Review by New York Times Review
ONE Saturday night in the mid-'70s, I stood on the deck of a shabby duplex watching my teenage boyfriend - a character who could have walked out of the pages of Andre Dubus III's powerful new memoir, "Townie" - beat another boy senseless in the parking lot below. Under the yellowish dusk-to-dawn lights, I could see my boyfriend's blond sideburns, denim jacket and dingo boots, and I could see him punch the boy in the stomach until he crumpled to the ground, then kick him over and over until his nose and lips were split and bleeding. In "Townie," which details Dubus's 1970s coming-of-age in the poor mill towns of Massachusetts, there are none of the usual signifiers of today's '70s Nostalgia Industrial Complex, no peace-sign key chains or smiley-face T-shirts, none of the goofy stoners and ditsy girls in tube tops that American television viewers have become accustomed to on "That '70s Show." Instead, Dubus writes about "the apartments" where his older sister buys drugs, two rows of three-story buildings surrounded by packed dirt worn smooth, a Dumpster in back always filled with dirty diapers, used condoms and pizza boxes. He writes about an early manifestation of "Fight Club" culture at his school, where, whenever there is a fight, boys and girls rush to one spot "like they were being pulled there by the air itself. . . . Kids were yelling: 'Kill him! Kill him!'" It was his parents' divorce that left Dubus fatherless and living in a world of violence and poverty. Dubus's father (and namesake) was a well-known writer, famous among other things for his short story "The Winter Father," about a man recently separated from his family. The most vivid image in the story is of the protagonist watching through his rearview mirror as his young son chases after him: "A small running shape in the dark, charging the car, picking up something and throwing it, missing, crying You bum You bum You bum." "Townie" in many ways reads like one long rebuttal to "The Winter Father." In the father's telling, there is no sense of financial desperation on the kids' side, and it takes just six months for the father to feel connected again to his children and the children to feel safe. In reality, his father's departure left Dubus's family vulnerable for years, his mother always working and exhausted, their series of rented houses always dirty and often filled with "Heads," teenagers smoking pot while blasting Aerosmith. A neighbor kid beats Andre up daily, hurling obscenities and insults his way. A drunk urinates in their hallway and a greaser throws a Molotov cocktail into his mother's car. The family's exposure affects each of the Dubus children differently. Andre's younger sister, Nicole, puts a padlock on her bedroom door and retreats behind it; his older sister, Suzanne, deals drugs and is later gang-raped; his sensitive younger brother, Jeb, starts an affair with his former art teacher, a woman 22 years older, and attempts suicide. For his part, Andre takes up weight lifting. He begins a careful and ritualized effort to bulk up, reading Muscle Builder magazine and arranging a bench and weights in the basement. He works out the way competitive bodybuilders do, dividing his body into muscle groups, eating only tuna and eggs. Soon he can bench press 150 pounds and then 200, curl 80 and perform 1,000 situps. He learns to box, to wrap his hands, put on gloves and hit the bag as hard as he can. It's not long before he is using these skills in bars and parking lots. The first time he punches a guy who has kicked his brother down a flight of bar stairs, he experiences a sort of ecstasy: "I could feel my weight sink back on my right foot, my arms go loose at my sides, and it was as if I were in a warm bath under a blue sky." Dozens of fights follow, including a brawl at a restaurant. These combats are lovingly detailed, almost overly descriptive, as Dubus tries to connect to the mythic struggle of male avengers throughout history. As I read these passages I thought about how, when I was growing up, fights were inevitable. How the young men were humorless and easily offended. One boy would throw out a halfhearted insult and the other would fling his arm back and the two would be on top of each other, the fighting all the more intense and bloody because neither had anything to lose. Dubus sees himself as his family's protector, but in my own experience these fights were less about right and wrong and more about degraded teenagers who'd developed an unhealthy blood lust. Only after challenging his sister's old boyfriend does Dubus sense he's become addicted to the upside-down intimacy of throwing a punch. "This was different from sex, where if you both want it, the membranes fall away," he writes. "With violence you had to break that membrane yourself, and once you learned how to do that, it was easier to keep doing it." As Dubus grows into a man he begins to write stories and struggles to dissolve his attachment to violence. He struggles, too, to come to terms with his larger-than-life father. That doesn't mean escaping him - to the contrary, he attends the same college where his father teaches, and arrives at undergraduate parties to find his father already there, wearing a cowboy hat, getting drunk and flirting with the girls. The father acts like a buddy to his son, not a dad. Worst of all, he is proud that his son can fight. He himself carries a gun, and when he hears that his daughter's husband has hit her, he and Dubus make a late-night long-distance call to California, looking for someone to break the man's legs. Only when the father is hit by a car and paralyzed, in 1986, does he finally mellow, letting father and son find healthier common ground. As this fine memoir closes, Dubus is concerned with a fundamental question: Can he care for a father who did not really take care of him? To the book's credit (and the author's), he does not lean on easy redemption. Instead he finds tactile ways to support his dad, helping him to work out his upper body and renovating his house to make it wheelchair friendly. Although he's never able to discuss the life he led with his siblings on the other side of the river, he enjoys this time with his "new father." But while he eventually forgives his dad, the pain of abandonment does not dissipate. After hearing of his father's death in 1999, the first thing he thinks of is his leaving the family years earlier, as if that first leave-taking was the real death. The image that haunted his father, of the boy following the car, is no less haunting for the son. His father saw that boy - it was Andre's brother, Jeb - getting smaller as the car pulled away. Andre watched as the car got smaller in the distance, and Jeb scooped up a handful of gravel and ran down the hill, throwing rocks that scattered across the road like shrapnel and shouting: "You bum! You bum! You bum!" Darcey Steinke's most recent book is the memoir "Easter Everywhere." As Dubus grows he struggles to dissolve his attachment to violence, and to come to terms with his famous father.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 27, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Townie is a resolute story about the forging of a writer in fire and blood and a wrenching journey through the wreckage of New England's lost factory world during the Vietnam War era. But Dubus wasn't born into poverty, rage, and violence. His father, an ex-marine officer turned celebrated writer and adored college professor, initially settled his first family in the bucolic countryside. But the marriage failed, Pop moved out, and the four kids and their overwhelmed mother plunged into impoverished small-town hell. Dubus, a target for bullies, and his equally complex and resilient siblings were hungry, neglected, and imperiled within a storm of druggy nihilism and bloodlust. Dubus survived by lifting weights and learning to fight, but his unbridled aggression, even on the side of good, exacted a spiritual toll. Although their charismatic father was oblivious to his children's suffering, he was not unloving, and when an accident left him confined to a wheelchair, their support was profound. Dubus chronicles each traumatic incident and realization in stabbing detail. So chiseled are his dramatic memories, his shocking yet redemptive memoir of self-transformation feels like testimony under oath as well as hard-hammered therapy, coalescing, ultimately, in a generous, penetrating, and cathartic dissection of misery and fury, creativity and forgiveness, responsibility and compassion. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Oprah-pick Dubus will tour the country with this powerful memoir about his past and his renowned father, writer Andre Dubus.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Long before he became the highly acclaimed author of House of Sand and Fog, Dubus shuffled and punched his way through a childhood and youth full of dysfunction, desperation, and determination. Just after he turned 12, Dubus's family fell rapidly into shambles after his father-the prominent writer Andre Dubus-not only left his wife for a younger woman but also left the family in distressing poverty on the violent and drug-infested side of their Massachusetts mill town. For a few years, Dubus escaped into drugs, embracing the apathetic "no-way-out" attitude of his friends. After having his bike stolen, being slapped around by some of the town's bullies, and watching his brother and mother humiliated by some of the town's thugs, Dubus started lifting weights at home and boxing at the local gym. Modeling himself on the Walking Tall sheriff, Buford Pusser, Dubus paid back acts of physical violence with physical violence. Ultimately, he decided to take up his pen and write his way up from the bottom and into a new relationship with his father. In this gritty and gripping memoir, Dubus bares his soul in stunning and page-turning prose. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A powerful, haunting memoir from acclaimed novelist Dubus III(The Garden of Last Days, 2008, etc.).The author grew up poor in Massachusetts mill towns, the oldest of four children of the celebrated short-story writer Andre Dubus (19361999), who abandoned the family in 1968 to pursue a young student. Beautifully written and bursting with life, the book tells the story of a boy struggling to express his "hurt and rage," first through violence aimed at school and barroom bullies and ultimately through the power of words. Weak and shy as he entered his teens, Dubus III lived with his mother and siblings in run-down houses in crime-ridden neighborhoods, where they ate canned food for dinner and considered occasional "mystery" car rides to nowhere special with their mother a big treat. While his mother was at work, young toughs hung out at his house doing drugs. At 16, he began training with weights and grew strong to fight his tormenters, and he became a vicious brawler in a leather jacket and ponytail. Meanwhile, at nearby Bradford College, his father taught, striding across campus in his neatly trimmed beard and Australian cowboy hats. The elder Dubus sent money home and took the children out on Sundays, but otherwise remained out of touch. He eventually went through many young women and three broken marriages. At Bradford, which he entered as a student, Dubus III was known only as his father's son, "such a townie." Although the author stopped expecting anything from his father, he yearned for the connection that finally came years later when he helped care for the elder Dubus after the 1986 car accident that crushed his legs. By then, Dubus III had found a new way to draw on the anger of the "semi-abandoned," turning his punches into sentences. His compassionate memoir abounds with exquisitely rendered scenes of fighting, cheating, drugging, drinking and loving.A striking, eloquent account of growing up poor and of the making of a writer.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
