reading review - adultery and other choices

Adultery and Other Choices by Andre Dubus (September 2019)

I decided months ago to work through Andre Dubus’s entire collected works. Adultery and Other Choices, despite my sniffy remarks regarding 'crumbling marriages' in yesterday's review of Separate Flights, proved worthy of my effort. It covers varied ground compared to his first collection, and I reread three times as many stories - ‘An Afternoon with the Old Man’, ‘Contrition’, and ‘The Fat Girl’. 'Contrition' wasn't my favorite reread, but I count the other two among my favorites from 2019. (I should note that ‘The Fat Girl’ seems widely considered among his very best stories.)

I read this collection about a year and a half ago and was surprised to see my notes almost triple in length on the second pass. It's probably a good sign for my reading eye, although perhaps a faint symptom of overindulgence, but in my defense the notes here were also longer than those for Separate Flights. In this collection, I noticed more insights into the universal and enjoyed how he brought them to life in his stories; in Separate Flights, I felt less certain at times about the broader applicability of its lessons.

The thought I liked the most was how people fear or fight change because their current lifestyle enables them to channel their full energy into a pursuit, challenge, or craft. I can certainly relate to that far better than I could have five years ago. There are likely an endless number of lifestyle changes available to me that would improve my life but it’s hard to see past the disruption such a change would have on the energy I could devote to my current commitments, each an activity I like very much. Of course, perhaps I'm simply living out another one of Dubus's insights - people who cannot express themselves often confuse what they like to do with what they have to do.

i read adultery and other choices so you don't have to

Adultery and Other Choices by Andre Dubus (February 2018)

I came to this work because I liked Dubus’s Broken Vessels, an essay collection filled with various simple but profound insights into the challenges of daily living. I enjoyed similar types of observations throughout Adultery and Other Choices, his second short story collection.

Dubus seems to have little patience for conversations about other people’s bodies. In one story, he notes that talking about another person’s appearance reveals much about the speaker’s character. It’s a true enough comment, I suppose, and one that underscores fiction’s advantage over the essay – a story is always better able to generalize about a ubiquitous and widely accepted behavior than any nonfiction piece.

A thought from his title story resonated with me – when people are betrayed, their actions are separated from how they lived before the betrayal. Again, a similar insight to the above in how its importance comes not from its universal applicability but rather in how knowing this may sometimes apply. In meeting the challenge of relating to and understanding others, knowing this kind of information strikes me as invaluable.

A final thought I liked revealed a hard-won understanding about routines – when a routine is described with reverence, it is certain to prepare a person for the day or task ahead. Like I suspect is the case for any writer, Dubus probably relied on a strict routine to energize himself for the day of work ahead. When such a routine is described in hallowed tones, a listener can immediately understand the energy it creates. On the other hand, the routine completed with a sense of obligation or duty cannot be described in such a way. Over time, this kind of routine is sure to slowly drain away all natural energy.

Footnotes / recommended…

0. After I finished…

I chose to reread ‘The Bully’, ‘The Fat Girl’, and ‘Andromache’. Of these, I would definitely recommend those first two – for some reason, the latter didn’t quite have the same resonance with me on the second reading.