Saturday, October 27, 2007

Book 2: Separate Flights, by Andre Dubus

For my first choice in the Dävine Book Club, I selected Separate Flights, a collection of short stories by Andre Dubus. Before I go into my thoughts on the stories, I first want to talk about why I picked this book.

I was in Singapore for a week in September, meeting with our operations department on a project I'm involved with. The jet lag took me four or five days to really overcome -- I've done Europe a number of times, and jet lag to and from there is cake, but going to Singapore was absolute murder on my body. On Sunday, my fifth day in the city, I was finally on a normal schedule, so I got up in the morning and went to church, then came back and watched rugby on TV. At around 2:00 PM I was bored, and I knew I wouldn't be able to make it the whole day without going out (I try to avoid "going out" on Sundays), so I grabbed my book and headed over to the subway, then over to a mall called VivoCity, which was supposedly really cool. I checked it out for a while, took some pictures, grabbed some dinner (sushi, really good), then I walked into a book store with the sole intent of picking my book for this club. I felt rotten at the time. I was lonely. I was halfway around the world all by myself. I had spent four days falling into a daze at 6 PM every night, then wandering the streets (well, taking taxis places, then walking around) in the middle of the night looking for anything interesting to do or see or eat. So I really was in a bad place when I walked into the book store. I felt sorry for myself, I felt like sitting in my loneliness and savoring it, being proud of it.

I had heard about Dubus' writing at many points in my adult life, but I had never read anything of his until I saw a few of his titles in that bookstore. The title of one of his books caught my eye: Adultery & Other Choices. I flipped through a few of them, read some passages, read the covers, and knew very quickly that I wanted to choose a book that reflected my emotion at that moment, and that something by this author was likely my best bet at achieving that desire. I ended up picking Separate Flights, and I purchased it as soon as I was online the next day. It was waiting for me when I got back from Singapore.

So that's the story of how I came to choose this book: I knew it would be dark, I expected it to make me feel sad and empty and lonely like I had wanted at the time, and I knew that it would be different than anything I had read in the recent past, if ever.

On to the book itself: Dubus is an excellent writer. To put it simply, every one of the stories in this book could be described as "Great writing about terrible things." To start, it's clear that Mr. Dubus was not happy with his life; there is a recurring plot line in all of his stories, in some more literally than in others, that he had not seen in life what he had expected of it. There is disappointment in every sentence he wrote. Here's a sample from the title story that reflects the theme of the entire set of stories, and also of Mr. Dubus himself:

At Helen's wedding she had of course cried a little, and for some of the accepted reasons: a daughter had grown, a daughter was leaving, a phase of her own life had ended. But her tears were bitter too, for she knew the rest of Helen's life would never live up to the emotional promise of that day. Like graduation ceremonies where you heard all those words about what lay ahead, then you went out and nothing happened. Helen and Larry would end up, in a friendly way, boring each other, disliking each other.


The other major theme is infidelity, which seemed to stem in the stories from the previously mentioned boredom. In the eyes of Dubus' narrative, marriage is required of everyone, and expected, but it inevitably leads to boredom, which leads to infidelity, often to vice, always to a life of the resolution that we never get what we want, and we have to continue to live with that disappointment. It's quite discouraging. I simply don't agree with Dubus, but I know that his description of men and women was a representation not only of the men and women we all know in our professions and communities, but also of what Dubus himself was clearly experiencing at the time he wrote these stories (and throughout his life, since all of his other stories are apparently cut from the same tree).

Dubus is masterful when it comes to writing about the tedium of life. Not just the everyday things -- doing the laundry and the dishes and jogging and work -- but also the ever-shrinking emotion of those who live "normal" lives. I've never read a book that says so much about so little "real time" without making it seem like overkill. The pace of the stories matches the emotion, and I appreciated it, even though, to put it lightly, it bummed the hell out of me.

I felt down and sad with every story that I read and finished, but that was the goal. Not all literature has to be chirpy or poppy or have happy endings. In fact, life rarely is as happy as we'd read it in books. Dubus did his part to change that perception, and I enjoyed (not in an entertaining sense, but in a life and feelings sense) his pattern of writing about the everyday corners that no one ever wants to address.

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