[Andre Dubus] is a southerner who almost never writes about the South. Most of the stories in Separate Flights take place in New England or the Middle West, and on a superficial level they have a great deal in common with the work of [Alan] Sillitoe, for they are filled with images and acts of sex. Dubus is good with quick strokes, slight details that bring whole sequences into focus…. Minor characters, people seen briefly in bars or at filling stations, give Dubus's work an enhanced sense of reality and an enriched texture.
What I do not like about Dubus's stories is the cumulative effect of the collection as a whole, the sameness of characterization from one piece to the next, the obsession with sexual congress and crumbling affections. For example, almost without exception the men, whatever their ages or morals or professions, are given to physical exercise. They run before breakfast; they work out at the gym. Men and women drink and smoke too much, so that one gets the feeling that Dubus cannot discover what business to put them to: when they are out of bed, they do not know what to do with their hands. This is a small matter, and one which a writer of Dubus's talent could easily rectify, but the obsession with sex gives me more serious concern. Sillitoe's people drink and fornicate because they are poor and bored and ignorant and desperate: such is the state of things in Nottingham. But has the whole world become an extension of this English hopelessness? Are the possibilities of literature reduced in our time to variations on a single theme? (pp. 544-45)
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