Not a Townie

I just finished reading my first book on a Kindle. I selected "Townie" by Andre Dubus III. I had heard a lot about the book when it came out a few months ago and it was on my list of books to get from the library. I thought this was a good choice for a Kindle book because I thought my husband and son would also be interested in reading it.

Well, I don't think I'll be recommending the book to anyone. Dubus certainly has a wonderful ability to create a scene and give the reader a sense of place. But I had no idea I was signing up for hours and hours of descriptions of fist fights, of long, hopeless hours in bars. The book had just one theme -- barely controlled and barely disguised anger. Frankly, it became pretty boring and I started to skim whenever he stepped into a bar and saw a well-muscled young man.

I felt like I lived in an entirely different world than the author. About 50 pages in I found myself looking up his picture because I just needed to have a face in mind as I read about these endless fights. I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen anyone in a fight (including junior high) and I can't remember ever observing the things that seemed to happen to Dubus every week -- coming across a couple who were on the verge of physical violence and needing to make the decision of whether to step in and protect the woman. Have I just not noticed? It's not like I've spent my entire life in a rarified, protected suburb. My first 18 years on Staten Island and my several years living on the edge of Koreatown in Los Angeles allowed me to see a pretty broad cross-section of humanity. But I guess those places are a lot safer than the Boston suburbs where Dubus grew up.

One of the weirdest things about the book is that Dubus is the son of a well-regarded writer who was a working writer and teacher when the author was a child. And yet the son had never traveled out of Boston and lived in near poverty conditions with his mother and siblings. It left me really wondering about Dubus pere.

One of the only poignant things I discovered in the book was the description of the father's writing schedule. Apparently he wrote every morning, had lunch, and then went for a run. He kept careful track of how much he was writing and kept a log where he noted down his word count for every day and wrote "thank you" below it. I like that. A daily recognition that artists are just a vessel for a gift, a thing, that we only barely understand.

But I would have been happy reading that in an article. I didn't need to read the whole book.