Andre Dubus "Townie" Review for Providence Journal by Brett Warnke

Andre Dubus III’s new memoir Townie offers little to the reader except a baggy story with a few interesting flashes of desperation and setting.  Dubus, the son of another fiction writer, is a rarity in the literary world.  Other than Martin Amis, few literary sons have successfully continued in the occupation of their fathers.  But this Dubus, who received so much acclaim with his novel The House of Sand and Fog and so much attention for The Garden of Last Days stumbles in this disappointing volume. 

With a promising opening, we follow the author on a jog with his college professor father, a man who eventually leaves his wife and family for a bohemian life of books and women.  Andre is wearing his sister’s shoes but presses forth in the run, hoping to compete (and bond) with his Dad.  The story is littered with small and similarly engaging but very loosely related vignettes.  But they often stick and sink in a bog of redundancy or are lost in a flurry of superfluous detail. 

Even this compelling opening which hooked my interest also cracked my hopes.  Dubus senior “had a brown beard he kept trimmed and he ran five miles a day, a ritual he had begun in the Marine Corps...”  But only a few pages after we discovered that jogging “was a habit he’d formed in the Marine Corps.”  And if the early one hundred page opaque portrait of his boyhood self—a scrawny and timid Louisiana boy brought to the post-industrial waste of Eastern Massachussetts—leaves the reader unfulfilled, the following 300 pages of bulking up leads to this: 

“They’d be up in her room, the door closed, Grand Funk Railroad playing, Pink Floyd, Robin Trower, the Stones.”  Later, Andre notices the jazz collection, “Stan Getz, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck and Connonball Adderly. There was Dylan, too.  And Kris Kritofferson and Joan Baez.”    In one chapter, in the backseat of a car “Aerosmith blasting from his speakers.”  Or from his sister’s room he “could hear Mick Jagger singing, Angie, you’re beautiful…” beside his own room which hung “blacklight posters of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.” 

We get it.  But Dubus clearly does not. 

Townie is slow, brutal, and unbeautiful; the writing is clear but merely so.  And while Dubus has a roving eye, he would rather describe gritty bikers’ outfits for half a page (“T-shirts with a neon wolf engraved across the chest…”) than focus on his story.  Perhaps the most titillating episode was when Dubus actually wrote about something other than weights and fights in what he calls “the forced busing riots,” which caused so much class and racial antagonism.  But it goes nowhere.      

The underwhelming structure of the book distracts from the interesting, timely stories he tells of economic hardship and the chilly remove he describes with his father reveal isolation and are untypically pithy:  “[O]ur father never called us and we never called him.”  But while his father might be proud of his son for following his bookish life, I was disappointed in him.