Abstract:Conversations with Andre Dubus. Edited by Olivia Carr Edenfield. Literary Conversations Series. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. xxi + 257 pp. [$40.00] cloth.The cover phot...Conversations with Andre Dubus. Edited by Olivia Carr Edenfield. Literary Conversations Series. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. xxi + 257 pp. [$40.00] cloth.The cover photo for Conversations with Andre Dubus displays the famous writer with his chest bare except for a gold cross. Dubus (1936-1999), the author ^ of such highly honored story collections as Flights, Adultery and Other v J Choices, Finding a Girl in America, We Don't Live Here Anymore, The Last Worthless _ Evening, and Dancing After Hours, was, like Flannery O'Connor, a cradle Catholic who was outspoken about his Catholicism, and since he was a successful southern writer with an MFA from Iowa and a writer who faced serious long-term health issues, it is surprising that there has not been more critical prose devoted to comparing the works of Dubus and O'Connor.These two writers shared a sense of the importance of writing on a regular and deliberate daily schedule, a skeptical attitude toward the symbol-searching of literary critics, and an understanding of how violence should work in fiction. Dubus could talk about his aim in writing as showing the delivery of a secular sacrament to a character (55), making his strategies and goals sound like those of O'Connor. In these interviews, Dubus never says a bad word about O'Connor-when one interviewer compares Dubus's Separate Flights to O'Connor's Wise Blood, Dubus's response is simply Wow (19)-but he not list O'Connor among his influences or his favorite writers. These tend to be male, as one might expect from a writer who was once a Marine: Dubus speaks at length about Hemingway, Chekhov, and Faulkner. But when Dubus mentions a favorite woman writer, it is Gina Berrault or Nadine Gordimer. Since Dubus started his studies at Iowa at about the time that O'Connor died, perhaps her reputation became somewhat intimidating for him.One important difference in the careers of Dubus and O'Connor is that when the Louisiana-born Dubus left the South, he stayed away. Dubus had a full teaching career at Bradford College in Massachusetts, and most of his fiction is set in the Northeast. The successes of Dubus call into question our usual assumption that O'Connor's return to Milledgeville was crucial to the success of her art. Another significant distinction between the two writers might be on the subject of compassion. One might not easily imagine O'Connor saying, as the macho military man Dubus in these interviews, When you're writing, you somebody as God does (82), or can't write about someone I don't love (158), or . …Read More
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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