Such Kindness

Starred review from March 6, 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.

April 15, 2023
A disabled laborer at the edge of despair learns to find himself. 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.

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Starred review from April 1, 2023
Tom Lowe Jr. had it all--a beautiful, loving wife, an adoring young son, and a solid house he built with his own hands. Alas, Tom did not realize he had it all until it was gone. Like Tom, Dubus is a master craftsman. He builds structures that are bigger on the inside than appears possible from the ouside. When Tom falls off a roof, requiring intensive hip-reconstruction surgery, he is unable to work and soon becomes addicted to opioids. He can no longer make the payments on his escalating variable rate. His wife leaves him for another man, and his son is all but a stranger. Tom is a male archetype, stoical with a strong work ethic, a provider not inclined to be emotive or ask for help. He now finds himself in subsidized housing, his only friend the single mom of three next door, struggling to make ends meet and contemplating criminal behavior. Dubus subtly shifts registers and Tom begins to explore his interiority. 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.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling and Oprah Book Club pick Dubus is a sure-bet for fans, while this sensitive, timely tale will also attract readers new to his powers.

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