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Shelf Love

"Killings" -- Andre Dubus --

On the August morning when Matt Fowler buried his youngest son, Frank, who had lived for twenty-one years, eight months, and four days, Matt’s older son, Steve, turned to him as the family left the grave and walked between their friends, and said: “I should kill him.” He was twenty-eight, his brown hair starting to thin in front where he used to have a cowlick. He bit his lower lip, wiped his eyes, then said it again. Ruth’s arm, linked with Matt’s, tightened; he looked at her. Beneath her eyes there was swelling from the three days she had suffered. At the limousine Matt stopped and looked back at the grave, the casket, and the Congregationalist minister who he thought had probably had a difficult job with the eulogy though he hadn’t seemed to, and the old funeral director who was saying something to the six young pallbearers. The grave was on a hill and overlooked the Merrimack, which he could not see from where he stood; he looked at the opposite bank, at the apple orchard with its symmetrically planted trees going up a hill. 

Next day Steve drove with his wife back to Baltimore where he managed the branch office of a bank, and Cathleen, the middle child, drove with her husband back to Syracuse.....


This is an opening sentence for the history books. Because it raises such big questions, so quickly and so artfully. Why did this young man die? When Steve says, "I should kill him," which guy might he be referring to? What might have happened to inspire these thoughts of vengeance?

Because Andre Dubus is a wizard, he doesn't immediately pursue the questions (as he would if he were writing a simple page-turner). He instead points out that Steve has thinning hair; life's bits of data fly at us fast, and we might cope with an undigestible statement by focusing on someone's physical appearance. (Also, Matt is seeing a child where a man is standing; he is partly lost in the past, and, in his heart, he has just buried a little boy.)

I love this opening also because of the interest in things happening under the surface: Ruth doesn't speak, but she tightens her arm, in an ambiguous way. Ruth might seem poised, but there's swelling "beneath her eyes," and the swelling betrays her suffering. The Congregationalist minister must have struggled with the eulogy, "though he hadn't seemed to."

Finally, I love the use of paragraphing. Matt does not shout his son down. He does not say, "That's a terrible idea." Instead, he is--distressingly--silent, and then the narrator pushes us forward to the next day. A non-response is a kind of response. A seed has been planted.

Great writing is a miraculous thing. "Killings" became one of my favorite movies, "In the Bedroom," and that movie was one of the main sources of my now-life-long movie-love. I rewatched it a few years ago, and I was so struck by Sissy Spacek's performance that I started giggling. The person I watched with thought this was a bit monstrous; after all, Spacek's character was suffering. I wasn't giggling at that; I was giggling at Spacek's intelligence and inventiveness, the joy of seeing a creative act. The sense that Spacek's braininess matched Dubus's braininess.

In any case, you have to read this! Dubus had a son--Dubus III--who also became an accomplished writer. I'm obsessed.

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