Cheated by the world around them, they live in shabby wooden houses close to the downtowns of drab New England cities. Victims of spotty American educations, trained to no particular skills, they enjoy little culture or tradition in their lives. They drink, smoke, form relationships too early in life, and stumble along, perhaps looking to the Marine Corps, the family, or more likely the Catholic church for spiritual solace or cultural regeneration. But often they cheat their church as much as it cheats them. Dubus's marines, ball players, fathers, and wives live by a self-imposed code, trying to establish order and meaning in their lives, and like Angstrom they fail more often than they succeed.
In depicting unextraordinary people, single mothers, divorced husbands, and victims of failing marriages, Dubus treats in freshly original manner a host of problems that occupied American minds in the 1970s and 1980s. But merely to list the issues raised in his stories runs the danger of making Dubus's writing sound trendy, slick, or superficial -- all qualities he has avoided.
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