Ghost Dogs by Andre Dubus
Andre Dubus III made his name in fiction, but he’s also been an active essayist for literary journals, newspapers and other venues. Eighteen of his essays, mostly written during the past 15 years, are gathered as Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin.
Dubus has been thinking a lot about kin. His late father, also an author, abandoned young Andre and his siblings early on. His single mother struggled to pay the rent. They moved two dozen times during Dubus’ formative years, and yet, the author maintained warm relations in adulthood with both parents. By his account, he has enjoyed his own marriage and fatherhood. With the birth of each child, “my capacity for love seemed to grow.”
Dubus writes vividly of his salad days in ‘80s Manhattan, crime ridden, cramped yet exciting. And in “If I Owned a Gun,” he meditates on the gun culture in which he grew up—a relatively benign subculture with nary an assault rifle in sight—and yet, he recounts several near disasters from his own experience. “Guns, especially loaded ones, call us to use them.” The results can be fatal.
With the almost inevitable repetition among his mini-memoir essays (we hear often about the house he built with his brother’s help, his dancer-wife Fontaine, his Manhattan apartment), Ghost Dogs begins to sound like the twice-told stories of an old friend, a sometimes-wise companion on life’s journey.
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