Loners & Losers the Last Worthless Evening: Four Novellas & Two

By Paul Gray

Forget the business about novellas and stories in the subtitle. Author Andre Dubus' latest collection of short fiction contains six pieces, four of them somewhat longer than the other two. It is Dubus' main title that calls for scrutiny. The Last Worthless Evening is not taken from any of the works included in the book; it alludes instead to a passage from William Faulkner's The Bear that amounts to a dirge for man's despoliation of the New World. In the past, Dubus has called his collections names such as Finding a Girl in America (1980) and The Times Are Never So Bad (1983). Now, apparently, they are.

Indeed, there is more than enough gloom to go around these tales. Dubus, 50, has always written most effectively about loners and losers, people who, as the narrator of one story describes them, "move through life like scraps of paper in the wind." The tension in his stories springs from an ambivalent attitude toward such characters. Are they victims of circumstance or of their own inadequacies?

The question matters because Dubus insists that actions, however dumb or careless, create moral consequences. Someone is to blame for wife and child battering, for drug abuse, for racial hatred, for crime, for the sense of dread that is "loose in the land." In Land Where My Fathers Died, a lawyer in a small Massachusetts town takes on the case of a man accused of murdering a local physician. Archimedes Nionakis knows that his client is innocent. He also realizes that in trying to find the real killer, "I was going to confront nothing as pure and recognizable as evil but a sorrowful litany of flaws, of failures, of mediocre hopes, and of vanity." During the course of his investigation, Nionakis finds his already low-voltage ambition dimmed by the tawdriness he encounters around him. Knowing that his prosperous relatives wonder about him and his modest law practice, the lawyer decides, "I would not, could not, work twelve or eight or even six hours a day five or six days a week for any life this nation offered."

This statement lacks the demonstrable authenticity that appears so consistently in all of Dubus' fiction, including the stories in this book. Abstract critiques of U.S. society seem puny amid the welter of details and telling observations that the author provides. In Molly, the title character, a 15-year-old girl, goes riding with her new boyfriend toward a beach on the Atlantic. She looks out the window at a succession of small, working-class houses: "In the faces of a group of teenagers who stood under a tree and watched her and Bruce passing, she saw a dullness she thought was sculpted by years of television, of parents who at meals and in the evenings had nothing to say to them, nothing to teach them."

People like this seldom make it into print nowadays unless they are lumped in with the latest unemployment figures or, even worse, written up in the police blotters of local papers. Dubus may have decided that such wasted lives are America's fault; he may even be right. But the case made by his fiction is far more complex and intriguing. In Rose, a nameless middle-age narrator starts chatting casually about a fellow habitue of Timmy's, a neighborhood bar in a town, once again in Massachusetts, on the Merrimack River. Her name is Rose; she is disheveled, disreputable, and she has a past that she confides to her barfly acquaintance one snowy Friday night. The teller of this tale takes his time getting around to it, but it is a scorcher when it arrives: how Rose and a construction worker fell in love long ago, married and, being devout Roman Catholics, had three children in as many years. How, further, romance soured into a nightmarish descent into impoverishment and brutality. After years of dulled acquiescence to the growing horror around her, Rose musters the energy to strike back. She saves her children from disaster and, in the process, loses them to the legal system. Now, at a different bar, she says that she did not deserve her offspring. The narrator thinks differently: "She reentered motherhood, and the unity we all must gain against human suffering."

Rose, by itself, is worth the price of this book; it is the most powerful entry in Dubus' impressive canon. Some decades down the road, enough justification will have cohered to call Rose a classic American story. And it is not, in truth, the product of a last worthless evening but of an artist in full control of his sympathies and skill.