I had promised myself, while walking the dog, to post a brief blog item that linked to the New York Times review yesterday of Andre Dubus III, and his memoir “Townie”.  The writer says that the author “growls” like a mixture of Stephen King, Ron Kovich and Bruce Springsteen. Frida, on the other hand, despite her nickname “Grr Grr” (short for “girly girl”) never says boo.

Frida the cocker spaniel enjoying a sunny Palo Alto afternoon walk

EDIT TO ADD, two months later, April 25, 2011: I never met Andre Dubus (1936-1999) but felt a second hand kinship via my good friend Brian Moore. Dubus was scheduled to talk once at Stanford, at Kresge Auditorium, but when I got there — and was hoping to meet him, and remind Brian to him —  there was a noticed taped to the door saying that the author had taken ill. In this moment, I don’t recall how close this was to his actual and ultimate demise, but I am sure it was somewhat near the end. I remember seeing my friend Star Teachout there on the Kresge lawn, and telling her about my idea of installing Foucalt Pendulums nation-wide to promote consciousness of the Copernican nature of the cosmos (i.e. these devices, like the one in the science library at Dartmouth College, demonstrate how the Earth rotates, or that it does; I worry that too many people might be ignorant or misinformed about cosmology and have a dark ages view of an Earth-centric universe, and that there is a corresponding mass acceptance of things like war, hate, fast food and television, if you will excuse my generalism and plastic thinking). Both Star and I had ridden our bikes that day, if memory serves. (Certainly she did, at least). I first heard about Andre Dubus because my friend Brian Moore had met him at a reading in Massachusetts. Andre punched Brian in the stomach, in a friendly, manly, teasing way, and remembered his name upon a subsequent meeting. With that, Brian and I became his fans.

I just looked it up to learn, thanks to my fav search-injun, that the Dubus lecture at Stanford’s Kresge Auditorium was scheduled for April 15, 1996, three years before his ultimate death. (So Star would have been a newlywed, and this was before the birth of her three kids, with Dan:  Zander, Leo and Felix; Dan and I met in junior high and I was once the manager of his band, Oxbow, if you excuse the digressions, and name-dropping, and they do).

The briefest telling of the Andre Dubus story is that he was a former Marine turned Iowa Writers Workshop-trained author and writer, but he was crippled when struck by a car, while acting as a Good Samaritan; he was trying to assist after coming upon a highway accident.  I bought what was then a front-list book, “Broken Vessels” (1992), a book of essays, from David R. Godine press.  He is also the father of the writer Andre Dubus III (1959), one of whose stories was made into an excellent film called “House of Shadows and Fog.” What triggered this somewhat “dog” or “shaggy dog” of a blog post was my seeing the New York Times review of AD3’s memoirs. Here is a link to the part of this narrative I am most sure about, that the father’s book of essays, if you can find them, are worth the read (although, surely, and by Amazon metrics, the son also rises, and eclipses his dad):

I didn’t know or recall until just now — thanks to wiki — that Dubus (pronounced “duh BYOOS”, rhyming sadly with “abuse”)  was from Lake Charles, LA — the geography referenced in my post about Ann Savoy (sa FWAH) and The Magnolia Sisters.

EDIT TO ADD, APRIL 25, PT. 2:

I caught recently this movie adaptation of an Andre Dubus story, “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” with Mark Ruffalo and Laura Dern,  on our local paid-media hookup:

EDIT TO ADD, APRIL 25, 2011, PT. 3:

For comparison sake, here is the trailer from the movie based on Andre Dubus III novel, “House of Sand and Fog” which I caught in the theaters and which I still occassionally think of if I fall behind in paying my bills, or when I catch myself being xenophobic:

And this is a bit of a digression (except they all deal with New England, or my New England) but here is a link to a Janet Maslin review of a Ellen Hovde / Muffie Meyer film that Charlotte Gerstein and I saw as undergraduates at Dartmouth in the nineteen-eighties, and the author Grace Paley was there too, I recall. This film, if you can find it, features a screenplay by John Sayles and acting by Ellen Barkin and Kevin Bacon:

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9D02E4D81338F932A25757C0A963948260

So thank you, Frida, for being the Trojan Dog or Beckoning Cocker Spaniel that tried to lure people in to these somewhat complicated topics.

And here is a link to Emily Rooney talking to Andre Dubus III on WGBH Boston:

http://www.wgbh.org/programs/-854/episodes/-26839

Lastly, it kinda reminds me of the recent film “The Fighter”, which deals with boxing (and Andre Dubus III became an expert in fisticuffs, he tells Emily), and takes place in Lowell, about 20 miles from the Haverhill, Mass. of Dubus.

But since what struck us about the Dubus’s in the first place was a punch to Brian Moore’s belly, I guess it is somewhat fitting that this narrative dances around the ring a bit and goes nose to nose with a lot of the sweet science.

Link to the actual topic of this (and I am amazed that his most famous novel has been reviewed 771 times on Amazon):