Andre Dubus III is something of a household name when it comes to books: His novel “House of Sand and Fog’’ was an Oprah Book Club pick, a finalist for the National Book Award, and made into a movie. He’s also the son of one of America’s most respected short-story authors, the late Andre Dubus, whose most ardent admirers were writers themselves. And so one might expect a memoir by the son would be a tale of how the art of the story got handed down generation to generation. But “Townie’’ turns out to be not a book about literary legacy. Rather, this harrowing and strange and beautiful book is one of paternal absence, of spiritual hollowness, of exacting strife and blatant violence and, finally, of a hard-wrought and grace-filled redemption.
A separate peace
Abandoned by his father to a childhood of poverty, Andre Dubus III traces his path from street thug, to writer, and finally to a wrenching redemption
Dubus’s father left his wife and four children when Andre, his oldest son, was 10. What followed for the family were years of living at a desperate and poverty-stricken remove from the prominent dad, who worked at and resided in a toney campus across town. The ivied walls of Bradford College are a seeming force field through which the son, his siblings, and mother rarely pass, living instead in Haverhill proper, a miserable mill town thick with crime and drugs and a kind of freewheeling violence that calls for its citizens either to fall victim or join in.
Dubus chooses the latter, but for good reason: He wants to right any and all humiliations his family and friends endure in this town, and to do so with his fists. He wants, it soon becomes apparent, to be his family’s guardian, an angel of death meant to mete out justice one mouthful of teeth down the throat at a time.
“He was falling, not backwards, but straight down,” Dubus writes of his first foray into beating the crap out of someone, in this case a fellow named Lynch who’d pushed his little brother down the stairwell behind a dive bar.
“I was swinging and swinging but the bouncer’s arm was in the air between us and I was trying to punch over it, my fist just missing Lynch’s face which was bone white, his lower face wet and red, his mouth a dark hole though my fist felt nothing . . . and I was half falling, half running down the stairs and out into the cold where my brother waited.”
Much of the early going in the book is given over to Dubus’s single-minded pursuit of the chiseled physique and the administering of the fist to the face. But after a few too many turns with the gratifying rush of stoving in some deserving punk’s ribs with the steel toes of his boots, Dubus begins to connect his actions to his father’s absence. It is, we find, this lack of a father — no matter how beloved a writer he might have been to the literary world — that feeds the poisonous dynamo Dubus becomes on the streets of Haverhill.
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