Andre Dubus won significant acclaim for his short fiction during a writing career spanning over three decades. In Broken Vessels, Dubus tries his luck with a series of personal essays. The result was a collection I enjoyed a great deal and I’m looking forward to reading a little more of his work in the coming year.
I read a number of these essays a second time before sending Broken Vessels back to its anonymous position within the stacks of the Cambridge Library. I enjoyed 'Under The Lights', an essay about the lowest levels of minor league baseball (1). 'The Judge and Other Snakes' is about the time Dubus was the key witness to a true injustice (and an assault) and ‘A Salute to Mister Yates’ is about, well, Richard Yates, a writer without enough readers. ‘Lights of the Long Night’ recounts Dubus’s life-changing car accident and provides important background information for the title essay, ‘Broken Vessels’, the longest piece of the collection which describes his recovery from the accident and details just how much it altered the course of his life.
Though I would recommend each of these essays, I do wish to point out the insight demonstrated by Tobias Wolff in the introduction to this collection. A good personal essay, Wolff suggests, demands self-awareness without self-importance. He adds that such writing is the chance for an author to express his or her significant gifts by expressing shock, rage, or grief only through meticulously detailed observation. I found myself noting the many ways Dubus lived up to these ideals in the ensuing essays and thought Wolff’s introduction did a fine job in setting the stage for the collection.
One up: The best thing I can say about a book is that the experience of reading it inspired me to do my own writing. The post inspired by Broken Vessels is set to publish sometime this month. Ten points and an autographed TOA post for any reader who identifies it correctly, I suppose.
One down: I liked many of the observations Dubus scattered throughout this work and noted a number of them to highlight here (those are below). However, some of them did strike me on second pass as more lazy than insightful, the sort of 'fortune cookie' wisdom that seems true until I come up with an obvious counter-example.
Here’s one: writing requires discipline, resilience, and a drive to use time fully.
This could be true. But what profession does not demand these things?
Just saying: Dubus comments at one point that many living room conversations could be printed in the local paper without causing anyone embarrassment. This might explain why the family meal is becoming a thing of the past (or maybe it explains the demise of the local paper).
He writes in one essay that nature is not lethal, just indifferent. Later on, he indirectly connects to this point by commenting on the dilemma faced by the bystander: though a bystander often wants to help, the problem is not knowing what to do. I guess in a sense it is our nature to be indifferent - as I highlighted last year after reading Will Durant's Fallen Leaves, the only lasting solution to any problem is education.
No one had ever tried to explain the progression of shyness to me until Dubus took a crack at it in this book. The first step, he says, is narcissism because being shy requires some sense of belief in the importance of how we act, look, or are perceived by others. If this narcissism becomes a sense of always being watched, it may lead to the vanity and cowardice required in order to become shy. This isn’t a perfect explanation, I’ll admit, but it’ll do for now as a working hypothesis.
Finally, I thought the observation that some emerge from a difficult time with the ability to see the way others are hurt or crippled was a very astute observation. For these survivors, it becomes a sort of obligation to help others find a day, an hour, or even just a moment of respite from this suffering.
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. And landed...foul...on the grass...
'Under The Lights' is a Traditional Baseball Essay – you know it reader, the sort where the bases and balls (and players) are forever perfectly white, every extra inning is full of drama and intrigue, and the home run ball that ends it all - because how else could it end, reader? - is still rising, somewhere, into the romance of a lightning-streaked sky.
