Bosca Dubh

“It was the worst day most families have ever had.”
Her eyes closed.
“But it was the best, too,” she said, her voice detached from her body, coming from a throat somewhere above her. She felt his voice close to her face, but she heard one word at a time, then it drifted away from her, and the next were alone, and meant nothing.

In Dancing After Hours, Andre Dubus offers fourteen stories about grace. They’re not pretty stories, or necessarily happy stories; his characters are broken, flawed, often petty and mean, always a little less than they dreamed they would be. They’ve made mistakes, and they’ve faced unhappiness, not always bravely.

But somehow, they all are touched by grace. It’s the theological sort of grace: unearned, undeserved, grace that comes in spite of whatever they might have done. Sometimes it’s an apparent miracle, like being rescued from sharks; more often, it’s something small, like narrowly avoiding adultery or being forgiven of (and forgiving) an affair; and always, there’s a small revelation, a peace or insight that doesn’t make all the other flawed and broken things better but does make them more bearable.

Dubus is, like Thomas Williams and Raymond Carver, an incredibly humane writer. He presents his characters as they are–unlovely and unlovable and so much like ourselves that it hurts–but never judges them. And we somehow love them all the same, and by loving them begin to love ourselves, too.