The wheels of fate
Muscular and emotional essays by Andre Dubus, about perseverance and the value of a challenge

Author: By Donna Seaman

Date: SUNDAY, June 21, 1998

Page: C1

Section: Books

Dubus's power on the page is an expression of his masculinity. His writings embody maleness in the very best sense of the word by virtue of their forthrightness, focus, aura of responsibility, independent thinking, and unstinting loving-kindness, and these qualities are a source of both stimulation and comfort. Even so, Dubus has written some of his finest stories -- ``Dancing After Hours'' and ``Blessings,'' for example -- from a woman's point of view. And the very first piece in ``Meditations from a Movable Chair,'' an essay that freezes every random thought and sensation, is a momentous portrait of a woman he has always loved, his sister.

Candid, calm, and smart, Kathryn, a grandmother, has no qualms relating the story of how she was raped one Louisiana winter night in her own yard. She tells her brother about it on the telephone. He writes simply and hauntingly, ``In Massachusetts, I sit in my wheelchair and listen; I see her face as though she is in the room.'' He sits and listens and thinks about Louisiana, where he and she grew up. Kathryn tells the story of her rape matter-of-factly, explaining that she would have tried to kill the man if he had tried to harm her daughter, but instead she prays for him. Dubus guides his narrative to a poignant memory from their childhood, and we're left thinking about his sister's resolution and faith, and his steadfast affection. But subconsciously, we harbor another image, that of Dubus, far from his first home, grasping a telephone, struggling with conflicting emotions, confined to a wheelchair.

He returns to the hot and volatile Louisiana of his youth in the masterful essay ``Digging.'' Remarkably concentrated, it projects reflections like a small crystal in brilliant sunlight. He introduces his young self as a small, quiet boy, who attracts bullies but never complains or tattles, is shy around his own father, and adept at escaping into fantasy. He has reached the age of 16 and is looking forward to a lazy summer, but his father introduces him, instead, to the world of hard labor. He brings his dreamy son to a construction site and tells the foreman to make a man out of him. Skinny, obedient, and stubborn, young Dubus takes his place among a group of well-muscled black men and struggles to keep up as they dig a deep trench. As Dubus describes this trial, he ultimately chronicles a classic rite of passage. Bending and digging and lifting and sweating in the killer heat, young Dubus overcomes exhaustion, fear, pain, and nausea, and discovers a power within himself he never imagined he possessed. This ordeal is a giant step toward manhood, and Dubus's essay cues us to his signature theme, the infinite value of perseverance and the ability to learn something from every challenge.

Dubus elicits an incredibly visceral response; he literally moves you. The essay ``A Hemingway Story'' begins with an intriguing account of a summer day in 1966 in Iowa City, when Dubus boldly finagled his way into accompanying his next-door neighbor, Kurt Vonnegut, to the airport to pick up Ralph Ellison. Dubus describes his fascination with what remains one of his favorite Hemingway stories, ``In Another Country,'' an almost eerily prescient choice. When he mentioned the story to his colleagues, Ellison promptly recited the opening lines, and no one reading this piece in good conscience will be able to resist Dubus's subliminal command to locate this remarkable story and read it -- either for the first time, or with renewed and deepened appreciation.

Dubus calls his essays meditations, and they are contemplative, but these potent narratives are actually uplifting in a far more active manner, striking home with the impact of good old-fashioned sermons. There are moments, though, when the force of Dubus's convictions is an obdurate one. His absolute certainty regarding right and wrong, the roles of men and women, discipline, duty, and his religious beliefs can verge on intolerance, and he risks sounding holier than thou. Spiritual teachers caution against pride in one's faith because therein lies vanity, rather than a true openness to the divine. On occasion, Dubus's accounts of his triumphs over debilitating states of mind are a bit too exalted, nearly grandiose, and the very polish and gravity of his sentences, the essence of their beauty, becomes overly formal, as though uttered from on high. But these slips into bombast are the exception, not the rule, and are attributable in great part to the difficulty of reducing so much passion into so few words. Like Hemingway, Dubus is enamored of the heroic, a romantic vision that induces him to founder now and then on the rocks of his spare prose, but this just proves that he is, like the rest of us, only human.

Each essay in this collection, even those that rile, is truly a revelation, whether Dubus is writing about being a boy, a Marine, a husband, father, writer, runner, Red Sox fan, man without the use of his legs, or a Christian. Slowly, he brings us into the present, gradually disclosing how excruciatingly frustrating, frightening, isolating, and sorrowful life is when you can't move your own legs, and even non-Christian readers will easily comprehend how the act of receiving communion makes such a restricted life tolerable. When he writes about the church, when he really gets to the soul of the matter, Dubus is open-minded and just. He assures us that ``sacraments are myriad,'' and that while he personally derives tremendous comfort from attending Mass, we all can receive communion anywhere and any time if we're attuned to the sacred.

This generous and profound spirituality is the lifeblood of Dubus's work, and the secret to his survival. Over the course of the book, he circles back in ever-tightening loops to the accident that crippled him when he was 49 years old, a cataclysmic event that, we finally discern, occurred because he stopped one night to help strangers on a highway. He stopped to aid people in need, and never walked again. He has suffered long and hard, and this struggle has infused his writing with might and vigor, transforming each word into a firm footstep on the path toward enlightenment. And now, instead of running as he used to, Dubus wheels his chair around the grounds of his church, breathing deeply and singing loudly and clearly with all his heart.