16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bewitching, June 20, 2003
This review is from: In the Bedroom (Paperback)
Usually I shy away from short story collections, but a friend whose opinion I value highly recommended this book by the well-respected author, Andre Dubus. She was right. These 7 stories are masterful, displaying the quiet power within the decisions we make as we live through life's seemingly small moments. The award-winning movie titled In the Bedroom with Cissie Spacek was made from one of these stories.
A bewitching and profound collection that should be on every serious reader's bookshelf.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best of Dubus's work, February 23, 2002
This review is from: In the Bedroom (Paperback)
My first reaction to the title of the collection was one of skepticism. After all, the story the movie IN THE BEDROOM is based on is the short story KILLINGS. I feared this was a hastily put-together collection designed to cash in on the film's success. I was wrong. The stories collected here are the some of the finest Dubus wrote. It is a perfect introduction to the new Dubus reader. If the reader enjoys this collection of seven stories, they will progress naturally to the SELECTED STORIES collection;then on to his non-fiction. It is a journey well worth taking. The established Dubus reader might enjoy the new book of tributes titled ANDRE DUBUS: TRIBUTES. It is available on Amazon. Contributors include Tobias Wolff, James Lee Burke, Andre Dubus 111, Frederick Busch, and many other fine writers.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Dubus gives us the well-crafted style, but does he deliver a well-crafted story?, May 10, 2007
This review is from: In the Bedroom (Paperback)
Andre Dubus is perhaps one of the three best short story writers of our age. That's not to say he's one of the best story tellers. His style is a gift from God. In this collection of short stories, he gives us some of finest descriptions 15-30 pagers worth of reading can garner, and within the pages of 'In the Bedroom', we are privileged to encounter this type of writing seven times over.
But I will take a step out of the land of self-importance and pretentious amazon reviewing for a moment and speak as one simple person to (hopefully) another. Half of the stories in this book were boring at best. 'Rose' drags along for the first 3/4ths of the journey and ultimately leaves us with a letdown (commence with infuriated non-helpful review marking in 3..2..1...). I'm not saying I can write better. I'm not saying that with the ghost of Mark Twain dwelling within me I could write better. I'm just saying most of these stories dragged and gave me the same frightened children or the same mentally unstable parents that I could have sworn I just read about in the story before.
I would have liked to have actually cared about the characters in these stories, and in one or two of them, I actually did. Most of the characters, however, were selfish jackwhipes who couldn't manage to unleash to smallest dose of empathy for any of them. LuAnn, who is the main character in 'All the Time in the World', is helplessly annoying and by the time I finished reading about her, I was hoping she would stay single for the rest of her life, unable to obtain love of any kind and ultimately become a pious, man-hating nun, burning sadistic effigies long after the other nuns had gone to bed (I think I might be alone on that one).
Maybe ole Andre wanted to piss me off like that. Who knows? But that style, oh-my-friggin-goodness, that style. If I could write like Andre, I'd already be the father of 16 children from 12 different women.
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