We Don't Live Here Anymore: Three Novellas

This guy is awesome! He does what I love, writes about the ordinary in a way that makes it interesting. These 3 linked short novels deal with relationships, particularly the married relationship of two couples. Considering that almost all my peers are married (or in a state approximating marriage), and that most of us grew up in a household where there lived a married couple, this theme is one well known to us all.

So, more than the story of what happens between these two couples, is what is really being told. And the charming way it is written is just the icing on the cake for this near-perfect book.

Dubus writes about what the characters are doing saying and thinking, and manages to get the reader to really inhabit their head. To feel show more what they are feeling, even if they are doing things that are alien to the reader. I wanted the stories to go on and on, but alas, they all ended. So now all I have is the memory of people who feel like they were once friends. show less

Andre Dubus is one of the best "relationship" writers I know. And I don't mean romantic comedy type work where the big question is "How and when will they finally kiss?", but rather in how he handles marriages that just don't work. He writes flawed characters whose view of the world can be cynical and skewed, but in the end, very real. The novellas that comprise this work dig deep into emotional confrontationw without the melodrama and expected endings many writers exhibit. I can't read on planes--I've never been able to--but I read two of these during recent flight. I guess that says something.

Very very bleak image of man and woman and what we do to eachother in terms of intimacy in relationships. There is a bit more to this than in the film, specifically one of the characters after the major tumultuous relationship rift. I think perhaps the most finely crafted aspect of it is how intellectuals fool themselves.

I have the Picador edition, 1984 Published in great britain. The cover picture is different to the one shown here.

Andre Dubus, the master short story writer, toiled in relative obscurity during much of his lifetime. Though known primarily for his stories, Mr. Dubus also wrote essays and novellas. His only novel, THE LIEUTENANT, was published in 1967.

Though publishers clamored for novels, Mr. Dubus wrote what his stories asked of him. Sometimes the story wanted to be seven pages, sometimes twenty; occasionally the story turned into a novella. In 1984 Crown Publishers issued a collection of four of Mr. Dubus's novellas titled WE DON'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE. The novellas in the collection were originally published by David Godine.

I like the show more way Dubus gets into the character's heads and writes what they are thinking. show less

Cuts like a knife.