Separate Flights by Andre Dubus (September 2019)
This 1975 collection, the earliest of Andre Dubus’s career, brings together eight stories that mostly focus on crumbling marriages. Not my first choice of topic, reader, but I enjoyed the writing and like many of my fellow amateur book reviewers thought the bookend works did a little better than the rest.
My favorite story was ‘The Doctor’. I thought it was a great example of how to get a full sense of a character’s thinking without being forced into his head via the first-person perspective. The story is also a great advert of Dubus’s style and in this early work I detected much of what captures my attention in his writing. As a bonus, it has nothing to do with a crumbling marriage... (I think).
I'd like to highlight a couple of notes I took from Separate Flights. First, the difference between outright lies and lies of omission is that the former at least acknowledges certain topics whereas the latter avoids these matters entirely. If the omission means certain open wounds are never acknowledged, the pain might fester until it causes irreparable damage in the future.
I also liked the observation that sometimes people need to talk just to share the burden of a decision. I think a common error in these situations is for a listener to offer unwanted advice. For those who can't tell when their advice is unwanted, I offer my own unwanted advice - sit back, listen, and wait to be asked.
