The Garden of Last Days, due to its structural issues, is merely a very good one, but it more than cements Dubus's status as one of America's finest writers. House of Sand and Fog was a brilliant novel, which more than deserved every accolade heaped on it. In Dubus's hands such personal calamities are made not only understandable but inevitable by their context. However, the bigger story is not the last days of the 9/11 gang, but that of April and Franny, the well-meaning widow Jean, the amiable bouncer Lonnie, and the everyday tragedy of AJ, the would-be rescuer of the little girl. Dubus's writing makes most post-9/11 novels, including such touted efforts as John Updike's Terrorist, seem knee-jerk, shabby and out of time. While not above letting the essential lunatic humour arise from the moral gymnastics of the Islamist's desires for western clothes, sex, drink, tobacco (all under the pretext of "blending in"), this is never done in a cheap way, and his vision is as critical of western materialism as it is of Middle Eastern fundamentalism. The empathy in his writing always transcends the bleakness of his subject matter. In the same way that he makes us understand the goodness of a woman who leaves her child in the back of a strip club, he shows us how a drunken wife-beater can abduct an infant thinking he is rescuing her. His greatest gift as a writer is his ability to find the humanity in all his characters. Again, the predictability is subverted by the quality of Dubus's writing: he never lets Bassam become a plot device or a cardboard villain and he renders the chilling rationale of the Islamists all too believable. We already know Bassam's fate, for, as part of an al-Qaida cell, he has been domiciled in Florida for flying lessons, and will go to Logan airport in Boston to hijack a plane and fly it into one of the World Trade Centre's twin towers. It's a testimony to Dubus's skills that the book continues to roar along at a ferocious pace, but you cannot escape the feeling that he has written two great stories, rather than an integrated novel. Unfortunately, the major problem for the novel is that this is April and Bassam's last encounter, and once it's over there are still 300-odd pages left. Tension and confusion are wrought from every spare yet evocative sentence. The standard of Dubus's writing, that missing link between the high literary novel and the superior thriller, never wavers, but it is employed to its most devastating effect here. The dramatic crux of the book arises when one of the club's customers, the Islamic fundamentalist Bassam, arranges a private session with April in the seedy and secluded "champagne room". Most of the action takes place over one weekend in a Florida strip club, the catalyst being the disappearance of Franny after April has left her in the back room while she strips (her regular babysitter, Jean, a caring neighbourhood widow, is ill). However, The Garden of Last Days is a very different book: more ambitious, yet also showcasing Dubus's considerable writing skills to great effect. In House of Sand and Fog it was the family home, while in April's case it is her infant daughter, Franny. The women in both books stand to lose something they value greatly. And, again, she too has a would-be protector, not a misguided cop this time, but a poetry-loving bouncer called Lonnie. Like its predecessor, The Garden of Last Days features a vulnerable young female protagonist, in this case April, a stripper and single mother, who also has a Middle Eastern adversary (a fundamentalist terrorist instead of an ex-military crony of the Shah of Iran). House of Sand and Fog was certainly a big book, establishing Andre Dubus III as a writer of great talent and creating an air of expectation about his next offering. The exalted work, like any preceding it, has long gone, and only the current undertaking has any importance. Writers, on the other hand, concern themselves less with this issue. When an author produces what becomes known as a "big book", critics and readers tend to obsess about how they will follow it up.
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