A Sad Time

Not long after I’d returned to the US from Japan, I met a couple living a few doors away from my place at the beach. There was something about our meeting that first time that assured me we would become good friends. 

And that we certainly did. 

At the time, Fred and Kathleen were good medicine in the sense of helping me through the re-acclimation to American life, something I’d long been away from. It wasn’t long before I was calling them best friends, always happy to share dinner or a bottle of wine or nothing more than an hour of good conversation on the patio. Over the past four years there has never been a day I wouldn’t be grateful for time together with these friends.

About three weeks back Fred and Kathleen went to south Florida to spend time with family at the Club Med Resort. During their days there they renewed their wedding vows for the third time. Nine days ago I had lunch at their beach condo where I practically slavered over a casserole that took the place of the cold cuts she hinted we might have. Twice this past week I have made that dish, something I now call Kathy’s Kasserole.

Between March 2012 and November 2013 she wrote a blog called The Three Rs of Cancer: Remission-Recurrence-Resilience about her experiences of dealing with cancer and about the importance of remaining positive and upbeat in the face of a difficult battle. 

I am heartbroken to report that our good friend-wife-mother-sister and grandmother passed away early this morning. Fred, you and the entire family are in our thoughts and prayers.

Kathleen  1945-2014

The Aftermath of Cleopatra

It took recommendations from different people over a long period of time but several months late I finally got around to Jess Walter’s 2012 novel, Beautiful Ruins. 

Hard to recall a book I’ve enjoyed as much in the last half year. 

With a book buying budget teetering on the brink of calamity, I opted for the local library but discovered the book was on reserve—good sign for one published over two years ago. The paperback came out in April of this year, so finding a copy on store shelves shouldn’t be hard. And of course, there’s always Amazon who can get an inexpensive copy to readers anywhere in a week or two.

Author, Jess Walter lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington with his wife and three children. His most recent book is a collection of short stories titled, We Live in Water: Stories. He has written six novels as well as two non-fiction books. His novel Citizen Vince won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2006, The Zero was a National Book Award finalist and Beautiful Ruins was included in the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2012. HIs books have been translated into twenty-eight languages.

Beautiful Ruins brings a story that jumps here and there across fifty years from Italy to Hollywood, on to Seattle, London and places far and in-between. It begins with the arrival of a striking young woman in a tiny village on the coast of Italy. While filming the epic movie Cleopatra in 1962 Richard Burton “trifles” with the beautiful young bit-part actress who is later bundled off the set with a story that she is dying of stomach cancer, her symptoms very like those of early pregnancy. None the wiser, she is taken to a tiny village on the coast of Italy where she meets a young Italian named Pasquale. From there we follow a boldly entertaining cast of characters across fifty years to a little theater in present day Idaho. 

For all its color, its richness of character and bravura storytelling, Beautiful Ruins is at heart a novel of social criticism offering the reader much more than mere superficial entertainment. Each of the writer’s characters shows us another side of what it is to dream, to lie, to take advantage, fail and then ultimately understand what we are. Two of Walter’s central characters—the actress and the young Italian, Pasquale—are set apart in their goodness and honesty, but are forced to find their way through a world of others serving only themselves, feeding their own misguided selfishness. 

From here forward this reader’s eyes and ears will be tuned to anything by Jess Walter. 

Duh-Byoose 3

Frequent rain along with a near medieval plague of mosquitos here in dirt road country has kept me pretty much housebound the past couple of weeks. Those rare times when I run from front door to car I have to hope that only a dozen or so of the bloodthirsty devils will join me behind the wheel. Farina the dog is wary as well, on more than one occasion breaking into a Saint Vitus dance when the attack comes from all sides. We are both happier ensconced on the back porch where we can watch the rain safe from mosquitos and happy with book or bone. 

Andre Dubus III is the author of six books: The Cage Keeper and Other Stories (1989), Bluesman (1993), House of Sand and Fog (1999), The Garden of Last Days (2008), Townie (2011) and Dirty Love (2013). His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and a 2012 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, as well as being a finalist for the National Book Award. His books have been published in over twenty-five languages.

Dubus grew up in mill towns in the Merrimack River valley along the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border and began writing fiction at the age of 22, just a few months after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelors Degree in sociology.

At my local library a couple of weeks ago I came upon a Dubus book on the New Fiction shelf, his most recent work titled Dirty Love, published in October 2013. The writer’s name was not new to me and I remembered him immediately as the author of House of Sand and Fog, a book I read in 1999. With that in mind, I took home this latest book from Mr Dubus almost certain it would turn out to be a good read. 

And it was. Dirty Love is a book of four novellas, each story set in the same town north of Boston and including minor characters that reappear in a subsequent story almost like a familiar face from down the street or the guy at the local Starbucks. Writing about Dirty Love in The New York Times, Jeff Turrentine reminds us that newlyweds crossing the threshold are walking into a ‘…daunting meshwork of married-folk dialectics: conquest and submission, selfhood and union, lust and shame, rejoicing and regret…so disoriented by love they honestly can’t tell whether they’re looking for a way into or a way out of it.’ This is a good description of characters who fumble through infidelity, philandering, romantic disillusionment and the betrayal of friends and family. My experience with Andre Dubus III has sometimes been that many of his characters come across as unsympathetic people who too often orchestrate their own problems. I found less of that in this new book. The final and best of the four stories is the sad tale of Devon, a high school dropout shattered by dirty love and the betrayal of friends and parents. 

Impressed by Dirty Love, I next dug up a copy of Dubus’s 2008 book, The Garden of Last Days, a story inspired by the suspected visit of one 9/11 hijacker to a Florida strip club shortly before the attacks. Probably my favorite of this writer’s work, it tells the story of an early September night in 2011 when a stripper in Florida is forced to bring her three year-old daughter to the Puma Club for Men because her babysitter has been hospitalized. Not well received by all critics, this was for me a relentless charge through over 500 pages, the story and viewpoint switching between five voices: April the stripper, Bassam the jihadist, A.J. an angry customer ejected from the club, Lonnie the club bouncer and Jean, April’s elderly landlady and babysitter. Dubus shapes anger, desperation, sexuality and fear into an absorbing novel I found hard to put down. Rumor has it that James Franco is planning to direct and star in a movie version of the book. Action-packed, that’s for sure.

A few days later I began the Dubus memoir, Townie, one that followed publication of The Garden of Last Days. Though born in California, Dubus grew up north of Boston in an area of depressed mills, poverty, drugs and alcoholism, where violence lived around every corner and where bullying was a way of life. I stuck with this one for 250 pages but finally put it down because the people of Dubus’s childhood and youth were mostly thugs and drunks quick to pound on the next guy or girl. At one point, afraid of his neighbors or classmates, Dubus took up weightlifting and boxing, turning himself into what he had previously feared. It is a great credit to him that he ultimately lifted himself out of that anger and brutality to become a respected writer, professor and family man. But his was a forge too harrowing for me and after the chapters leading to his early twenties I laid it aside. That said, I would discourage no one from reading the book. It has won awards and been called riveting and unforgettable. 

These days I am rereading House of Sand and Fog, the 1999 book that was a finalist for the National Book Award, and one that Dubus conceived after reading a tiny newspaper article telling of a woman losing her house when erroneously evicted for unpaid taxes. There is something Shakespearian about the tragedy that befalls the characters in this book. Kathy Nicolo is a recovering addict whose husband walked out and who repeatedly ignores letters from the tax office until the day they knock on her door with an eviction notice. Forced into a motel room, her belongings in storage, the house left to her by her father is auctioned off by the state, bought by a former colonel in the Iranian military under the Shah trying to make a life for his family after fleeing Iran. And that is only the beginning. All involved are on a path to disaster. House of Sand and Fog is a harrowing and beautifully written novel. For a reader looking to sample Andre Dubus III, this one is the ticket.