Meditations from a Movable Chair [Paperback]

Andre Dubus (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 6, 1999

The twenty-five luminous and intensely personal essays in this collection are, like Andre Dubus's celebrated short stories, a testament to the author's vulnerability, vision, and indestructible faith. Since losing one leg and the use of the other in a 1986 accident, Dubus has experienced despair, learned acceptance, and, finally, found joy in the sacramental magic of even the most quotidian tasks.
Whether he is writing of the relationship with his father, the rape of his beloved sister, his Catholic faith, the suicide of a gay naval officer, his admiration for fellow writers like Hemingway and Mailer, or the simple act of making sandwiches for his daughters' lunchboxes, Dubus cuts straight to the heart of things. Here we have a master at the height of his powers, an artist whose work "is suffused with grace, bathed in a kind of spiritual glow" (The New York Times Book Review).

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In his first book of essays, Broken Vessels, Andre Dubus uses experiences such as baseball games and sheep herding as occasions for insight. His second essay collection, Meditations from a Movable Chair, is about the people who have meant the most to him. The book conjures a cloud of witnesses--Dubus's father, his sister, Norman Mailer, Liv Ullmann, a gay military officer--so vividly that their gifts to Dubus become gifts to the reader, as well. Many of these people helped Dubus understand the holiness, even sacramentality, of everyday life, which he describes in explicitly Catholic terms. Meditations from a Movable Chair is a rare and wonderful thing--a book written out of love, whose richness of heart is expressed by an exacting and challenging mind. --Michael Joseph Gross --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

The 1986 highway accident that resulted in Dubus being largely confined to a wheelchair is an event that is by now familiar to readers of his award-winning short stories (Dancing After Hours, etc.) and previous collection of personal essays (Broken Vessels, 1991). In these 25 spare and luminous essays, most of which have previously appeared in magazines like the New Yorker, Harper's and Yankee, the author lingers over experiences past and present, from the everyday trials of life in a wheelchair to his thoughts on being a writer, a divorced Catholic and father. "Song of Pity" combines simmering rage at public indifference to the handicapped ("newspaper[s] would not review a restaurant that was accessible only to Caucasians, or only to men") with recollections of an earlier time when he was the one pushing a wheelchair: "I spoke to the back of his head, and he spoke to the cold air in front of him." Other essays recall his encounters as a young writer with Kurt Vonnegut and Ralph Ellison in Iowa City, and Norman Mailer, whom he meets at the Algonquin during a whirlwind trip to New York to meet with his editor in 1967. In Dubus's sharply distilled prose, these meditations are as starkly tangible as they are resonant, providing a vision of his own life before and after the accident, a life united finally by a passion for love, life and craft.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; First Edition edition (April 6, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679751157
• ISBN-13: 978-0679751151
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #256,263 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Andre Dubus (1936-1999) is considered one of the greatest American short story writers of the twentieth century. His collections of short fiction, which include Adultery & Other Choices (1977), The Times Are Never So Bad (1983), and The Last Worthless Evening (1986), are notable for their spare prose and illuminative, albeit subtle, insights into the human heart. He is often compared to Anton Chekhov and revered as a "writer's writer."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The piece on Sacraments is alone worth the price of the book, August 12, 1999

By 

Gregory A. Bachman (York, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Meditations from a Movable Chair (Paperback)

To enter the world of another mind is to discover we are all of one mind. Andre Dubus makes this possible by minding the business of living. Each grief, loss, and puzzlement he experiences is faced full on, letting us see how the prosaic details speak larger meanings when veiwed from the perspective of faith: life has meaning when I accept as a gift what I don't understand.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved the man who was full of grace, March 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Meditations from Movable Chair (Thorndike Basic) (Hardcover)

Although he always wrote pencil to paper, I do not think he would object to a tribute on the net.

Andre Dubus was my friend. I attended his wake, funeral and "time" this past weekend. We were buddies that shared a common living space...the campus of Bradford College. He lived in a townhouse out back, I was the dorm director for Academy Hall.. We went to the Red Sox together, we walked down the placid evening summer street to Ronnie D's on more than one occasion...oh, the tranquil nights, the botanical paradise where we stopped to sniff the lucious bushes and trees and shrubs that Dick Broadhurst had taught us to appreciate...

My heart is broken, I cannot imagine Andre not walking this planet, I cannot do without the wisdom and grace that made ME important because he was my friend.

The funeral, a simple Catholic mass, was missing the most important ingredient...I remember the many occasions when Andre was elected to be the speaker, to put our grief into eloquent words... Carolina Arria, the beautiful flower of Argentina was remembered as a cara mia...Jim Valhouli, the man who emphasized Andre's grace was his treaure...Tony DeLuca the frog sandwich...no one escaped his discerning eye.

I sit here and weep at 5"00 a.m. not knowing how to put this behind me. As a member of alcoholics anonimous Iam taught to let go and let god... why is it so difficult for me and the hundreds of people at that church who wept as Rebecca Paris sang "The Lush Life" to let go?

We are all a product of his munificence...I will write a letter to the kids and his beautiful sisters that I know they will understand...I will contribute to the Homeless Shelter for veterans because my husband is a Vietnam combat Marine who persuaded Andre to don his Combat Cover one wonderful night last November...

Andre, I miss deep sea fishing with you...the drive past Brown's (full of penanace)...the revolution and moratorium...the fish you brought over to Inge's house that night...we were little devils and then you reformed.

Hail Mary, full of Grace...now and at the hour of our death...

I wish this was not so spontaneous, you deserve a more fitting tribute.

Excelsior Andre! Love, Mary P.

P.S. I encourage the friends and admirers of Andre to write and comfort me, to share their thoughts and keep the church going. [e-mail]

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Andre Dubus's Daily Bread, July 7, 2000

By 

Leather Dinghy (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Meditations from a Movable Chair (Paperback)

Shortly after finishing "Meditations from a Moveable Chair," I learned that Andre Dubus recently had died. I was surprisingly startled, considering he was a man I never knew and with whose writing I was merely acquainted. My reaction to the news of his death speaks a great deal about the quality and affect of Dubus's austere and confessional prose. Dubus frequently ends essays in the volume by recalling the moment of the piece's composition, as if he is offering not only an artifice, but the origin, the spot of time and emotion and weather from which the artifice emerged. In some cases this device seems almost redundant because his clean prose seemed already imbued with the sense of being written; especially in the essays recounting manual labor, jogging, or taking churchyard laps in his wheelchair, I imagined a man (resembling the man with a pensive scowl on the book's jacket) hammering away at a typewriter. Despite being about many quotidian things, Dubus's writing reminds me of a few lines of "Song of Myself": "Not words of routine this song of mine, / But abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet nearer bring." Although at times I thought Dubus was simply repeating himself, well, simply, I found the essays to be touching, memorable, and a pleasure to read. "Meditations from a Moveable Chair" is markedly anti-stoic: beneath its equivocal title, the volume effuses the pleasures and pain of life after a literal "wreck of body," and offers itself to its reader as a sacrifice and another one of Dubus's sacraments.