[Separate Flights] consists of a novella and seven short stories, each of which is a considerable achievement. Dubus's attentiveness to his craft and his deep commitment to his characters make the experience of reading these tales—which are almost without exception about lonely, pitiful people—a highly rewarding pleasure.
The author of a novel, The Lieutenant, published in 1967, Dubus writes in a vein that might be considered naturalistic, since he relies to a great extent upon charting his characters' experiences in a highly recognizable world, following them closely from one hour to the next, from one drink to the next, recording their unexceptional dialogues with one another, with great subtlety and tact pinpointing their rare moments of insight. All of his people are ordinary, though some have pretensions to being intellectual; many are trapped in stultifying marriages, though Dubus never suggests that they might have been capable of arranging other fates. Their arguments are familiar, even banal. Their defenses against the panic of dissolution are commonplace: drinking and adultery. But though Dubus's materials are naturalistic, and his style is never self-consciously lyric or poetic, one sees in the craftsmanship of the tales a rigorous paring-back, a concern for what is implied rather than stated, so that the stories as a whole—the eight "separate flights" of the collection—come to operate symbolically, to mean much more than they record. (p. 105)
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