★ 03/06/2023
Dubus (Gone So Long ) returns with a heartrending account of one man’s desperate quest to retain his sense of goodness under the long shadow of the financial crisis. Fifty-four-year-old carpenter Tom Lowe is near rock bottom. Before the housing crash of 2008, Tom had taken out an adjustable-rate mortgage to finance the construction of a home for his wife and young son. But ballooning mortgage payments, a roofing accident, and a painkiller addiction left him broke in more ways than one. Now, he’s divorced and living alone in subsidized housing. He wants to visit his son, Drew, at college in Amherst, but his car gets impounded for expired plates. To get it back, he begrudgingly lists his carpentry tools for sale on Craigslist, but someone steals them first. The nonlinear narrative of Tom’s ups and downs finds him at one point entertaining a scheme cooked up by his neighbor and only friend, Trina, to steal the credit cards of an elderly woman in their complex, but Tom waffles, earning sour looks from Trina and leading to more soul-searching on his part. As in Dubus’s previous work, the author poignantly portrays his protagonist’s search for redemption, and shows how precarious situations can make people especially vulnerable. There’s a natural free association to the prose, with Tom’s stray thoughts generally leading him to regrets over “reach for more” than a “two room life,” or wistful memories of Drew before the family fell apart. This is a stirring addition to Dubus’s formidable oeuvre. (June)
2023-03-28
Tom, the hero of this cloying novel by the veteran Dubus, has lost just about everything. A fall from a roof while on the job led to a painkiller addiction, a foreclosed house, a failed marriage, and an estranged son. Living in subsidized housing in northeast Massachusetts, he’s shaken the painkillers but keeps plenty of vodka handy; his neighbors are loud, sometimes violent products (and creators) of broken homes. He wants to get his car out of hock to visit his son on his 20th birthday, but after his last valuable possessions—his tools—are stolen, he’s financially ruined. Early on, a sunken and understandably vengeful Tom (last name: Lowe) ropes his neighbors into driving his creaky body to the home of the agent who trapped him in a disastrous subprime loan; there, he plans to steal his trash, which he hopes contains blank credit-company checks he can fraudulently cash. This goes poorly, so Tom hits on another idea: What if he just approached the world with a spirit of love and forgiveness? Soon, doors creak open for this “broken-boned dog": Needed car rides are proffered, moral support is delivered, and he appreciates every small favor as a miracle of human generosity. Dubus remains a keen observer of the working class, but this cast of hard-luck types serves a sentimental yarn that unsubtly elevates Tom to the level of a Christ figure. (Asked what he once did for a living, he replies “carpenter.”) Maybe Dubus aspired to infuse working-class fiction with a rare optimistic vibe; perhaps he wished to deliver a Dickensian parable on the virtues of generosity to a hardhearted America. Regardless, this ode to the myth of bootstrapping is unpersuasive.
Dirty realism at its most mawkish.
"Such Kindness is magnificent. A profound and compassionate study of how to be human wrapped in a taut survival story. I loved it so much. This is Dubus at his absolute finest."
"Such Kindness is a deeply spiritual book, almost religious in its focus on forgiveness and connection and a deep belief in the worth of everyone—the broken, the sick, the elderly, and addicted. Andre Dubus III’s new novel is a gift to his readers, and a reminder to all of us that we can be better and kinder people."
"A big-hearted book…a novel that deserves praise for its nuanced depiction of working-class people."
Minneapolis Star Tribune - Kevin Canfield
"Dubus is a scribe of the blue collar, the downtrodden, and the destitute, with an uncanny ability to capture guilt, shame, and anger while also infusing his characters with resilience, strength, and hope. Few writers paint three-dimensional characters with such verve and humanism. Dubus is the Botticelli of Beantown."
Booklist (starred review) - Bill Kelly
"Dubus is, undoubtedly, a skilled writer, and Such Kindness is an admirable project for challenging us to show compassion for those on the economic fringes of society."
Boston Globe - Zahir Janmohamed
"Dubus pulls off the near-impossible. He writes convincingly and, for the most part, unsentimentally about a man resurrecting himself from the dead."
"Dubus probes at masculinity’s wounds, its core beliefs about earning money as a means of caring for others, and exposes the selfishness and emptiness at its core…Such Kindness is an astonishing novel."
LA Times - Lorraine Berry
"Such Kindness charts a remarkable rebirth, not from poverty to wealth but from bitter helplessness to the knowledge of self-worth. The result is a gripping and transformational journey toward kindness, in a tremendously moving novel."
"There’s plenty to talk about in Such Kindness , but most of it goes unsaid in public discourse. But Such Kindness is the most accurate portrait of America I’ve read in years. Screw Hillbilly Elegy , the rest of the crap written by people with a chip on their shoulder. Such Kindness is the real deal, sans pretension, fiction rather than fact, but never forget, fiction is more honest than fact."
The Lefsetz Letter - Bob Lefsetz
"A story of acceptance. Hard-won, beautiful, life-changing acceptance…How do we accept the world for what it is, when nothing seems acceptable? Therein lies the trick of this novel, its slow magic wrought through small accumulative moments."
