Dancing After Hours: Stories

cw: self-harm

Dancing After Hours is an incredibly well-written collection of short stories. The writing itself is so compelling and the characters all have rich interiors. Each story, many of which are intertwined, provides a glimpse at the reality of humanity and the motivations behind us all. I can't remember the last time I highlighted so many phrases in a book. And!!! I counted multiple instances of women-loving women, which was a nice touch for me. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested.

There are fourteen stories here, about love, fidelity, desire and loss. Intertwined with these tales are four linked snapshots of a single couple, called Ted and LuAnn, as they meet, marry and deal with the struggles of marital life.
Dubus is a fine writer, evoking Raymond Carver and Richard Yates and completely understands this distinctive story form. His prose is strong and deft, if just a touch cold around the edges.
“The earth itself was leaving with her sad and pitying husband, was drawing away from her. Stars fell. That was a song, and music would never again be lovely; it was gone with the shattering stars and coldly dying moon, the trees of such mortal green; gone with life itself.”

These stories are of course well-made. Andre Dubus was a master of the short story. However, I have a hard time loving them, being satisfied by them, or even admiring them very much. They're made very simply, and don't tend to move, exalt or act deeply upon the reader. I have a hard time liking or sympathizing with his characters, even (or especially) those he returns to in a series of time-lapsed stories. The themes are fairly consistent: sex, love, betrayal, redemption. Betrayal, perhaps, most of all.

Another note: Andre Dubus does not appear, from this volume, to have what Virginia Woolf, following Coleridge, would call the 'androgynous mind' of genius. There is often something off in his female characters, and there is a masculine show more skew to the world of his writing that grated insistently upon this female reader's nerves. This female reader loves many works by male writers, including some with almost no female characters. Something is amiss here.

However, as I said, the stories are well-written, and at least one ('Blessings') was so delightfully unexpected that it probably accounts, entire, for one of the three stars above. show less

Life's too short for morose love stories. Tossed it aside after the fifth such story in the collection. He writes well, just not about anything I care to read.

I was a huge Dubus fan in my 30s. He was a man, writing for men, without the macho bullshit.