The Last Worthless Evening - Hardcover

Dubus, Andre

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0517566257 ISBN 13: 9780517566251

Publisher: Crown, 1987

Synopsis

Andre Dubus has reached that point in the affection and dependence of his readers that argument is always breaking out over which tale or tales are his best. This is the sign of signs in a writer's reputation. It means he's been acknowledged as one of the authentic voices of his generation, a writer to whom readers and critics alike turn to discover how they feel. The four novellas and two stories of The Last Worthless Evening deepen Dubus's hold on his material, and so are bound to lengthen that frequently debated list of his "best" among his advocates.

The range in this new book is greater than in any previous Dubus collection. The novellas begin in the Navy, where two young officers (one white, one black) discover each other on the changing terrain of residual racism; offer shrewd homage to the detective story in Dubus's patented territory northwest of Boston; move on to the life of a suburban girl coming beautifully of age as her mother doesn't; and finish with a magnificent defense of her life and children by a woman who refuses defeat at the hands of her brutal and pathetic husband. The stories tell about a Hispanic shortstop lost among the gringos on a major-league team, and show what happens to an eleven-year-old kid when he meets up with a broken, angry, and decidedly dangerous Vietnam vet who takes him into a local bar for a treat.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

The four novellas and two stories in this collection all demonstrate Dubus's belief in the inherent nobility of the individual, the possibility of taking good, moral action on a small scale. And in each, the immediacy and strength of his writing renders the small universal; the reader is drawn into the situations Dubus creates so completely that for the moment, no other world seems to exist. In the thoughtful "Deaths at Sea," a naval officer writes a series of letters home to his wife about his black bunkmate, Willie, and about the burden of responsibility he, as a white Southerner, has always felt for the oppression of blacks. "Rose," every bit as compelling, is the story a woman tells to her bar partner about her silent complicity in her husband's abuse of their children. In all of the narratives, the human, and humanitarian, spirit triumphs over what can only be called the forces of darkness. Moral struggle comes as naturally to these people as good writing does to Dubus (whose last book was Voices from the Moon. His words and characterizations are infallibly right, yet he never abandons good storytelling in his desire to make a point. The majesty of these pieces remains long after the reader closes the book.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Rose,' by itself, is worth the price of the book; it is the most powerful entry in Dubus's impressive canon. --Time

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0517566257
• ISBN 13: 9780517566251
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 214