Sad Songs

By Paul Gray

THE TIMES ARE NEVER SO BAD by Andre Dubus Godine; 180 pages; $13.95

At several moments in this collection of eight short stories and a novella, characters turn on a radio or record player and listen to country and western music: Crystal Gayle, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson. Author Andre Dubus, 47, makes this C & W name dropping seem more than a bid for easy topicality. He writes about people whose lives evoke sad songs and wailing pedal steel guitars. They work at checkout counters, wait on tables, tend bar or fry hamburgers at fast-food outlets. All are somehow stranded, searching for a pattern to their existence beyond the wet circles left behind by their beer cans or cocktail glasses.

Few of them succeed, but Dubus never condescends to their often inarticulate yearnings. In The Pretty Girl, for instance, there is clearly something terribly wrong with Ray Yarborough. He rapes his ex-wife Polly at knife point and severely beats the man she had slept with during the bad last days of the marriage. Dubus gives Yarborough his say, allows him, in fact, to tell much of his own story: "They would call it rape and assault with a deadly weapon, but those words don't apply to me and Polly. I was taking back my wife for a while; and taking back, for a while anyway, some of what she took from me. That is what it felt like: I went to her place torn and came out mended."

The constant enemy in these stories is what one character calls "the normal pain of being alive." People go to abnormal lengths to evade it. But booze and drugs only postpone unhappiness, and possessions do no better. In Anna, an impoverished young man robs a drugstore and gets away wiih a little more than $2,000. He takes his wife to a local mall for a shopping binge: color TV, stereo, albums, vacuum cleaner. Later, the money almost gone, he regrets not stealing some drugs for resale as well as the money. His wife says: "There's too much to get. There's no way we could ever get it all." He replies: "A lot of it, though. Some of it."

These bleak emotional landscapes will look familiar to readers of Dubus' three earlier collections of short fiction. Yet there is something new here: a religious sense, largely implicit in previous stories, that is now explicitly Roman Catholic. The narrator of A Father's Story, the last and best piece in this volume, is a devout believer whose wife has left and divorced him, making it impossible for him to marry again with the church's blessing. And he will not do so without it: "For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love." Years of loneliness have strengthened his faith and given him a sense of how his marriage failed: "Twelve years later I believe ritual would have healed us more quickly than the repetitious talks we had, perhaps even kept us healed." The shift from senseless to redemptive suffering marks Dubus as a writer with a distinguished past and a promising future.

--By Paul Gray This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.