Growing up hating a faithless father

A Memoir

By Andre Dubus III

W.W. Norton. 387 pp. $25.95

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Reviewed by Dan Cryer

At age 10, when his parents divorced, Andre Dubus III lost his father.

Townie

summons up the violence born of anger, of anger born of that loss. This haunting memoir is as explosive as a Muhammad Ali prizefight, as vivid as a Basquiat canvas.

The sad truth is that his father, author of some of the most admired short stories published in America from the '70s into the '90s, had little clue about the suffering that divorce caused his children. In the domestic sphere, his acclaimed empathy for characters failed him.

Dubus the elder didn't appreciate that his ex-wife could barely pay the bills or feed the four kids, that they grew up in squalid conditions right out of novels by Dennis Lehane and Richard Price. He was too busy writing, too busy hanging out with his students. The kind of man who made others feel important, because he listened so attentively, he failed to do the same with his own children.

Yet Townie is ultimately a love story, of a young man who eventually finds his way and comes to love this father, however flawed.

The younger Dubus, who earned plaudits as author of the novel House of Sand and Fog, paints a chilling picture of his down-and-out Massachusetts town. Here are the sounds of Haverhill: "a bottle breaking, a drunk singing, a motorcycle or lowrider revving its engine." The polluted Merrimack River smells of "sewage and diesel and drying mud . . . dead fish and creosote." Connolly's Gym sits in a sea of "empty oil drums, a stack of mattresses, an upside-down shopping cart."

In this urban jungle, it's a flip of the coin between a future in prison or the graveyard. Andre's boyhood pal is shot and killed by his wife after beating her up. A fellow worker at a seafood restaurant turns out to be a serial killer of children.

In this environment, a weakling like Andre proved an easy target for bullies. Until, that is, as a young teen inspired by Billy Jack and the revenge movies of Clint Eastwood, he turned to bodybuilding to armor himself. Eventually, he was not only fighting back but also earning a rep as a tough customer himself.

Andre got so good at pummeling bad guys that he began to wonder if he had become one of them. The anger that welled up inside wasn't all about them. It was about Pop.

"The weak little boy I'd been working all these years to kill" kept screaming well into Andre's 20s. So he kept getting into brawls even as he recognized their self-destructiveness, understood that there might be other ways to "express the wound" of father loss.

This was the 15-year-old kid who had never played catch until his baseball-mad father showed him how. This was the father unaware that his older daughter, Suzanne, was dealing drugs, that his younger son, Jeb, had attempted suicide.

Despite six years in the Marines, Pop had never been in a fight. But he swelled with pride when he saw his son take on barroom sleazebags. Thus the source of the anger, Pop, only exacerbated his son's malaise.

For a while, the controlled aggression of boxing seemed like the way out. Eventually, while attending the University of Texas, Andre found something more productive. He began to write fiction.

"I felt pulled along by something larger than I was. . . . If I wanted to stay this awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing." Soon enough, writing became "as ingrained a habit as [bodybuilding] workouts, a private and necessary thing I had to do."

"You're a writer, man," Pop applauded when Andre published his first story, in Playboy.

The two would grow ever closer, though more like buddies than father and son. In the wake of a horrific highway accident - Pop's legs were crushed while helping a disabled motorist and he was thereafter in a wheelchair - the son would even become a kind of father. He and Jeb built ramps at Pop's house. He coached Pop in techniques for building up upper-body strength. He silently forgave him for all those sins of omission.

Though the love would deepen between father and son, Andre could never reveal the deep wounds that so burdened his early years. Until now, more than a decade after Pop's death.

Townie moves with the accelerating momentum of a thriller novel, plumbs the depths of a bittersweet love affair, and rends the reader's heart in two. This wrenching story can only strengthen the reputation of Andre Dubus III. From father to son, the torch has passed.