Dancing After Hours

Description

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

From a genuine hero of the American short story comes a luminous collection that reveals the seams of hurt, courage, and tenderness that run through the bedrock of contemporary American life. In these fourteen stories, Dubus depicts ordinary men and women confronting injury and loneliness, the lack of love and the terror of actually having it. Out of his characters’ struggles and small failures–and their unexpected moments of redemption–Dubus creates fiction that bears comparison to the short story’s greatest creators–Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor.

"A master of the short story…It’s good to have Andre Dubus back. More than ever, he is an object of hope."–Philadelphia Inquirer

"Dubus’s detailed creation of three-dimensional characters is propelled by his ability to turn a quiet but perfect phrase…[This] kind of writing raises gooseflesh of admiration."–San Francisco Chronicle"Like some of the most satisfying storytellers of the past (Dubus has been compared to Chekhov), he is munificent, spinning out whole lifetimes and recounting events from many characters’ viewpoints. For the lyricism and directness of his language, the richness and precision of his observations and the generosity of his vision, he is among the best."
—Village Voice

"Dubus’s characters resemble those of Raymond Carver…but the stories stand alone in their idiosyncratic spiritual cast, occasionally religious, more often expressive of devotion to the people he lives among."
—The New York Times Book Review

"A master of the short story…It’s good to have Andre Dubus back. More than ever, he is an object of hope."
—The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Dubus’s detailed creation of three-dimensional characters is propelled by his ability to turn a quiet but perfect phrase…[This] kind of writing raises gooseflesh of admiration."
—San Francisco ChronicleAndre Dubus (1936–1999) is considered one of the greatest American short story writers of the twentieth century. His collections of short fiction, which include Adultery & Other Choices (1977), The Times Are Never So Bad (1983), and The Last Worthless Evening (1986), are notable for their spare prose and illuminative, albeit subtle, insights into the human heart. He is often compared with Anton Chekhov and revered as a “writer’s writer.”The discussion topics, questions, and biography that follow are intended to enhance your group’s reading of Andre Dubus’s remarkable collection of stories, Dancing After Hours. Dancing After Hours is an important new book by a writer who is considered, particularly by his fellow writers, a master of the art of short fiction in America.

1. For Discussion of Dancing After Hours:

In several of these stories the problems of dating, and the physical and emotional vulnerability inherent in the process, are explored. How does Dubus express through his characters–Ted Briggs, Tess, LuAnn, Lee Trambath, and others–the terror and emptiness dating can bring? How do both fear and courage enter into the search for love? Does maturity necessarily depend upon a progression from promiscuity to monogamy?

2. Andre Dubus has been praised for the realism with which he is able to represent the psychological and sexual lives of female characters. Do you see any difference in his rendering of male as opposed to female experience?

3. As this collection makes clear, for Dubus, mature adulthood seems to involve coming to terms with the pain of love, and also the pain of not having love. In what ways are these experiences similar?

4. Joyce Carol Oates has commented on Dubus’s "deep commitment to his characters." Indeed, the third-person narrator in Dubus’s stories never engages in ironic distance from either character or story. Dubus’s empathy is pervasive; he does not pass judgment on his characters. How does the narrative point of view in these stories affect your experience as a reader?

5. A devout Catholic, Dubus has said, "I’ve seen the whole of my fictive world through the eyes of someone who believes the main problem in the United States is that we have lost all spiritual values and not replaced them with anything that is comparable." How is spirituality, however loosely defined, present in the lives of his characters?

6. Drinking and smoking play an important part in the lives of many of Dubus’s characters–as habit, as deep pleasure, as the aid to self-revelation and intimacy. How does Dubus use them to reveal character and develop situations?

7. Since the accident in 1986 in which Andre Dubus lost one leg and most of the functions of the other, he has been confined to a wheelchair. How does this aspect of the author’s life shape his vision in these stories? What elements of his fictional world do you see as the result of his working through of this extremely painful reality in his own life?

8. How would you characterize Dubus’s distinctive prose style? You might want to consider his narrative strategy of circling back to certain key images and experiences.

For discussion of each story

"The Intruder"

1. Who gets killed in the story, and why? Is this killing portrayed purely as an accident?

2. Why do Kenneth’s parents respond to the accident as they do? How is the blurring of the line between fantasy and reality reinforced at the end of the story?

3. "The Intruder" was Dubus’s first published story; it appeared in Sewanee Review in 1963. What difference do you see between this story and the rest of the collection, which is comprised of much more recent work?

"A Love Song"

1. Why does Catherine sit down and calculate what percentage of her life was contained in the "two hours of truth" [p. 21] in which her husband told her he was leaving?

2. In what ways does this story illuminate the relationship between loss, grief, and time, and their effect on the re-alignment of one’s sense of self?

3. What is the effect of the story’s ending with the weddings of the woman’s two daughters? Why does she herself not remarry?

"Falling in Love"

1. In "Falling in Love" a conflict over abortion causes "the death of everything" [p. 38]–the end of a relationship in which two people love each other very much. Is this conflict more a matter of a lack of understanding between the sexes, or a matter of two different belief systems about abortion?

2. Does Andre Dubus portray the effect of deep emotion differently in male and female protagonists in this story? Consider how Ted Briggs deals with the loss of his love. How does the fact that he has been injured in Vietnam change his response to emotional life?

3. What does Ted mean when he tells Nick, with regard to dating and his desire to find a wife, "I need a philosophy to go out there with" [p. 42]? What is "the demon" he needs to confront by being alone for a while?

"Blessings"

1. In this story Andre Dubus only gradually reveals to the reader what happened to Rusty and her family a year earlier. What are Rusty’s first thoughts upon waking, and are they significant to her coming to terms with what happened? Why do you suppose Dubus uses this very slow technique of exposition, and do you find it effective?

2. How is the world of nature portrayed in this story? What is the relationship among the various kinds of predators mentioned? What is Rusty’s attitude toward such acts of predation as hunting and fishing?

3. Why does Rusty take the sleeping pill, and then later regret having taken it? What is the affirmation she achieves by the end of the story?

"Sunday Morning"

1. Why does Tess tell Andrew the story of her friend Mona, who was killed by her husband? Why does she seem unable to stop herself from talking about what happened to Mona?

2. Does love, for Tess, inevitably contain the seeds of distrust, hatred, and bitterness? Is she being unfair to Andrew?

"All the Time in the World"

1. LuAnn Arceneaux, who reappears in three other stories in this collection, is created with great sympathy by Dubus. What are some of the ways in which Dubus gives this character depth and causes us to share his interest in LuAnn?

2. What is the relationship between LuAnn’s passionate nature and her Catholicism?

3. When the heel breaks on LuAnn’s shoe, her sitting position creates the perspective from which Ted Briggs gradually comes into her view and the reader’s. What do you find effective or interesting about Dubus’s style and his use of detail here? How does
he communicate the excitement of this meeting?

4. In the story’s final paragraph, what imagery does Dubus use to describe the arrival of love? Do you find the end of the story moving? Is it rare for a person to discover love in this way?

"Woman on a Plane"

1. Why is the woman unable to write while her brother is dying? What is the source of her fear?

2. Why does the poem the woman tries to write about fear become a poem about love? How does impending death tie the two together?

"The Colonel’s Wife"

1. In what ways does the Colonel’s injury rearrange both his household and his marriage? How does physical pain change every aspect of Townsend’s daily life?

2. Is it relevant to the story’s situation that Lydia is both beautiful and rich? Is the portrayal of her character and her femininity realistic, or is it affected by her husband’s–or the author’s–idealization of her?

3. How does the shared admission of adultery at the end of the story strengthen the Townsends’ marriage? Does Dubus want us to understand that adultery and fidelity can coexist? Do you find the end of the story convincing?

"The Lover"

1. Why does Lee Trambath feel that he has gone wrong in his life? Why does he feel guilty about his former wives and his five children?

2. Why does Lee weep for himself after making love with a much younger woman? Why is the title so fitting? What is the effect of the story’s ending?

"The Last Moon"

1. What is the woman’s motivation for plotting her husband’s death?

2. Does the woman think of herself as extraordinary? Is Dubus’s presentation of the mind of this woman
as effective as that of other female characters in the collection? Why or why not?

"The Timing of Sin"

1. The pace of this story is quite leisurely, as Dubus tells his entire story through a conversation between two women walking together. What kinds of revelations emerge? Does this slow pacing give a greater sense of realism to the depiction of a friendship between women?

2. Is Dubus right in having the friendship between LuAnn and Marsha, two married women, deepened by physical attraction? How does this statement enlarge the story’s scope of love, eroticism, and affection?

3. Why is the story of Sylvie’s experience at the center of this tale? Why does Sylvie’s pain provoke LuAnn’s desire for Roger?

"At Night"

1. How does this story differ from the others in the collection? Do you feel you get to know this woman, even though she remains unnamed? How does Dubus portray her life? Do you have a sense of what this marriage was like, even though the story is so brief?

"Out of the Snow"

1. What does LuAnn’s analogy of the shopping cart have to do with what has happened in the story? What does it tell us about her character? The shopping cart and the frying pan are emblems of domestic life; why is Dubus interested in breaking with the notion of domestic life as safe and dull?

2. Is there an ethical problem inherent, for LuAnn, in self-defense–in the fact that she has saved her own life at the possible expense of two other lives, even though they were the lives of criminals?

3. Why does Dubus here, as elsewhere, subject his characters to the terror of random events? What are the possibilities for wisdom and growth in the survival of such awful happenings?

"Dancing After Hours"

1. Here, as in "The Colonel’s Wife," Dubus gives us a close look at the difficulties of life in a wheelchair. Why is the story of Drew’s skydiving adventure particularly relevant to what all the characters are seeking in "Dancing After Hours"?

2. Why does Dubus go into such detail about the routine of Emily’s daily life? How does the gathering in the bar "after hours" transform the loneliness Emily feels? Do you think this transformation will have a lasting effect in her life?

3. What relevance do the descriptions and details of music have for the story?

The Intruder

BECAUSE KENNETH GIRARD LOVED HIS parents and his sister and because he could not tell them why he went to the woods, his first moments there were always uncomfortable ones, as if he had left the house to commit a sin. But he was thirteen and he could not say that he was going to sit on a hill and wait for the silence and trees and sky to close in on him, wait until they all became a part of him and thought and memory ceased and the voices began. He could only say that he was going for a walk and, since there was so much more to say, he felt cowardly and deceitful and more lonely than before.

He could not say that on the hill he became great, that he had saved a beautiful girl from a river (the voice then had been gentle and serious and she had loved him), or that he had ridden into town, his clothes dusty, his black hat pulled low over his sunburned face, and an hour later had ridden away with four fresh notches on the butt of his six-gun, or that with the count three-and-two and the bases loaded, he had driven the ball so far and high that the outfielders did not even move, or that he had waded through surf and sprinted over sand, firing his Tommy gun and shouting to his soldiers behind him.

Now he was capturing a farmhouse. In the late movie the night before, the farmhouse had been very important, though no one ever said why, and sitting there in the summer dusk, he watched the backs of his soldiers as they advanced through the woods below him and crossed the clear, shallow creek and climbed the hill that he faced. Occasionally, he lifted his twenty-two-caliber rifle and fired at a rusty tin can across the creek, the can becoming a Nazi face in a window as he squeezed the trigger and the voices filled him: You got him, Captain. You got him. For half an hour he sat and fired at the can, and anyone who might have seen him could never know that he was doing anything else, that he had been wounded in the shoulder and lost half his men but had captured the farmhouse.

Kenneth looked up through the trees, which were darker green now. While he had been watching his battle, the earth, too, had become darker, shadowed, with patches of late sun on the grass and brown fallen pine needles. He stood up, then looked down at the creek, and across it, at the hill on the other side. His soldiers were gone. He was hungry, and he turned and walked back through the woods.

Then he remembered that his mother and father were going to a party in town that night and he would be alone with Connie. He liked being alone, but, even more, he liked being alone with his sister. She was nearly seventeen; her skin was fair, her cheeks colored, and she had long black hair that came down to her shoulders; on the right side of her face, a wave of it reached the corner of her eye. She was the most beautiful girl he knew. She was also the only person with whom, for his entire life, he had been nearly perfectly at ease. He could be silent with her or he could say whatever occurred to him and he never had to think about it first to assure himself that it was not foolish or, worse, uninteresting.

Leaving the woods, he climbed the last gentle slope and entered the house. He leaned his rifle in a corner of his room, which faced the quiet blacktop road, and went to the bathroom and washed his hands. Standing at the lavatory, he looked into the mirror. He suddenly felt as if he had told a lie. He was looking at his face and, as he did several times each day, telling himself, without words, that it was a handsome face. His skin was fair, as Connie’s was, and he had color in his cheeks; but his hair, carefully parted and combed, was more brown than black. He believed that Connie thought he was exactly like her, that he was talkative and well liked. But she never saw him with his classmates. He felt that he was deceiving her.

He left the house and went into the outdoor kitchen and sat on a bench at the long, uncovered table and folded his arms on it.

"Did you kill anything?" Connie said.

"Tin cans."

His father turned from the stove with a skillet of white perch in his hand.

"They’re good ones," he said.

"Mine are the best," Kenneth said.

"You didn’t catch but two."

"They’re the best."

His mother put a plate in front of him, then opened a can of beer and sat beside him. He sat quietly, watching his father at the stove. Then he looked at his mother’s hand holding the beer can. There were veins and several freckles on the back of it. Farther up her forearm was a small yellow bruise; the flesh at her elbow was wrinkled. He looked at her face. People said that he and Connie looked like her, so he supposed it was true, but he could not see the resemblance.

"Daddy and I are going to the Gossetts’ tonight," she said.

"I know."

"I wrote the phone number down," his father said. "It’s under the phone."

"Okay."

His father was not tall either, but his shoulders were broad. Kenneth wondered if his would be like that when he grew older. His father was the only one in the family who tanned in the sun.

"And please, Connie," his mother said, "will you go to sleep at a reasonable hour? It’s hard enough to get you up for Mass when you’ve had a good night’s sleep."

"Why don’t we go into town for the evening Mass?"

"No. I don’t like it hanging over my head all day."

"All right. When will y’all be home?"

"About two. And that doesn’t mean read in bed till then. You need your sleep."

"We’ll go to bed early," Connie said.

His father served fried perch and hush puppies onto their plates and they had French bread and catsup and Tabasco sauce and iced tea. After dinner, his father read the newspaper and his mother read a Reader’s Digest condensation, then they showered and dressed, and at seven-thirty, they left. He and Connie followed them to the door. Connie kissed them; then he did. His mother and father looked happy, and he felt good about that.

"We’ll be back about two," his mother said. "Keep the doors locked."

"Definitely," Connie said. "And we’ll bar the windows."

"Well, you never know. Y’all be good. G’night."

"Hold down the fort, son," his father said.

"I will."

Then they were gone, the screen door slamming behind them, and Connie left the sunporch, but he stood at the door, listening to the car starting and watching its headlights as it backed down the trail through the yard, then turned into the road and drove away. Still he did not move. He loved the nights at the camp when they were left alone. At home, there was a disturbing climate about their evenings alone, for distant voices of boys in the neighborhood reminded him that he was not alone entirely by choice. Here, there were no sounds.

He latched the screen and went into the living room. Connie was sitting in the rocking chair near the fireplace, smoking a cigarette. She looked at him, then flicked ashes into an ashtray on her lap.

"Now don’t you tell on me."

"I didn’t know you did that."

"Please don’t tell. Daddy would skin me alive."

"I won’t."

He could not watch her. He looked around the room for a book.

"Douglas is coming tonight," she said.

"Oh." He picked up the Reader’s Digest book and pretended to look at it. "Y’all going to watch TV?" he said.

"Not if you want to."

"It doesn’t matter."

"You watch it. You like Saturday nights."

She looked as if she had been smoking for a long time, all during the summer and possibly the school year, too, for months or even a year without his knowing it. He was hurt. He laid down the book.

"Think I’ll go outside for a while," he said.

He went onto the sunporch and out the door and walked down the sloping car trail that led to the road. He stopped at the gate, which was open, and leaned on it. Forgetting Connie, he looked over his shoulder at the camp, thinking that he would never tire of it. They had been there for six weeks, since early June, his father coming on Friday evenings and leaving early Monday mornings, driving sixty miles to their home in southern Louisiana. Kenneth fished during the day, swam with Connie in the creeks, read novels about baseball, and watched the major league games on television. He thought winter at the camp was better, though. They came on weekends and hunted squirrels, and there was a fireplace.

He looked down the road. The closest camp was half a mile away, on the opposite side of the road, and he could see its yellow-lighted windows through the trees. That’s the house. Quiet now. We’ll sneak through the woods and get the guard, then charge the house. Come on. Leaning against the gate, he stared into the trees across the road and saw himself leading his soldiers through the woods. They reached the guard. His back was turned and Kenneth crawled close to him, then stood up and slapped a hand over the guard’s mouth and stabbed him in the back. They rushed the house and Kenneth reached the door first and kicked it open. The general looked up from his desk, then tried to get his pistol from his holster. Kenneth shot him with his Tommy gun. Grab those papers, men. Let’s get out of here. They got the papers and ran outside and Kenneth stopped to throw a hand grenade through the door. He reached the woods before it exploded.

He turned from the gate and walked toward the house, looking around him at the dark pines. He entered the sunporch and latched the screen; then he smelled chocolate, and he went to the kitchen. Connie was stirring a pot of fudge on the stove. She had changed to a fresh pale blue shirt, the tails of it hanging almost to the bottom of her white shorts.

"It’ll be a while," she said.

He nodded, watching her hand and the spoon. He thought of Douglas coming and began to feel nervous.

"What time’s Douglas coming?"

"Any minute now. Let me know if you hear his car."

"All right."

He went to his room and picked up his rifle; then he saw the magazine on the chest of drawers and he leaned the rifle in the corner again. Suddenly his mouth was dry. He got the magazine and quickly turned the pages until he found her: she was stepping out of the surf on the French Riviera, laughing, as if the man with her had just said something funny. She was blond and very tan and she wore a bikini. The photograph was in color. For several moments he looked at it; then he got the rifle and cleaning kit and sat in the rocking chair in the living room, with the rifle across his lap. He put a patch on the cleaning rod and dipped it in bore cleaner and pushed it down the barrel, the handle of the rod clanging against the muzzle. He worked slowly, pausing often to listen for Douglas’s car, because he wanted to be cleaning the rifle when Douglas came. Because Douglas was a tackle on the high school football team in the town, and Kenneth had never been on a football team, and never would be.

The football players made him more uncomfortable than the others. They walked into the living room and firmly shook his father’s hand, then his hand, beginning to talk as soon as they entered, and they sat and waited for Connie, their talking never ceasing, their big chests and shoulders leaned forward, their faces slowly turning as they looked at each picture on the wall, at the designs on the rug, at the furniture, passing over Kenneth as if he were another chair, filling the room with a feeling of strength and self-confidence that defeated him, paralyzing his tongue and even his mind, so that he merely sat in thoughtless anxiety, hoping they would not speak to him, hoping especially that they would not ask: You play football? Two of them had, and he never forgot it. He had answered with a mute, affirming nod.

He had always been shy and, because of it, he had stayed on the periphery of sports for as long as he could remember. When his teachers forced him to play, he spent an anxious hour trying not to become involved, praying in right field that no balls would come his way, lingering on the outside of the huddle so that no one would look up and see his face and decide to throw him a pass on the next play.

But he found that there was one thing he could do and he did it alone, or with his father: he could shoot and he could hunt. He felt that shooting was the only thing that had ever been easy for him. Schoolwork was, too, but he considered that a curse.

He was not disturbed by the boys who were not athletes, unless, for some reason, they were confident anyway. While they sat and waited for Connie, he was cheerful and teasing, and they seemed to like him. The girls were best. He walked into the living room and they stopped their talking and laughing and all of them greeted him and sometimes they said: "Connie, he’s so cute," or "I wish you were three years older," and he said: "Me, too," and tried to be witty and usually was.

He heard a car outside.

"Douglas is here," he called.

Connie came through the living room, one hand arranging the wave of hair near her right eye, and went into the sunporch. Slowly, Kenneth wiped the rifle with an oily rag. He heard Douglas’s loud voice and laughter and heavy footsteps on the sunporch; then they came into the living room. Kenneth raised his face.

"Hi," he said.

"How’s it going?"

"All right."

Douglas Bakewell was not tall. He had blond hair, cut so short on top that you could see his scalp, and a reddish face, and sunburned arms, covered with bleached hair. A polo shirt fit tightly over his chest and shoulders and biceps.

"Whatcha got there?" Douglas said.

"Twenty-two."

"Let’s see."

"Better dry it."

He briskly wiped it with a dry cloth and handed it to Douglas. Quickly, Douglas worked the bolt, aimed at the ceiling, and pulled the trigger.US

Additional information

Weight	7.6 oz
Dimensions	0.5600 × 5.2500 × 7.9500 in
Series	Vintage Contemporaries
Imprint	Vintage
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780679751144
ISBN-10	0679751149
Author	Andre Dubus
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC019000, FIC025000
Subjects	us history, Literature, anthology, love story, collection, literary fiction, americana, essays, american literature, short story anthology, short stories, fiction books, books fiction, realistic fiction books, long story short, short story collections, short stories collections, anthologies, fiction psychological, gifts for men who have everything, aging, feminism, historical, psychology, marriage, relationships, family, modern, music, classic, school, novels, romance, love, drama, fiction, death, literary, FIC019000, FIC025000, 20th century, 21st century