I have a candidate [for "Most Underrated Writer of 1975"], a man who published a book this year to the merest flutter of applause, and deserved much more: Andre Dubus…. Dubus writes in an almost painfully unmodish way. He lacks tricks of style. He does not have a head full of helpful sociological constructs about his world. He is not a particularly close observer of trends in manners or speech. But he knows things. [The stories in Separate Flights] are mostly about spent and misspent love, and he knows how to dramatize love's counterfeit emotions: loneliness, jealousy, and pity. He's an imaginative writer, persuasive on the inner lives of women as well as of men. He can imagine his way, for instance, into the mind of a middle-aged woman so hungry to participate in her daughter's life that she incurs only her scorn. Debus is the sort of writer who instructs the heart, a phrase that ought to be redundant, but isn't. He ought to be discovered by any number of readers, but probably won't. (p. 96)
Richard Todd, in The Atlantic Monthly (copyright © 1976 by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass.; reprinted with permission), January, 1976.
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