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“The Garden of Last Days” by Andre Dubus III (Norton, 535 pages, $14.95)
The weather was splendid on that fateful New York City morning, Sept. 11, 2001. It was a Tuesday. Things turned ugly in a matter of seconds. Our innocence evaporated, lost forever.
Andre Dubus III sets his novel “The Garden of Last Days” during those waning moments of innocence on that final weekend prior to 9/11. It is told from the numerous viewpoints of characters living in south Florida at that instant in time.
There’s April, an exotic dancer at a strip club. And Lonnie, a bouncer at the club.
April and her 3-year-old daughter Franny share a house with Jean, who simply adores Franny.
AJ is a blue collar worker who frequents the club. Finally there’s Bassam, a young Saudi who is staying at a hotel.
Bassam hates America and everything it stands for.
Seething with rage, Bassam despises immorality yet he cannot resist partaking in it.
Dubus doesn’t want his readers to focus on the disaster that looms ahead. He said: “It’s not anything I want you to think about at all. I want you to just go through the journey with all the people in there.” It is their story.
I asked him how he got the idea for this book? He responded: “I just get an image. I start to go with it. I saw an image of a wad of cash on a bedroom bureau.”
He thought about the money and where it came from — that it belonged to a stripper. So he wrote about “48 or 72 hours in the life of one of these women.”
He described his process: “I love trying to be other people and trying to imagine other peoples’ existence.”
His task was to “try not to say anything with this novel. Instead, just try to find something.”
He elaborated on that impulse: “The human imagination I find to be a gorgeous thing. Terrifying. Frustrating …
“The kind of fiction I like to read and the kind I try to write tends to be inherently empathetic.
“I think character-driven fiction is a sustained act of empathy. You are really just asking, ‘What is it like to be you?’
“For me that’s the joy of reading these novels by these great writers … you get to live all these other lives than the one you’ve got. It’s kind of miraculous.”
Dubus is the son of an acclaimed short story writer, the late Andre Dubus. He had no intention of becoming a writer though. Then something altered his view.
“I wrote a short story. It wasn’t very good but I was hooked.
“Honestly, the day I finished it I felt more like myself than I ever had in my life … it’s one of those rare epiphanies that can happen in a life. I feel very lucky that I got to have that … I still didn’t want to be a writer but I knew that I was going to keep writing no matter what because I just felt more like myself than I ever had before.”
Posted by Vick Mickunas on 6/8/09; 12:07:46 PM
from the dept.
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