Andre Dubus

*Separate Flights* is part of a short-story collection centered on a single theme: the disintegration of marital relationships within the nuclear family, now typical of the middle class. One need only dwell on the short story that lends its title to the entire volume to grasp the author’s literary traits and flee, as quickly as possible, from the tedious repetitiveness of the situations, characters, and dialogue. Beth cannot sleep and refuses to take sleeping pills: she wants to know why she cannot do something as simple as sleeping. > So night after night she went to bed to lie awake. (...) she was not equipped to solve a problem of this sort, (...) what she needed was to look into herself, and that was a painful, unsuccessful task. For when she looked into herself she found, oh God, she found nothing. There was nothing left to do but fix a gin. Lee, her husband, has to attend a corporate event; as they often do, the two take separate flights to avoid both perishing in a potential plane crash (it’s the portfolio theory of finance: spread the risk!). Beth meets a man with whom she has a casual affair. And it is precisely this fleeting and intense encounter that brings to light the root causes of her malaise: she no longer loved her husband. For a long time > you suspected that something had died in your house, so you looked around and saw it was long dead in everyone else's house too; then you could come back and look under your own bed and find, truly, a corpse. She accepted this death. It was as natural and predictable as a wrinkled face . And indeed, there is no outlet for the marital crisis, for the loss of love, because it is something that "just happens and there is nothing we can do about it." In a society in which everything disintegrates, even love, all that remains is turning to alcohol: loneliness is an existential dimension that cannot be escaped because it is grounded in the stasis of human relations, in our inability to truly love or to overturn our lives. The author’s deep pessimism leaves the stories hanging, deliberately arresting the narrative’s development to create a static plot; the characters are cold, soulless, imprisoned in a flat, lackluster existence. And Beth’s daughter is right to react violently to her mother’s warnings ( > oh my baby, save yourself. (...) it's a farce, love, marriage, fidelity..), and scream: oh why did you come in tonight! Why! Why! Why didn't you stay upstairs and mind your own dirty business!" There is no hope, perhaps that is true; but one would have wished for a better story, with intense dialogue, a few plot twists, and, above all, deeper insight into the characters and situations. Instead, one is confronted with a tedious and oppressive narrative pace; a pity, because the writing is of a very high standard. Why not read it? Oppressive and tedious.

The bottom line is very simple: a wasted talent. Remarkable stylistic skill is placed at the service of tedious stories devoid of narrative development, inconclusive and cynical relationship dramas: in short, an unbearable book. In *Listen Carefully as Our Options Have Changed*, Mark has discovered that his wife, Laura, is cheating on him: he knows because he hired a detective to tail her and has proof on a video, which he watches obsessively. He is a successful project manager and thus wants to approach the problem according to the rational tenets of project management. > No, the project of saving his marriage appears to have failed, and he is faced with a new objective. This is not unusual. Some projects collapse for various reasons. (...) In this case, there was simply a change of heart. Or, more accurately, a shift from concealing love’s troubles to displaying them, though Mark was forced to acknowledge them, wasn’t he? (...) There was the cold politeness toward his mother. (...) There was Laura’s habit of getting the detailed grocery instructions Mark gave her wrong, (...) to the point that he had to drop everything and go to the supermarket himself. (...) There was Laura’s habit of watching banal detective shows late at night, her eyes glued to the screen, vacant like a child’s. There was her mediocre cooking, her preference for frozen, heavily salted foods, and unremarkable dishes she was not ashamed to serve with ketchup. And now she was deceiving him, making a fool of him, and betraying him. Uprooting their home from its foundations and hurling shards of boiling glass into Mark’s blood, his brain, and his heart: and all this intense pain for what? For her? Look at her; what was he losing anyway? But that was a question that died before it was even fully thought, because he loved her . Mark fails to understand the reasons behind the failure of his marriage, even when numerous signs should tell him that it is his very own cold, rational approach that has driven Laura away. His habit of judging, evaluating, and treating the people around him as though they worked for him. He does not understand, but he is a stubborn man: > he would not throw his wife out of his house. (...) He would step back, take no action, and let things run their course. He would let his wife’s mistake resolve itself . Hypocritical forbearance is the sole means to make a relationship survive. This is also the outcome of another story: *Marla*. She is a woman no longer young, very fat, a drab bank clerk destined to remain an old maid. It seems an inescapable fate, until she meets Dennis, an equally obese man, affectionate and kind. It is unexpected love. The two move in together, and cohabitation reveals traits in the man that Marla dislikes: an obsessive fixation with order, a preference for a repetitive and mundane life, the risk of slipping into a tedious routine. What is more, the man does not want children. Leave him? But that’s marriage, my dear, her friends tell her; children will come later, even if the husband doesn’t want them (just deceive him about your fertile days so he won’t wear a condom!). Now well on his way toward squalor, Dubus tackles the third story (*The Bartender*): two young people marry full of enthusiasm, she gets pregnant, and he cannot resist sleeping with a curvaceous coworker—quite a bitch, truth be told. In the seventh month, the wife discovers the affair and risks miscarrying; miraculously, both she and the baby girl survive. > He walked over beside her bed and stood still. (...) Soon she would open her eyes, (...) eyes he did not deserve but hoped to earn, eyes of dark hope . At this point, I should have tackled *Dirty Love*. I confess: I could not bring myself to do it, so grating did the reading promise to be. From the story, it is useful to quote a sentence to convey Dubus’s remarkable ability to sustain long periods through a masterful use of words—a succession of impressions not underpinned by punctuation or the unfolding of content (events, character descriptions, feelings), but anchored in a carefully and skillfully calibrated syntax. In Italian, much of this writing is undoubtedly lost, and a great translator would be required; nonetheless, I shall try. > Now everything is lined up, her feelings and the music in her head, and all of it keeps making her feel as if she were moving forward, gliding silently on an airport moving walkway, that time she was on one, back in the past when she was little and her mother and father seemed happy, or at least laughed together a lot, her mother still pretty or at least looking it because she took care of herself, heavy but still sexy, though Devon never thought about these things, she only sensed them, as if she were lying in a soft bed surrounded by cool, deep pillows and the scent of something sweet was in the air, and that day the three of them were boarding a plane to Disney World where everything was realer than real could ever be . Why not read it? Monotonous, ponderous, even superficial at times.