ANDRE DUBUS: THE TIMES WERE NEVER SO BAD . . .

So . . . this past week I attended a screening of a film documentary on short story master Andre Dubus (not to be confused with his son Andre Dubus III, also an accomplished writer of fiction). Comprising interviews with family, friends, fellow writers and former students, a wonderful selection of still photos and even some grainy old home movie footage, The Times Were Never So Bad: The Life of Andre Dubus presents a candid portrait indeed—both intimate and measured—of a complex man and subtle writer, quietly yet emphatically teasing out the deeply intrinsic relationship between his life and his work. Directed by Edward (Ted) Delaney, the 90-minute film is altogether compelling as Delaney is unabashed in his admiration for Dubus yet is equally unabashed in acknowledging that he could be a difficult person . . . father, husband, friend, neighbor.

One of the sad ironies of Dubus’ life and career is that he became a household name only after he was critically injured in a car accident in 1986, a month short of his fiftieth birthday. The film reconstructs in graphic detail the circumstances and the aftermath of that horrific incident, in which Dubus, stopping Good Samaritan-like to assist at a highway accident involving a car and a motorcycle, was struck by another motorist. Suffering multiple trauma (eventually he lost a leg), he was wheelchair-bound for his remaining thirteen years of life. I remember the accident very clearly (happening just north of Boston, it received a lot of attention in the local news media), and I am grateful for Delaney’s sensitive telling of “the rest of the story.” And certainly that episode in Dubus' life validates the film's title, which is borrowed from the title of one of Dubus' collections of stories, which opens with an epigraph from Saint Thomas More: The times are never so bad but that a good man can live in them.

Yet what I am most grateful for regarding the documentary in its entirety involves the insight it affords into two of the central recurring interests in Dubus’ fiction. His early life in Louisiana defined by his troubled relationship with his father, Dubus apparently returns again and again in his fiction to the subject of fatherhood (and of sonhood). Apparently he also returns again and again to the subject of women in the lives of his male characters. I say “apparently” because I have not—yet—read Dubus’ work extensively.

But I have begun. In fact, the day after viewing Delaney’s documentary, I pulled off the bookshelf my barely thumbed-through copy of the collection The Times Are Never So Bad and started with the closing story (not quite randomly—it had been mentioned in the film), titled simply “A Father’s Story.” Am I, as the father of three daughters, a biased reader of this stunning narrative? Au contraire: I think I am utterly qualified to declare it the most staggeringly truthful depiction of a father-daughter relationship I have ever encountered. The things we do for love, I thought after reading it. As it turns out, “A Father’s Story” is available online on the website of Narrative Magazine. Read it now.