She is a bank teller who feels her life
slipping away from her. She begins an affair with a 37-year-old engineer whose
passions tend toward video games and keeping his house pathologically clean. She complains about her live-in boyfriend's
playing video games: "Marla felt the same bruised emptiness that she did
after an action movie, and she'd kiss Dennis on the forehead and leave the room
while he kept playing."
- We talked about feeling so bad about oneself that one
“settles” into an unhappy situation.
- Fear keeps us from changing our circumstances; nothing
better will come along.
3. A philandering bartender/aspiring poet,
Robert Doucette is married to
Althea, a sweet but reticent upholsterer. In the final months of Althea's
pregnancy, Robert has hot sex with Jackie, a waitress at the restaurant, and
Althea finds this out and simultaneously goes into labor.
- We talked about how the waitress knew exactly what kind of
man Robert was, even though she knew him for many years less than his wife.
4. In the last story,
"Dirty Love," a teenage
girl tries to escape the notoriety of appearing in a sex video that goes viral.
Devon is an 18-year-old waitress at
the tavern where Robert works. To get away from an abusive father, she lives
with a considerate, widowed great-uncle Francis, but
she has to deal with the unintended consequences of an untoward sexual act that
was disseminated through social media. Her parents can't get past their anger
about the sex tape. When she finds love
with an Iraq PTSD vet she’s met by surfing the web: "Francis has seen it
over and over again, the girl in the corner whose new radiance shines not from
the boy who has found her but from the chance to direct all the love that's
been pooling inside her and now it's a warm flowing stream."
- We had the most empathy for Devon. She got trapped by lack of privacy (which got
us thinking about the “Google” books).
