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The Garden of Last Days: A Novel
by Andre Dubus III
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Synopses & Reviews From the author of the New York Times bestseller and Oprah's Book Club selection House of Sand and Fog — a new big-hearted, painful, page-turning novel.
One early September night in Florida, a stripper brings her daughter to work. April's usual babysitter is in the hospital, so she decides it's best to have her three-year-old daughter close by, watching children's videos in the office, while she works.
Except that April works at the Puma Club for Men. And tonight she has an unusual client, a foreigner both remote and too personal, and free with his money. Lots of it, all cash. His name is Bassam. Meanwhile, another man, AJ, has been thrown out of the club for holding hands with his favorite stripper, and he's drunk and angry and lonely.
From these explosive elements comes a relentless, raw, searing, passionate, page-turning narrative, a big-hearted and painful novel about sex and parenthood and honor and masculinity. Set in the seamy underside of American life at the moment before the world changed, it juxtaposes lust for domination with hunger for connection, sexual violence with family love. It seizes the reader by the throat with the same psychological tension, depth, and realism that characterized Andre Dubus's #1 bestseller, House of Sand and Fog — and an even greater sense of the dark and anguished places in the human heart. Review: "Dubus's ambitious if uneven follow-up to House of Sand and Fog begins shortly before 9/11 with stripper April taking her three-year-old daughter, Franny, to work after the babysitter flakes at the last minute. Though she leaves Franny with the club's house mother and intends to keep tabs on her, April's distracted on the floor by Bassam, a Muslim who's in Florida to take flying lessons and (like one of the real 9/11 hijackers) spends early September 2001 throwing around money and living lasciviously. Meanwhile, AJ, a down-on-his-luck local, lingers in the parking lot after getting thrown out for touching a dancer. The slow-starting plot splinters once Franny wanders outside and disappears. Soon, AJ's wanted for kidnapping, April's run through the social service wringers as an unfit parent, and the murky particulars of Bassam's mission come into sharp focus as he struggles with his religious convictions. Dubus gives the breath of life to most of his characters (Bassam — not so much), though the narrative has a mechanical feeling, partially owing to the narrow emotional register Dubus works in: doom and desperation are in plentiful supply from page one, and as the novel fades to black, the reader's left with a roster of sadder-but-wiser Americans to contemplate. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: So here's the setup: A decent if rootless American working girl commits a minor household slip-up, which sets her on a collision course with a wounded yet determined emigre from a Middle Eastern hotbed. Caught somewhere in the wreckage created by these two is a basically decent but likewise wounded blue-collar worker. Does that description, which roughly applies to Andre Dubus' new ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) novel, "The Garden of Last Days," sound familiar? It should. In his previous novel, the wildly popular "House of Sand and Fog," a girl named Kathy managed to lose the rights to a house in California by not attending carefully enough to her mail; her emigre-nemesis was a deposed Iranian general from the days of the Shah, and the working stiff was the cop who fell in love with Kathy. If the tragedy was laid on a little thick (never before had so much trouble followed from an unopened tax bill), Dubus was on to something in contrasting late 20th-century American laxness with the new immigrant energy. In "The Garden of Last Days," Dubus' peripatetic working girl is named April. A single mother, she has recently moved from New Hampshire to the Gulf Coast of Florida, where she's found a degree of financial empowerment by working as a stripper. Her household slip-up is her failure to have a backup baby-sitter. When the landlady who regularly watches Franny, April's 3-year-old, checks into a hospital, there's nothing for April to do but bring her daughter to her workplace, which happens to be the Puma Club for Men. On the night in question — Sept. 6, 2001 — a young man named Bassam decides to visit the Puma. Bassam, along with a few fellow Saudis, has been taking flying lessons in Florida in preparation for an assault-by-airplane on some major American targets in five days. Before he dies, he wants to explore the nakedness of an American woman. We're well prepared, then, for the now familiar Dubusian clash of cultures. To fill out the pattern, there's a construction worker named AJ hanging around outside the Puma, having been tossed out for getting too forward with one of the women. But rather than take us into the potentially rich struggle between April and Bassam (he asks her to strip for him, privately, in the Puma's "Champagne Room"), Dubus takes a very odd turn. He virtually hands the novel over to AJ, who, finding April's daughter lost in the Puma's parking lot, proceeds to abduct her. Though we never fully lose sight of April or Bassam (this being a book of parallel narratives), the abduction forms the center of the story. Neither entirely believable nor particularly tense (AJ is too good-hearted to represent a threat to Franny), the long ride these two set out on does allow Dubus a wider focus than the one he employed in "House of Sand and Fog." With AJ at the wheel and a lost little girl behind him, this becomes a novel of side trips: to the rape of AJ's mother at one point, into the romantic and educational failures of a bouncer at the Puma Club at another. The larger intent seems to be to give us a Cinemascope view of our vast American lostness in those prelapsarian "last days" before 9/11. For this to work, the side trips have to be worth our time, but for the most part, they're not, being instead serious drags on the novel's forward motion. It would help, too, if AJ himself weren't such a dunderhead. Though his initial impulse in abducting Franny is "to give the girl some comfort," he forgoes all readerly respect when he starts thinking of Franny as a second child to bring home to his son and his wife, who has thrown him out. ("He pictured being able to keep her. A playmate for Cole. A living doll for Deena to love and raise.") It comes as a relief when Dubus finally gives up on AJ and returns the novel to Bassam and the plans for 9/11. On the Sunday before the hijackings, Bassam and a fellow conspirator, resting up in a Boston hotel, have sex with a call girl. In its mixing of erotic wonder and religious disgust, this is the novel's best scene. But it's also a reminder of how relentlessly American writers have concentrated on sex as a way to come to grips with the hijackers. As was the case with John Updike's "Terrorist," the religious attitudes of Dubus' Muslims here feel carefully documented, and hollow. "We are just moments away, brothers, Allah willing" is a line I never expected to read in a serious contemporary novel. Nor am I particularly fond of "Brothers, we have bound ourselves to the Holy One as shuhada." Lines like these more properly belong in the mouth of the turbaned villain played by Anthony Quinn in "The Road to Morocco." It's left to April, questioned by the FBI, to deliver the novel's valediction on Bassam. He was "like a boy. Just some drunk and lonely boy." Seven years after the events, that attitude begins to seem inadequate. The sex and the loneliness of the hijackers have been well documented by novelists. A truly imaginative rendering of "Allah," on the other hand, is still waiting in the wings. Anthony Giardina's most recent publications are "White Guys," a novel, and "Custody of the Eyes," a play. Reviewed by Anthony Giardina, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "[E]xplores the bewildering complexities of sexuality, and the dire repercussions of isolation and desperation." Booklist Review: "Dubus does a masterful job of allowing the reader to understand, if not forgive, why each character does what he or she does....Difficult to put down, impossible to forget." Kirkus Reviews About the Author Andre Dubus III is the author of House of Sand and Fog (an Oprah's Book Club selection and finalist for the National Book Award), Bluesman, and The Cage Keeper and Other Stories. He lives with his family north of Boston.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780393041651
- Author:
- Dubus III, Andre
- Publisher:
- W. W. Norton & Company
- Author:
- Dubus, Andre, III
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- Mothers and daughters
- Subject:
- Life change events
- Subject:
- General Fiction
- Publication Date:
- June 2008
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 537
- Dimensions:
- 9.40x6.54x1.60 in. 1.96 lbs.
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