Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III

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.)

Gluttony

So the Twitter Effect was a new and quite disruptive influence on my reading patterns in 2011, but there is a long-term issue that also affects how I approach reading: Greed.

My mother took me to get my first library card when I was five and as soon as I could ride my bike over to the public library by myself, I started the habit of filling my bike basket with as many books as would fit. Often I had to walk my bike back home because the full bags of library books hanging off each of the handle bars threw my balance off. I still remember the paper bags handed out at check out desk: crisp, white paper bags with handles made of twine, BEXLEY PUBLIC LIBRARY boldly printed large block letters on the front. They were good bags, only sometime breaking under the weight of the books inside.

I read so much as a kid that I was often ordered outside to play--that's probably where my tendency to read in out-of-the-way corners began. If I was hidden behind the corner chair in our seldom-used living room or in the way back of my well-lit closet, it took longer for someone to find me and remind me that the world outside could be just as fun and interesting as the world in books was.

Okay, the real world did not really live up to Narnian standards, but at least I could pretend I was Lucy coming out from the wardrobe into the snowy woods.  My play was largely book-based: I was Nancy Drew, Harriet the Spy, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Mary Lennox. Some of the books I have kept from childhood still have my handwritten "Property of the Elm Ave. Public Library" labels in them. When my imaginary library closed, I opened a detective agency. The mail carrier gave me a talking to for putting advertisements for my Encyclopedia Brown Detective Agency in all of my neighbors' mailboxes (2 cents per mystery was the going rate at the time).

Though the book-based imaginary play, of course, dissipated over time, my built-in inclination to see books as an unending source of knowledge, vision, motivation, wonder, and pleasure has never left me. I'm unable to leave well enough alone; to read one book at a time; to think "Oh, I can get that from the library another time." If a book strikes me as one that will satisfy some curiosity of mine, even if I already have a stack in my arms, I'll put the new one on top. I'll renew them until I've reached the limit and then turn around and put five more on hold. I'll case the bookshelves at the local thrift stores and come home with a handful--good thing this town has fantastic book collections at all of the thrift stores.

I still don't have an e-reader. I think it's probably about time. But what, I wonder, will happen when I finally open that Pandora's box?

What could possibly happen? After all, what is an e-reader but a digital book?  Just a harmless new tool to support a lifelong compulsion....

I think I'll wait a little while longer.

An Embarrassment of Riches

2011 proved to be an interesting year in my reading life. When I looked back on my blog stats it appeared that  I had produced a respectable number of posts (47), but then I realized that there were more re-posts of old reviews than quality posts of new books.  I also realized that if I had written that Inevitable End of the Year  List for 2011, it would have been shorter than usual and I would have had to put more thought into the categories than I normally have to.

So what changed? Well, I can pinpoint one big influence on my reading patterns last year: Twitter. 

I resisted Twitter for a long time. Really had no interest whatsoever. Didn't understand it and didn't intend to. But then I caved in to peer pressure from a writer friend who was convinced that we needed "platforms." She knew that these days agents and publishers expect writers to build followings, to create a brand for themselves. That was her motivation. Mine, she said, should be to have a platform for the blog.  A friend in marketing had the same advice. So, I jumped in.

It felt very strange to just throw out statements into the void of cyberspace, and it felt like eavesdropping to follow a stranger's conversation with other people I don't know. It still does. But almost a year after joining  Twitter, I've found a value in it that supersedes the whole platform or branding idea--in fact, I don't think being on Twitter has increased traffic to TFB at all. 

What being on Twitter has done--and this is part of the influence (good or bad) it has had on my reading life-- is connect me with writers, thinkers, and readers whom I admire and who have interesting things to say AND more good suggestions for reading than I ever could have imagined. That is the blessing and the curse of Twitter. 

People I follow are constantly suggesting articles and blog posts that fall smack into my many zones of interest: interviews with writers, reviews of upcoming publications, links to essays, articles about the publishing industry or the editing world, new issues of online magazines, grammar tips and sites.... Twitter is, simply, a word nerd's paradise. 

And then there are the books written by the writers I'm following. I want to read every one of them. I realize how dangerous this is...my holds list at the library is massive, the books tend to arrive all at once, and the fines mount. Much of the time I have to return books to the library unread, after renewing them until the library computer cuts me off for "surpassing the renewal limit."  It really is an embarrassment of riches.

So, it looks like 2012 will be the year to figure out how to manage all these riches. I love the constant influx of ideas, questions, and motivations that being on Twitter offers me as a reader and a writer. But, at the same time, I'm not sure I like the scattered feeling that comes along with the territory. There's more a sense of obligation to it, more of an "Oh! I can't miss this one!" sense of rushing from one book or one article to the next. And that leaves precious little time for savoring what I'm reading and less motivation for writing about it. I guess, in spite of myself, I've developed a New Year's Resolution for Too Fond of Books: savor the reading and then take the time to share it.

To tide you all over...

Well, I should know better than to make promises about TFB during the holidays (and a much needed mental vacation)!  No new blog posts, not even the "2011 Inevitable End of the Year List." There were so many "Best of" lists out there, I just didn't have the appetite to add another one to cyberspace.

I did do one book review while on hiatus for this month's issue of Hippocampus Magazine.  Here's the first paragraph and a link to my review of Avi Steinberg's Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian:

"In 2005, Avi Steinberg did what any Harvard-educated, obituary-writing, non-practicing Orthodox Jew would do at a crossroads in his life: he took a job as a prison librarian with the Suffolk County House of Correction in Boston."