Dancing After Hours: Stories

Dubus is not a master so much as a master artisan. He's not Michelangelo, he's one of the anonymous apprentices who did most of the brushwork. The stories are paragons of craftwork, written with a wonderful tightness and vividness that never fails to satisfy. The much-anthologized starting piece, "The Intruder," begins asking the questions that permeate most of Dubus's work--questions about the lines between dreams and dreamers, about the bright little worlds people invent for themselves in the face of life's relentlessness.

At the same time, you may find yourself thinking "haven't I read this somewhere else?" Dubus is very skilled at staying inside the lines when he colors, but the effect gives the appearance of variations on Cheever, Anderson, O'Conner and (most prominently) Carver. Where are the risks? Dubus never really dares to wander out on his own limb and so I think the posthumous (post-"In the Bedroom") drumming of his significance might have gotten a little out of hand.

THIS IS YOUR LIFE
After finishing this collection of stories I am asking myself just how good was it? The hype on the back of the book compares Dubus to Chekhov, Carver, and Flannery O'Connor. It might be that good. As you're reading the stories, most of which are about spiritual crises, or the equivalent, you begin to see the universality in these microcosms of life. The writer and the characters draw you into a quest for meaning and a struggle to reach into the past and change everything you regret. There are a couple of running characters in the stories who give a collection already united by theme the feel of a novel. Some of the best stories are "Blessings", in which a woman tries to sort through her emotions of a fishing trip in which the boat sank. Her family had to fend off shark attacks until they were rescued. It's a great combination of remembrance and violence. Also, "All the Time in the World" in which a woman is desperately trying to find a husband, not just a lover. I could go on for a 1,000 words about the beauty of the prose of each story but I won't. Suffice it to say that when you read these stories you see yourself reflected back through them or, if not personally, through the experience of someone you know. Whether its the questioning of existence, an affair, the senselessness of corporate America, crime, adolescence, love, regret, or physical disability. Every person seems represented here, like some great Walt Whitman poem singing the unity of everything and everyone. There was only one story that I had trouble with and it involved a woman fighting off two thugs who followed her home to rob or rape her. The way the action was described it seemed like the screenplay for some bad japanese karate movie. And sometimes it seemed as though Dubus uses the setting of a story just as background. It doesnt really matter to the telling of the story but he spends paragraphs describing what's going on as the characters walk and talk for example. I understand that he was trying to show the indifference of the outside world to the internal problems of the characters but it got a little old. But these are minor complaints. Overall, it was a great collection, which settles my own question about how good it was.

Not as good as Selected Stories
I read Dancing After Hours immediately after I read Selected Stories by Andre Dubus. I found Dancing After Hours not as enjoyable. It seemed to meander and was not as concise as "Selected". By being able to compair the two, I probabally gave this book a disservice, because the ability of this man to flat out write is undeniable.