Book Review: ‘Such Kindness,’ by Andre Dubus III

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In a new novel by Andre Dubus III, a man searches for hope and dignity after a long run of misfortune.

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By Isaac Fitzgerald

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SUCH KINDNESS, by Andre Dubus III

Tom Lowe is, well, low. Destitute. About as close to rock bottom as he can get. He was once a successful carpenter with his own business, a gorgeous house he designed and built himself — with the help of an (eventually disastrous) adjustable-rate mortgage — and a wife and child he adored. Now he's divorced, estranged from his 19-year-old son and living in Section 8 housing in Amesbury, Mass. Worst of all, Tom, the narrator of Andre Dubus III's novel "Such Kindness," isn't able to work.

Work, you see, is what made Tom feel useful. It's what made him a man. Someone who could hold his head up high. Work was Tom's way of expressing his love to his wife and to his son: Look at this beautiful life I have made for us. "Every day that I worked on building my home," he recalls, "I felt like I was in some temporary state of grace."

When he started falling behind on his mortgage payments, Tom knew how to solve the problem: by working more. Which eventually led to his fall — a literal fall, while Tom was doing some roofing. A brief distraction, then nothing but gravity, air and, eventually, ground. He had a debilitating injury. Surgeries. Pain medication. And then addiction. From there, Tom's life started slipping away from him in the same inevitable-seeming motion that he felt when he fell off that roof, when his "body seemed to unmoor from its very center."

Now living off disability checks and E.B.T. cards that he sells for cash, so that he can buy rotgut vodka to dull the burning pain caused by the screws in his hip, Tom is alone and stewing in bitterness. He's kicked his addiction to opioids, but has allowed a new kind of addiction into his life: resentment. He blames the banker who encouraged him to take out that mortgage. The insurance company that didn't pay him what he was owed after his injury, despite years of on-time payments (until he missed the last two, allowing the company to deny his claim). The doctors who prescribed him the painkillers and the giant pharmaceutical conglomerates that made the pills in the first place. "Big Pharma, Insurance, Banks": an unholy trinity of elusive enemies.

Other than hostility for those who have done him wrong, the only other motivating factor currently in Tom's life is visiting his son, Drew, in order to celebrate the boy's 20th birthday. Problem is Drew attends college in Amherst, Mass., over 100 miles west, and Tom has no idea how he will make the trek. He has no car: It was impounded because it was unregistered and uninsured, and Tom didn't have his license on him when he got pulled over. His precious tools, which he was hoping to sell to help get his car back, have recently been stolen. But in Tom's mind, regaining his son's love is his last glimmer of hope.

Much like Tom, the first half of this novel is hard. Not hard to read, mind you. Dubus — the author of the acclaimed best seller "House of Sand and Fog" and the phenomenal memoir "Townie," among other books — is at the top of his game here, masterfully carrying the reader from the present action to Tom's memories and dreams without confusion. The writing and the structure are clean and seamless.

Reminiscing about his mornings before his car was taken away, Tom gives us a tour of his world in the novel's early pages: "I leave the 8 and this neighborhood of box houses like the one I grew up in, the vans and pickup trucks in their driveways, the strip plaza across the street with the liquor store and a salon called Dawn's Hair & Nails." Later, on the highway, "I join the traffic of my fellow human beings and feel, for a few miles anyway, part of them again, a man coming home after a long day's work, a man who had every intention of carrying his own weight."

With its weathered characters and workaday settings, "Such Kindness" gives Dubus numerous opportunities to show how easily one's world can fall apart — how a few mistakes when you’re financially vulnerable can lead to crippling loss. Always a keen observer of the working class, Dubus knows what it means to miss a bill payment.

But in "Such Kindness" we remain squarely in Tom's head, and Tom's head is not an easy place to be. He's a bit of a bummer to hang with, which he himself would almost eagerly admit. Still, every gritty, well-written disaster in the first half of this book is balanced by the transcendence of the novel's ending.

At its core, this book is a hero's journey, but not one where the hero ends up somewhere wildly different from where he starts. This is a story of acceptance. Hard-won, beautiful, life-changing acceptance. Tom's account brought tears to my eyes — both from recognition of my own story in his, and of how far I have yet to go myself.

How do we accept the world for what it is, when nothing seems acceptable? Therein lies the trick of this novel, its slow magic wrought through small, accumulative moments. We sit in Tom's consciousness and experience his own hardship softening, but never in the way we expect. This is a testament to Dubus's talents. Every guess I had, even when — especially when — I thought I knew where the story was going, was wrong. Dubus kept surprising me, as did Tom.

So I will not ruin their secrets here. But what I can say is that when I finished this novel, I knew the lessons that Tom had learned were now my own.

Isaac Fitzgerald is the author of the best-selling memoir "Dirtbag, Massachusetts."

SUCH KINDNESS | By Andre Dubus III | 311 pp. | W.W. Norton & Company | $29.95

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