A few weeks ago I fell back to my favorite way of choosing what to read: randomly judging books by their covers on the library's "New Books" shelf. This time Andre Dubus's book Townie: A Memoir caught my eye.
Andre Dubus III wrote the devastating and powerful novel The House of Sand and Fog, which got a lot of (well deserved) hype when it was chosen for Oprah's Bookclub in 2000. But that's not why I took this memoir off the shelf; in fact, I didn't at first realize why the name Dubus was familiar to me. Maybe I just liked the cover, but whatever the reason, I took Townie home that day and quickly became riveted by the story.
Townie is a memoir which has what at first appears to be a tried and true, potentially cliche series of events at its core: young man disrupted by parents' divorce, poverty-stricken family, over-worked single mom, mostly absent father busy with a series of young women and his own career, kid pulling himself up by his bootstraps, and so on. We've heard this story before.
But what makes Townie rise above yet another "misery memoir," as I've seen one writer describe them, is that Dubus is able to make his story a unique and powerful commentary not only on the real circumstances of families in poverty and the toll it takes on young boys and men, but also how the culture of violence among youth develops and is perpetuated when disenfranchised youth have no outlet for what drives them. It sounds a little sociological when put that way, but while Dubus wrote a memoir to analyze his life and circumstances and how they brought him to where he is now, it's also an exploration of related themes. That is really the point of a good memoir: the writer explores a part of his or her own story and offers it to readers as part of a much larger conversation.
As a young teen Andre Dubus struggles against an overpowering feeling of helplessness. He is the oldest of two boys in the family and feels compelled to take care of his mother, two sisters, and brother, but he doesn't have the tools to do so. He is beaten up almost daily at school; his house is taken over every day by his older sister's drug-buying clients; neighbors disrespect his mother; his younger sister is completely left to her own devices. Andre is skinny, young, and perpetually afraid. He knows he can't count on his loving and famous father, the writer Andre Dubus II, to do anything other than show up every once in a while, blind to the reality of their lives.
After his sister is violently attacked, Dubus makes a decision. He will control his own circumstances and protect his family, something he believes he has failed to do. He is 15 years old and will no longer be an easy target. And, within a couple of years Andre becomes such an accomplished street fighter that he can knock out almost anyone with a single punch. He goes looking for fights, especially when he can teach a lesson to any punk who is picking on someone who is vulnerable. Or any punk who looks like he might be intending to pick on someone who is vulnerable.
And here is a problem. The lines become blurred between circumstances Andre finds himself in and the level of punishment he hands out to the perpetrators. He enjoys the rush; he becomes addicted to the endorphins. He seeks violence, believing that he's just attuned to threats surrounding him. But gradually a sense of shame permeates the feelings of triumph; questions niggle at his sense of righteousness. These questions propel this immature and, often, ignorant young man on a journey to forcibly dig himself out of his environment with no guidance other than a nagging feeling that the only way to survive is to find a different way to channel his anger.
Dubus is a novelist who wrote his memoir as if it were another novel, and that is what, for me, makes it stand out. There is character development, not only of himself, but also of his friends, family, and community. In memoirs it's easy for writers to tell their story rather than to show their story, but Dubus uses his narrative prowess to create scene and a strong sense of place. When he sets a scene, it appeals to all of the senses. We hear the crowd in the bar, the hammer on the nail, the smack of a fist against a face. We smell the cigarette smoke permeating the house, the fumes from the polluted river, his father's aftershave. Dialogue is realistic and used to move the story forward; we hear the accents of the people in the Massachusetts mill town, the college kids from Boston. Sometimes I forgot I was reading the personal account of this real person's life--Townie often reminded me of the novels of Richard Price, a writer who excels at depicting the gritty environment of his urban characters who are, like Dubus's young self, basically raising themselves on the street.
At times in the book Dubus could be accused of repeating key ideas here or with spending too much time burrowing into the graphic depictions of some of his more memorable street fights, but that's one of the potential pitfalls of writing memoir. In the effort to explore a crucial facet of one's life, it is natural to look at it from a myriad of angles to reach understanding. Sometimes those angles don't seem to offer enough insight, so the writer turns the idea to a different light. It's easier for a reader to see when it's not necessary to say it again than it is for the writer to say, "Okay, that's enough." Fortunately, those moments do not undermine the forward momentum of the story. Townie is very difficult to put down, and you come away from it thinking hard about boys and violence and the power of art to instill compassion in even the toughest of the tough.
(For any narrative structure nerds out there, I highly recommend looking back after you've read this book to see how Dubus constructs his paragraphs. He's a master at ending with the perfect line.)
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