Andre Dubus III gave his new memoir a memorably short title: "Townie." If he were looking for something a little longer, he could have called it "Portrait of the Artist as a Young-Coward-Turned-Fighter."
Dubus, author of the novels "House of Sand and Fog" and "The Garden of Last Days," learned how to survive with his fists while growing up in a tough Massachusetts mill town.
Dubus didn't take to the pugilistic arts quickly. He was small, he writes, and easily intimidated. He turned to weightlifting and boxing only after watching his 13-year-old brother get pummeled by a soldier on leave.
The gym-hardened Dubus came to love fighting because it proved he was no longer a scared boy who froze when others swung their fists. When he got arrested for fighting and needed bail money, he proudly called his father, a former Marine captain who had studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and wrote critically acclaimed short fiction.
"Part of me was surprised I was calling him," Dubus writes. "It was my mother I lived with. My mother who knew we'd gone to the beach, my mother who would be home. And Pop had gotten married again."
"Townie" doesn't end with the young artist as a quick-tempered street fighter, though. Dubus eventually turned to writing, which he discovered was more gratifying than fisticuffs.
Why? Because it revealed who he really was beneath the fighter's façade.
After spending a day writing, he tells us, "I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and writing — even writing badly — had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay this awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me , I would have to keep writing."
The image of a self hidden beneath musculature returns when Dubus describes a scene in which he chooses words over violence while facing an angry drug dealer on a crowded train.
"[I]t was as if, in my explanation to him, I had stood between those trains and taken off all my clothes, then began to pull away every muscle I had ever built: I ripped off the plate of my pectorals, dropping them at my feet," Dubus writes. "I reached up to each shoulder and unhooked both deltoids and let them fall, too; then I reached around for the muscles of my upper back, the first to show up years earlier, and dropped them at the feet of the dark dealer, speaking to him all along as if I'd never learned to do anything but talk, as if this armor I'd forged had never been needed because I could trust the humanity of the other to show itself. Trust. "
It's a stunning piece of imagery, and it's a nice metaphor, too, for how nakedly Dubus reveals himself to us readers.
His ability to describe violence might be unmatched among contemporary writers. He understands the arcane, unspoken vocabulary of how fights start, as well as the bone-crushing details of how they end. But "Townie" is most memorable for how vulnerable Dubus seems, once he has stripped himself down to the soul for his readers.
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement