If you want to know what it would be like to lose the use of your legs, read this book. 

In a sparse, Faulknerian style Dubus evokes an emotional landscape that has been violated by physical injury or tainted by advancing age and the inevitable degradation of the body that comes in its wake. 

Although not every story in this collection has as its focus this troubling theme, a shadow of death and disfiguration falls on these stories. For Dubus the aftermath of traumatic injury, the recovery phase, is a fabulously rich domain of inquiry and detailed description. Although his emphasis in entirely interpersonal, Dubus also conveys superbly the horror of actual physical violation of the body’s spatial envelope. Reading these sections, I could actually feel my own body shrinking from all the posibilities for damage and injury that blindside us in life when we least expect it. 

Further, Dubus grasps exquisitely that the ineluctable transition beyond youth and physical splendour, the aging process, is all too frequently accompanied primarily by a nostalgic longing for past pleasures which are understood as being now out of reach. And he takes pains to explore the way in which individuals attempt to compensate for the steady stream of losses that only accelerate as the aging process progresses. The picure he paints is not a pretty one.

But the book ultimately leaves one meditating, as the author once did before his own demise several years back, about the realities that must be faced by all of us for the simple fact that we inhabit bodies that have a trajectory which sooner or later commands our full attention. The psycholgical terrain toward the end of this trajectory is Dubus’s terrain for sure. And his capacity for observing and chronicling its particulars is both robust and highly nuanced. He was a great master, after all. And his work will be sorely missed by this reviewer.

This review is an expanded version of a reader review by Dr Hauser of this book on Amazon.com. ©Amazon.com, Inc.

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Lawrence Hauser describes himself as follows:

I am a clinical psychologist not currently in practise. I have spent the last eight years pursuing research in the psychology of financial markets and trading. Before that I worked as a psychotherapist with special interest in the British School of psychoanalysis. I trained in London for two years in the early ninties and worked on the adolescent unit of The Tavistock Clinic as a clinical associate.

Categories: Fiction, General

Keywords: short stories