Garden of Last Days - Andre Dubus III

Jason Chambers: I’m glad to be finally having this discussion, guys. I’ve had a hard time in the last few weeks trying to avoid detailed reviews of Andre Dubus III’s The Garden of Last Days, while still needing to gauge the general reception of the heavily anticipated novel. I didn’t want anything I read to influence my interpretation of the book until we got our thoughts in print.

The action occurs in the last few days before 9/11 with the coincidental interaction of the main characters in and around a Florida strip club. Because her usual babysitter has become ill, Puma Club dancer April brings her three year old daughter to work with her. Meanwhile, screwed-by-life club patron A.J. gets his wrist broken by a bouncer after he touches another dancer’s hand. Bassam, soon-to-be international terrorist, joins A.J. as a club guest where he tests his resolve and training by consorting with the heathens. Hi-jinks ensue. Okay, not hi-jinks, precisely, but a complex series of character interactions and plot lines emerge from the opening that lead the story in lots of directions.

I want to start by discussing the characters. First, Dubus’ third person narrator pov shifts frequently, from character to character in each chapter such that we get insights into each characters thoughts. How well do you think that works? I know that House of Sand and Fog was acclaimed for the dual narration, but here he gets into a lot of characters heads and I’m not sure it works in every case. I think April is a solid character, if almost a cliche, whose few moments of emotion ring true to me. I found Franny fairly unbelievable – noting, of course, the difficulty of writing a child of that age. Jean, certainly a minor character, was really great, with her unexpected maternal instincts rising against her better judgment and her expectations of an early death in conflict with her now urgent desire to live – with Franny as her object of affection. To me however, the success or failure of this story hinges on two characters who never meet – A.J. and Bassam. To me, Bassam falls flat, but A.J. carries the book. It’s as if he walked out of a Larry Brown novel, full of resentment and anger, blaming the world for problems of his own creation. His life and his injury, coupled with his ingenious get rich plan, is a high-speed train on a cliff-side track. Every twist makes you cringe and hold your breath, but the ending is inevitable.

Finally, I know you guys have read your share of post 9/11 books. It’s practically its own sub genre. What do you think of this as a 9/11 book? He certainly takes a different angle at it than any of the others I’ve seen, which have been mostly along the lines of how people have reacted after the fact.

Jason Rice: I had a lot of trouble getting around a few things in this book that came with comments from people who’d read it in my general sphere before I did, and the reviews which I mostly stayed away from, but couldn’t help peaking at. After I finished the book I read Maslin who didn’t really like it, and McInerney shared my point of view, which is unusual. All of this combined with comments I overheard made it very hard to view this objectively. Yes it is an important American novel from a very strong voice in American Letters.

With that in mind; The characters are stupid ignorant people who wouldn’t ever read a book like this. Dubus III characterizations are almost without fail arrogant judgments of a class of people that is generally the norm in America today (arrogant statement of itself). April is a self imposed tragedy (beautiful teenage girl trapped in an adult’s body). Of course she’s going to loose her child because she’s a horrible mother, has no training in the first place, and must be penalized for taking her clothes of to earn a living. Is that necessary? The author thinks it is. Jean was a good character, someone I could identify with, not exactly, but she was realizing that she never really did more than just hang out and take care of Franny, who was nothing more than a three year old child, perfectly portrayed. Jean was disappointing to me in the end because she didn’t really get to say to April, “I told you so.” And unfortunately drifted into obscurity. But before she did she realized that she’d been living on ex-husbands wealth for years and has been fairly lucky to have it as good as she does. Dubus III writes common people well, and he’s not to be undone by this blue collar wife beater. A.J. is stupid, worse than stupid. He’s stupid filled with pie in the sky dreams that are nothing more than wistful manifestations of what he’s seen on television, in the extreme. Always hoped for and never achieved. He’s never had a parental figure who was more than blindly supportive. He fell in love with the first girl he met who wasn’t his mother and has never really grown up. He’s a kid whose never been told no, which is why he ended up with a broken hand. Of course he would fall in love with a topless dancer, all the guys who go to those places fall in love, usually on the first night. That means the dancers are doing their job.

Dubus III has written a full blown assessment of a group of people that anyone who is mildly educated wouldn’t interact with unless they were serving you coffee or pumping your gas. I had a lot of preconceived notions about Bassam, and the hard line he walked on was suffocating to me most of the time. Of course the terrorists hated America and our way of life, but did we have to see it every ten pages? The airless quality that came with the scenes where Retro and April danced for him were nothing short of amazing. I watched in horror as these people did a slow grind towards their own demise. A.J. with his Sisyphean efforts towards the middle of the pack and April’s ridiculous dream to buy a house. $50k doesn’t get you a condo even in anywhere Florida. She doesn’t know this. Why? Because she’s as sharp as a sack of wet mice.

Post 9-11 novels, this one fits that mold because it was written after that event. All novels published now are post 9-11, to be precise. This was about those sun dappled days before the world changed. The funny thing is the world didn’t change for these people. April was fairly flat lined by the event, Jean, well, she was turning to dust, and Bassam was dust when all was said and done. I think we’ve just read a book of stereotypes colliding with each other over and over. These people evolved one life cycle in this story. It was strange to watch happen.

Dennis Haritou: Jasons, between you guys I feel like I’ve stepped into a Gulf Coast gale. JR, “as sharp as a sack of wet mice” deserves constant praise and I think it’s worth reading this whole discussion just to come across it. I had to laugh for 2 minutes before I could continue reading. But I want to start with JC’s conversational leads: A.J. is the star exhibit, I thought Jean was pretty good and I am disappointed that no one mentioned Lonnie, the Puma club “problem solver”. Bassam was difficult to take as was the whole 9/11 angle. I’d rather just read about the quotidian lives of regular gulf coast folks. A.J., Lonnie and Bassam all have a theme in common. It’s a Howard Hawks or Hemingway-type male trope: we are all guys trying to cope, trying to be honorable and competent and not wimp out. They are all the same character to me really, each providing a separate attempt at a solution. Bassam self destructs with a fanatical religiosity and does massive damage to others. A.J.’s ruination is on a family and personal scale. Lonnie is the only one of the three that comes out straight by rejecting the club and its values and enlisting in the Marines as a reaction to 9/11. And he tries to be a decent guy to April who, strangely enough to me, doesn’t take him up when she has the chance. Quite a disappointment, that woman. But JR, you are really all over the block in your discussion in fascinating ways, shooting bolts of light and shafts of bleak darkness in rapid succession at the same characters.

But if I want to draw a line in the Gulf Coast sand and at least try to fight you to a draw somewhere, that line has to be drawn at A.J., the most splendiforous creation in the book. A.J. is a great man. He is great in his ineptness. It was shock and awe for me when he explained how it happened that he beat on his wife, Deena. He said something like: “well, it was really her fault for getting overweight and just sitting at home reading magazines and watching TV while I was out working so hard. And I didn’t really hit her face anyway. It was more like I found my hand smashed up against her check somehow” This is as amazing an example of total moral vacuity as I have ever read. And A.J.’s chain of catastrophic misjudgments when he takes the child Franny from the strip joint in order to safeguard her, at one point daydreaming that Franny would make a lovely companion for his beloved son, Cole, a son that he will probably never see again just because he took Franny from the strip joint. This is a perfect application of the Emersonian law of compensation in reverse. I take someone’s child, therefore I lose my own.

But A.J. loves his son Cole more than anything else and tries to be a decent guy. He is not much to look at and an averagely intelligent guy would seem bright to him. He falls a mile short in emotional intelligence as well. He’s a sub-par average joe. I don’t disagree with JR on that score. But as AJ makes one misstep after another, with his career, with falling into marriage almost by accident, with trying to be a good father without having had one himself, with thinking that whores can provide him with a satisfying emotional life, with his whacked-out scheme to feign an injury at work and collect big time, the obstacles to his success just keep piling up and the hole he digs himself into just keeps getting deeper. He literally ends up in a hole, actually. But still he plugs on, trying to survive until he just sinks under the waves. It’s a great portrait of a guy in trouble. It’s our common humanity, Jasons, just fighting to survive. I love the word “quotidian” which I used above. Even if you know what it means, look it up again.

JC: Dennis, that’s just what I thought was wrong about this book. It would be a hell of a lot better book, if smaller in scope, if Bassam had never shown up, and the story was about April and A.J. and the moments in time where their paths crossed and fortunes went in opposite directions. They are fighting to survive. These are the people Barbara Ehrenreich writes about, the underclass of the nation, who by situations of birth, circumstance, or by their own actions lead difficult and sometimes shitty day-to-day existences. Of course, A.J. is a loser. He is the asshole with a heart of gold. Everything is his life has gone awry and rather than take responsibility for even a single mistake – taking Frannie, hitting his wife, touching the dancer, getting his girlfriend pregnant – he blames the world and it’s inherent unfairness. He is right that life is unfair, but he is not really willing to do anything about it. He wants it “made right” for him, with pipe dreams and cunning plans. To his mind, all his transgressions should be forgiven, but every move he makes, every dumb-ass idea he has hurtles him headlong towards catastrophe. I like him. He’s sad and pathetic, but hopeful, like the best of the Harry Crews and Larry Brown lead characters. Maybe I’m just glad to be discussing something set somewhere besides NY and California. Surprisingly to some, there are places worth writing about outside the major population centers.

April, too, would have been a much more interesting character in relationship to Frannie, Joan and Lonnie, as opposed to Bassam, with whom she spends most of her time in the narration. Everything is in relation to other characters for April rather than being defined in her own right. She’s flat because the narration focuses on him and his hatred of the “infidels,” or about the child. Frankly, I’m hoping that the 9/11 book has run its course for awhile. Yes, JR, I know that everything since then has been a post-9/11 book, but don’t be obtuse: You know what I mean — books about the event itself and the immediate aftermath. There have been tons of them, some very good (Disorder Peculiar to the Country); some decent (Falling Man); some awful – too many to list (The Third Brother would be one). It is understandable that writers, major and unestablished, would want to take such an earth-shattering event and explore it for major themes, as well as high-drama and psychological intensity, but I’m quite ready for a break. Perhaps, as time passes, we will see a few more worthy novels come out the destruction, but I do think we will have to wait awhile for perspective. I would have been perfectly happy to trim this book by 120 pages and call it Southern Lit, a la Will Allison or Dorothy Allison.

JR: JC, it’s interesting to hear that you’re happy to read books that don’t take place in LA or NYC, which is a fine emotion but one that strikes me as incredibly provincial and to return the favor, I think it was obtuse and casual of you to even consider in your original post that this book was post- 9-11, as it’s about the days prior to that event, and has nothing to do with the days that follow, it’s all about the time when we lived carefree and blind to the fact that the world had and still has an axe to grind on our little naive heads. I read ‘Disorder Peculiar to the Country’ and found it to be as thrilling an indictment to that day as anything I’ve ever read about 9-11. To the point where the actual event was laced with such horrendous black humor as to take the pressure off the reader (who could only cry when reading about it) while it remained a riveting and unflinching look at those horrific events. There are places worth writing about besides the two cultural centers on either coast, but at what cost to the reader? Is the gulf coast one of the backwater places that you stumble on when you get lost on your way to Miami, God forbid, another cultural center, and think;

“oh, how nice, a titty bar, and look that dark skinned guy who really sticks out, but wait, lets see if there is a construction site near by, where I can witness the death and rebirth of the suburbs, but this time the houses won’t be affordable cinder block ranches, but quarter of a million dollar homes, that I hope I can buy with the $50,000 I saved by shaking my ass in front of grown men who can’t seem to see the forest through the trees, who all suffer from a Peter Pan syndrome.”

Lonnie is an irritant to this story and could have been butchered to death by AJ and I would have cheered. He’s never going to get April to bed, she’s too blind to see what’s right in front of her face. And that is the men she surrounds herself with are nothing more than predators laying in the weeds, if she zigs one direction or another and stops for one moment she’ll be devoured by these blood hungry meat eaters. It’s weird that you both find AJ to be a wonderful character. He’s a stupid bastard with absolutely no talent, irredeemable child snatcher who got what he deserved, if he had sex with the child would he still be “great”? His pipe dreams are nothing more than shallow expectations from a poorly educated (at best) member of the lower class of America. Ms. Ehrenreich writes about this lower class quite well. In America today there are two classes of people, lower, like Dubus III writes about so effectively, and they’re repulsively presented here, even though my upper middle class upbringing never lets me forget what hard work is, and the upper class, or the rich. They’re not on display in this novel, and it’s all about what you don’t have, to Dubus III anyway. April, AJ and his wife, his mother, Jean, Bassam and Lonnie all long for something they don’t have or need. April took her daughter for granted, Jean her life, Lonnie the straw man of the story, has no brains and reaches for Corn Flakes philosophy on tape, AJ and his ex-wife were literally hoping to stumble on a leprechun and his pot of gold, becuase we all know there is one lurking out there somewhere. These people have their noses pressed up to the glass of the department store window on Christmas Eve and they only have a handful of coins at their disposal. Finally Bassam is there to show us, the educated reader, because lets face it no one with less than a high school education (and those kids would read this if held at gunpoint) would ever read this book, how foul our culture is, especially in comparison to the religously militant Islamic fundamentalism of Bassam. It’s odd that more people don’t try to understand this culture, when it’s so prevelant, and it’s all gone from I don’t know, to I don’t care. Dubus III uses Bassam to make yet another criticism on American culture, which lacks subtley and is on the whole a glaring error in the narrative since Bassam takes up so much time with his ridiculous minstrations over sleeping with a whore. Why does he care? He’s going to die? Oh right, he’s got the afterlife to look foward to, and all those virgins. And Larry Brown’s characters that you hold so dear JC would never snatch a child, but they would go to a whore house and a titty bar.

Dennis Haritou: Board up the windows, I’m going to have to talk about class. JC and I come from different parts of the country but we both seem to have working class backgrounds. Those Gulf Coast residents who form the main subject of interest in Dubus are a lot like the folks that we both grew up with except in my case they sounded like they came from Queens and in JC’s case they sounded like they came from rural Georgia. Now JR, God bless him, one of my two best friends, the other coming from the South, doesn’t think he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth but from my perspective he was. While he was spending his summer break in Paris and Rome, I considered myself lucky enough to have fare for the subway. And part of that difference was a difference in expectation…in the sense of what you felt you were entitled to. It never occurred to me that I could go to art school like JR did. That was frivolous stuff. You had figure out how to earn a living or you weren’t going to eat.

So all that stuff from JR about location, location, location just sounds like social hubris to me and it’s inaccurate besides. But now that I go to Starbucks also and order my skinny iced latte, I find it a shame that people from different backgrounds and education levels can’t sympathize with each other. That’s why I liked the common humanity theme so much that I tried to put over in my last post.

I’m going to stick with my original A.J. theme although I note with some annoyance that my good friend JR has also taken a gratuitous swipe at Lonnie. But JR, Lonnie reaches for T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland on tape (or is it the Four Quartets, I don’t remember.) not cornflakes so let’s not form stereotypes about people. But let me put it this way about A.J.: he doesn’t deserve much by way of earned respect (he gets some, I’ll get to that later) but I think folks deserve what I’d call constituent respect for the hassles involved in drawing breath and trying to find a life in this world. I’m also thinking about A.J.’s threadbare mother. We have talked about her JR, tooling around her modest apartment trailing her oxygen tank while she puffs away. Is she just dumb and irresponsible? You could see it that way. But she also saved up and bought a house from her earnings as a maid. And she survived the trauma of being raped and took care of her kid. Later she finds some religion to add some direction and fortitude to her hardscrabble life. She pays her own way and she’s not bitter. She is just concerned about her son. I find her interesting to read about.

Getting back to her son, I find A.J. in a state of grace in incarceration like Oedipus after he has been blinded. He seems to have reached a state of peace with himself. He helps out the younger cons when they come to him. Maybe he has even learned something. And like Oedipus, I wouldn’t be surprised if A.J. were transported off to the Elysian fields at the moment of his death. At least that’s the way I would like to see it. But I guess that an internment in the slash pines is more likely for this long suffering and suffered schmo.

JC: We were largely in agreement on the Kalfus book, as I recall, but that doesn’t change the fact that for quite a while the catalogs and galley shelves have been overstuffed with novels that engage 9/11 in a large way. To argue that this doesn’t count as a book in that subgenre is just argumentative. It’s clear enough what is meant by the phrase. If this book isn’t about 9/11, then what the hell is Bassam doing here? I’ll disagree with Dennis about the silver spoon, but I do think that the topic reveals a social divide. Is it provincial to think that modern reading and writing should encompass more of society than LA and NYC; or about middle and upper class social strata? I don’t think so. It seems to me that the provincialism belongs to the other perspective. To suggest that nothing in these other places is worthy of cultural discussion smacks of pretension and self-righteousness.

I don’t know, JR. I think you are reading a lot into these characters that is not in the book even in a peripheral way. And to imply that A.J. is a child-snatcher and possibly a molester is an obvious misinterpretation of his character, when he is worried that some other pervert will come along and take the child. He is a would-be savior — but as usual screws it up. You argue that Dubus writes these people well and that he detests them, but I think that his portrayal of the characters (Bassam excluded, since we agree on him) is actually quite sympathetic — brutal, but sympathetic. These are deeply flawed people in terrible situations. They are misguided, poorly educated, sometimes lazy, but generally well-intentioned people who screw up their own lives as much as others do.

Clearly enough, none of us loved this book, although Dennis and I both found some salvageable parts to it whereas JR may have already burned his. Thanks to Dennis for bringing this all back to the Greeks, as he so often does. We can always count on you, DH, to bring us back to the classics. And thanks, to both of you for another spirited and enlightening discussion.