The Garden of Last Days

This book is a struggle. You won't like the characters, or the places where this story of people teetering on tragedy while hoping for redemption plays out, or their bad decisions based on arguably honorable intentions and unmet needs. Every overwrought bad review you might read here is justified (if short-sighted), and every rave review stumbles. But it will be a rare exercise in empathy - yours - which Dubus elicits unapologetically. Your commitment to finishing this book will be both stymied and rewarded, but ultimately worth the effort.

This offering from Dubus is not as compelling as [The House of Sand and Fog] though it is constructed on the same premise - inhabiting characters difficult to understand attempting to explain their motivations from deep within. Ultimately, the characters were just not worthy of the effort. It starts well enough, with a haphazard and equivocal abduction of a little girl from the strip club where her mother dances. Shifting among perspectives, we follow the girl, her mother, a Middle Eastern man for whom she dances, the abductor, and a bouncer from the club. Eventually, the Middle Eastern man is revealed to be one of the 9/11 hijackers. In the end, there was just too little redeemable about any one of the characters to maintain interest show more and buy-in.

I'll try another from Dubus, as he's a good writer, but I'm hoping to find the next more like [The House of Sand and Fog].

3 stars!!! show less

A 9/11 hijacker stops at a Sarasota, Florida strip club “for strength” several days prior and sets off a string of events involving a dancer, her daughter, a customer, a bouncer and the people close to them. They each have problems and doubts about their decisions and lives – including the hijacker. In alternating viewpoints, Dubus writes in intricate detail about each and what brought them to this point. The close examination allows each character to be discovered objectively despite the built-in prejudices most of them elicit.

Dear Mr. Dubus III, I recently wrote some MS Word macros that help to improve a novel's readability. Please write to me so I can send them to you. One of my favorites is the one that highlights sentences more than 20 words long. Although in your case, I would have to tweak the code so that your CPU won't smoke when you run it. Also, paragraphs probably shouldn't be more than one page.

This book feels like word vomit. The author just started writing and writing and writing without having any idea what or why or where the plot should go. It takes halfway through the book until there's an actual game-changing incident.

The setting is a strip club in Florida where there are three main characters. The main one is April who was forced to bring show more her daughter to work. She ends up giving a private dance to Bassam (the second character), a muslim extremist who will NOT SHUT UP about how he hates America, thinks we're all pig-dog whores, and how Allah is truth.

The third is A.J. an alcoholic who got his hand busted in an incident in the club. And we get to follow his repetitious drunken rantings about his wife and kid (who have a restraining order against him) as he drives back to the club. There, he finds April's daughter wandering around lost and thinks it's a good idea to "save" her. When he realizes he dun goofed, he ends up ditching her in someone's car. The police catch him after he finishes faking busting his hand on his job site (for workman's comp), which he has not shut up about since the beginning.

I hate this book. I hated it when I was reading it. I hated it when I was done. I almost stopped several times. I should have stopped. But I figured A) Stephen King recommended it B) I should read some literary fiction once in a while. I should've known better. These days, King is wordy, setting-driven, and pretentious. I should've expected the stuff he reads to be even moreso. I hate all the characters. No one is sympathetic, no one is worth redeeming, and no one will shut up. They're all so self-centered and ignorant. This book should be called "The Garden of Bad Decisions".

The problem is that no one wants anything. Well, the characters all want something, sorta. In the general sense that April wants to "get out of the business", A.J. wants to see his boy again and get to the job site so he can fake his injury, and Bassam wants to shove his self-righteousness in everyone's face. But there is no central plot, no goal everyone's working towards. And then the icing on the cake is that Bassam turns out to be one of the 9/11 World Trade Center terrorists. That's right, this is 9/11 fan fiction.

The tension in this book is like a hand squeezing a stone. There is little indication that anything is happening. You can't see the pressure building. A story should be more like someone throwing a ticking bomb in the air. You can see where it's going, but you're not sure where it will land, if anyone will catch it, and if it will explode. show less

A very intense book that moves incredibly slowly at first – you can read for an hour and find the storyline has moved on only a few minutes. Then towards the end things start to speed up, before a rapid sprint for the line in the final chapters.

Set in the days and hours leading up to 9/11, the novel follows a small cast of characters in Florida. Chief among them are people you wouldn’t perhaps expect to like – a stripper, a wife beater, and a terrorist. But in his meticulous prose the author sets out to understand all these people, to make them and their motivations and goals real. I found myself empathising with the wife beating character when he faced a gut wrenching dilemma partway through the story. Such is the strength of show more this novel, which ultimately invites the reader to decide where their sympathies lie, and why. show less

I first heard about the novel "The Garden of Last Days" by Andre Dubus III from a Stephen King column in Entertainment Weekly. He raved about the book so glowingly that I put the title down on my list of books to watch for. This was in 2008, and I have finally read the novel.

I don't know that "The Garden of Last Days" is quite as good as King said it was -- a blurb from that column appears at the top of the paperback cover -- but it is still a terrific novel, the kind that gives book clubs lots to talk about.

The story has no main character. There are no heroes and and no villains. Even Bassam, the young man who within a matter of days will be one of the 9-11 terrorists, isn't really a villain in the context of the novel. He is just show more another lost soul, like everybody else.

April is a stripper in a men's club near Bradenton, Fla. One night her sitter is ill, so April takes her 3-year-old daughter to the club with her because she needs the money. She enlists others to watch Franny in the dressing room while she entertains Bassam, who calls himself Mike, in the VIP room. He pays her thousands of dollars to keep her with him.

Meanwhile, Franny wanders away while nobody is looking, exploring the dark club in search of her mother. The child is taken by A.J., an intoxicated man whose arm was broken earlier in the evening when he was tossed out of the club by a bouncer. When A.J. returns, he sees the girl and takes her, believing he is doing a good deed. He drives away with the child, uncertain about what he should do with her.

Much of the air comes out of the plot about half way through the novel when Franny is recovered, but by then readers will be fully involved in the lives of the characters and the knowledge of what will happen on Sept. 11 and they will want to keep reading, even if some of the tension is gone.

Dubus puts us into the mind of each of his characters, showing us what each sees and feels and thinks. It is a masterful piece of writing. show less

On the Gulf Coast of Florida, the lives of several people come together in a "Gentlemen's Club." April, aka Spring, a single mother who is "dancing" at the club. Her 3-year-old daughter, Frannie, there only because her elderly babysitter has had a panic attack and is in the hospital for heart tests. AJ, an angry young man recently separated from his wife and young son and kept away by a restraining order. Bassam, aka "Mike," a young Muslim man, knowing he is on his way to meet Allah.

"Mike" hires Spring for a private dance in the Champaign Room. Believing Frannie to be sleeping and under supervision, Spring spends two hours taking off her clothes, then talking to Mike, answering his questions, then letting him tough her Cesarean scar. show more She ends the two hours thousands of dollars ahead - but her daughter is gone.

AJ has found Frannie. She woke up and went looking for her mother. AJ puts Frannie in his car and takes her way, thinking through his alcoholic haze that he is protecting a neglected child.

"Mike" leaves the club that night to meet his compatriots; together, they make their way to Boston, to an American Airlines flight that will take them to Allah and change our world.

The Garden of Last Days examines the morality of April / Spring. She is judged by everyone around her for her profession. Both her daughter’s babysitter and her daughter’s abductor decide that her profession makes her a bad mother. She is fired from her job because she is a single mother. The legal system takes her daughter away, assuming that she is a bad mother because she is a stripper. Even the man who will, only days later, be one of those who forces an American Airlines flight into one of the World Trade Center Towers tells her she is going to burn for her lifestyle. April is required to work harder than other mothers to demonstrate that she is not immoral; she is simply trying to make the money she needs to take care of herself and her daughter.

A fast-paced novel that has the feel of a thriller but is more the poignant examination of the life of a young mother as the world passes into the days post-9/11. show less