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.

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

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

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2008/jun/20/before-the-terror-dubus-new-novel-se...

Review: Andre Dubus' new novel set in a strip club on the eve of 9/11

By Jenny Shank For the Camera
Friday, June 20, 2008

As Andre Dubus III's new novel, "The Garden of Last Days," opens, April Connors is speeding to work with her 3-year-old daughter, Franny, in tow because her landlord and regular baby-sitter is in the hospital with heart-attack-like symptoms. At the Puma Club for Men, where April works as a stripper, there's "no calling in sick." April, who dances as "Spring," is so late for her first performance at the club that she has to leave Franny under the care of the unreliable "house mother" in a seedy room with nude-photo covered walls while she show more rushes out, wearing her regular underwear on stage.

Next we meet Bassam al-Jizani, a 26-year-old Saudi who is filled with guilt and anger as he drinks at the Puma Club; we soon learn that he is among the men planning to hijack airplanes and attack the World Trade Center in less than a week. Although al-Jizani is fictionalized, his character is based on the fact that some of the terrorists patronized a Florida strip club shortly before the attack.

Finally, there's AJ Carey, a construction worker who comes to the club to nurture his fantasies about one stripper and take his mind off his separation from his young son and his wife, who took out a restraining order against him after he hit her.

These elements quickly develop into a suspenseful plot that kept me up way too late at night as I tore through the pages to find out what would happen. As he demonstrated in his 1999 bestseller and National Book Award finalist, "House of Sand and Fog," Dubus -- who signs his new book Monday at the Boulder Book Store -- has a knack for building elemental themes and clashing moral codes into intense dramas. In "House of Sand and Fog" Dubus placed one piece of real estate at the center of a zero sum contest between a woman's quest for stability and an immigrant's desire for dignity.

In "The Garden of Last Days," Dubus pits an undereducated single mother's choice to become a stripper in order to make a good living and the consequences of that decision against the actions and judgments of Muslim fundamentalist al-Jizani as well as those of other Americans; al-Jizani isn't the only character who thinks of Spring as a "whore."

Al-Jizani pays for two hours alone with Spring in the "Champagne room" as AJ finds the distraught Franny alone in the back of the club and decides to help her in his own peculiar way. Through this intense drama, Dubus raises provocative questions about what makes a good parent and sets up a clash of cultures, values and ideas that fuels more than 500 tension-filled pages.

In this third-person narrative, Dubus plunges into the consciousnesses of half-a-dozen characters, allowing the reader the chance to become sequentially convinced by their particular thought processes and life stories. Of course, it's impossible to evoke sympathy for one of the 9/11 hijackers, but Dubus makes Al-Jizani not a monster but a human, if a loathsome one -- a virgin with a dead, beloved brother, conflicting feelings about Americans, parents who don't approve of his jihad mission and a streak of rage strong enough to bring down buildings.

Dubus sinks so far inside the head of occasional wife-beater AJ that he manages the trick of making the reader understand the perverse, internal logic behind why AJ hit his placid wife. Every person has a justification for their actions, no matter how abhorrent, and Dubus, better than most writers, takes us deep inside these inner monologues.

Paced like a thriller but written with the care, psychological depth and evocative details of literary fiction, "The Garden of Last Days" is a thoroughly transporting read. It has enough meat to feed a summerlong reflective reading, but most readers probably won't be able to resist gobbling it down immediately.

Jenny Shank also writes about books for NewWest.Net/Books. She lives in Boulder. show less