Gone So Long

I loved "The House of Sand and Fog" and couldn't wait to read his newest book. It didn't disappoint. Andre Dubus III is a master of building up suspense. The plot was straight forward, Man kills wife, young daughter witnesses the crime, he goes to jail and then the story really begins. Will his daughter want to see him 20 years after he is released from jail?

WOW. Another delicious book by this author. Heartbreaking at times, the characters stole my heart and left me wanting more. As I want more form the author!

Some actions are unforgivable. Though our Western culture is steeped in a religion that exhorts us to forgive those who trespass against us, there’s not a whole lot of guidance on how to do that or how we should live if we can’t forgive someone. In Andre Dubus’s shattering new novel, Gone So Long, we follow a daughter and her grandmother who cannot forgive a man for murdering the girl’s mother. The novel builds and builds to the moment when daughter and father meet again after 40 years…but to get there we have to hear the whole story and its aftermath first.

Susan has been adrift since she was three years old, when her father murdered her mother in their ocean-side cottage. All her life, she’s been told that she’s a spit of her beautiful mother. Male eyes follow her the same way they followed her mother. She is constantly warned away from boys—who might do to her what her father did to her mother—by her emotionally damaged grandmother in harsh terms. Four decades later, Susan is married to the most patient man on the planet while she works on cathartic documents that move back and forth from novel-modeled-on-the-author’s-life to autofictional memoir. The documents bring up so much that she was repressing, so much that has lead her astray from her potential.

While we work our way through Susan’s current life and her memories, we also get her father, Daniel’s, version of events. We see his current life as an ex-felon who works re-caning and restoring old furniture. We also get, in letter form, a terrible tale of jealous. I was worried for long chapters that Daniel—and the narrative—would blame Susan’s mother for her own murder. Fortunately, Daniel squarely takes the blame. He was a jealous monster and he took a life. Daniel’s problem now is that so much time has passed without contact with his daughter that he has no idea how to even approach her, even if he knew what to say to her.

In addition to the book’s meditations on forgiveness and the potential impossibility of forgiveness, I was struck at the emerging theme of a person’s worth. Susan and her mother, along with other women mentioned in Gone So Long, are called cheap when they wear make-up and revealing clothing. When women are talked about as mothers, the speakers (Daniel, Susan’s grandmother, etc.) seem to elevate the worth of these women. I was fascinated by the way that language about money is repurposed to talk about a person’s worth to society and others, as if being considered “cheap” justifies others’ taking advantage or hurting women. This theme about worth and “cheapness,” I thought, did a lot to argue against any excuses that what Daniel did was justified. A person’s worth comes from the fact that they are human beings and should not be diminished because someone is jealous or judgmental.

Gone So Long is a slow novel. It’s an emotional, thoughtful novel. It’s the kind of novel that lingers in the mind long after you’ve finished it, because it contains a world of truth. The universe in this novel is realistically imperfect. The characters are so psychologically rich that I could easily picture them sitting in their hot Florida rooms as they wondered about themselves and what the hell they should say to each other. I wasn’t immediately hooked the way I was with House of Sand and Fog, but I’m glad I hung in there. I was more than rewarded by the end of Gone So Long. This brief review doesn’t do the book justice.

“I've been trying to get down
To the heart of the matter
But everything changes
And my friends seem to scatter
But I think it's about forgiveness
Forgiveness
Even if, even if you don't love me anymore”

-- The Heart of the Matter, Don Henley, Songwriters: Mike Campbell / Don Henley / John David Souther

The last time Daniel saw her, in 1973, she was just three years old, his little girl, their Suzie Woo Woo, Danny and Linda’s baby girl. It was also the last time he would ever see Linda, one jealous rage too many. For years, all he will see is the small cell where he lives and the others that live there, as well.

Susan’s grandmother, Lois, moves to Florida after selling the arcade they’d owned in that small beach town north of Boston, leaving the bad things that had happened behind. Lois wants to shelter Suzie from the memories of that night, and keep her as far from her father as possible. Lois becomes an antique dealer, and for a time things are relatively normal, Suzie becomes a typically rebellious teenager, and eventually matures.

Suzie, now Susan, a woman who is married to Bobby Dunn, now in her forties, and she teaches college level English not too far from where her grandmother lives. In addition to that, she is also struggling with writing her own memoir, snippets of which are woven through this book.

Danny lives in this seaside city, where a handful of the older brick buildings still remain. In his sixties now, his health in decline, he makes a living recaning chairs, revisiting the past in his mind, frequently. He hasn’t talked to, seen, or heard from his daughter Susan in any sense through these years. His Suzie Woo Woo. He feels every year of his life, and then some, and seeks a way to make some kind of amends before his chance is gone. He’s trying to put his affairs in order, and plans to leave everything he might have to Susan, but he feels a need to make an explanation of this gesture, so that it is not rejected outright.

This is the first novel of Andrew Dubus III that I have read. While this was not an easy read, I found it to be very compelling and worthwhile. It is occasionally dark, and it is not a book one can skim through or allow your thoughts to wander about while reading. It is beautifully written, raw and gritty, and heartbreaking.

In Gone So Long Dubus manages to reveal a little about each character at a time, leisurely, allowing time to follow a natural course, allowing the course of events to unfold gradually, naturally. I felt mesmerized into following him on this journey, despite this ever-present feeling that all would not necessarily end well, but that, in the end, it would feel… true. True to the characters and, despite it seeming desperately dismal, this felt as natural a course of events for these characters. They are all flawed and imperfect, needing mercy and absolution. There is, after all, beauty to be found through forgiveness, as imperfect as it may be.



Pub Date: 02 OCT 2018


Many thanks for the ARC provided by W.W. Norton & Company

Andre Dubus III is the master of complex and complicated human beings in situations challenging the limits of the reader's empathy. This is a story with a long arc, In contrast to the riveting House of Sand and Fog, these people have lives that have been warped and rerouted by actions that seem unredeemable. Therein lies the story, well told and propulsive. As a footnote, Dubus' memoir Townie is an eye opening companion read.