Customer Reviews

We Don't Live Here Anymore: Three Novellas

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The three long short stories/short novels in this collection were not originally published together but share characters and the theme of the difficulty and complexity of marriage. As the cover proclaims, the form the basis for the new film of the same title. The title story is the longest and the best, narrated by a professor named Jack who is having an affair with his more successful best friend Hank's wife. Jack is married to Terry, who he thinks he no longer loves....

I won't go on about the plot, but I will say that I think Dubus really gets at a confusion in so many men, wanting stability at at the same time something else...(an oversimplification) ....The third story, "Finding A Girl in America" is set some years later...Hank is now divorced from Edith and with another woman, but in some ways his marriage continues. (I thought the middle story, told from Edith's poiont of view, was less successful) ....Funny, lacerating, heartbreaking, this collection is a wonderful way to introduce yourself to this writer. Recommended

I was assigned "We Don't Live Here Anymore" and "Adultery", two of the three novellas in this collection, to read in my college novel class. This book is hard to read, not out of difficulty or that it is poorly written, but rather the opposite. It reaches in and squeezes your chest, so it hurts everytime you pick this book up. I loved it.

I am married myself and what really got to me was that Dubus is excellent at forcing you to envision yourself in these characters situations. Like I said. . . . it hurts.

Is anyone really happy?

Great book and a great read. I highly recommend this collection of novellas.

This book is a collection of three novellas. Each containing the same characters as we trace them through the years. The stories follow two young couples, Jack and Terry and Hank and Edith. Jack and Hank are both literature professors at a small New England college and Terry and Edith are housewives and mothers. They're all best friends and they all married too young. This book is broken into three novellas, "We Don't Live Here Anymore," features Jack's first-person narrative. "Adultery" is Edith's version of events, and the final story, "Finding a Girl in America" is Hank's saga of trying to move on after a failed marriage. The characters in these stories are so vivid. That's the one thing I love about Andre Dubus's writing power. The characters just aren't fictional people, they become people living in the house next to you. Sure, it is bleak and depressing at times, but what marriage isn't?

Important lessons from this amazing book:

1. Less is not always more, more is more.
2. Characters can be complex. In fact, they must be.
3. Dubus' world is a luscious, richly painted place--why do other writers render their world in black and white?
4. Stories can wrap their arms around you and embrace you for days--even weeks. They can slow you down, in all the best ways.
5. Details--By the end of this trio of novellas, you will have been to another place. It's good to get away.

Get lost here. It's an important place to be.

Andre Dubus is one of my favorite short story writers. I love how he weaves his Catholicism into his writing, and I love that his writing has a moral center. I thought the first two stories were fantastic, and I was particularly affected by the story with Edith's point of view.

But the last story, "Finding a Girl in America," left me disappointed. I feel like Dubus lets his cheating, egotistical main character off too easily, finding him a new younger woman to marry and giving him a happy ending. I know that Dubus had many divorces, and maybe this colored his writing: he wants his male character to have a happy ending despite the fact that he didn't deserve it. So the last one was a clunker for me.

All in all, a lovely collection of novellas. If you're new to Dubus, also be sure to pick up his Selected Stories.Selected Stories

Andre Dubus is a masterful storyteller, as anyone whose read his work can attest to. He may generally focus on the one subject of relationships and marriage but he is so connected with that subject that the lack of creative range is forgiven. In this collection he gives us three novellas that focus on a group of four people. Jack, Terry, Hank and Edith, and with each respective story he breathes life into his characters and further cements them into the readers memory.

`We Don't Live Here Anymore' is the first novella in this collection and it's a brilliant way to start things off. Told through the eyes of Jack we are brought in on the lives of two married couples, Jack and Terry and Hank and Edith. We quickly learn that Jack is sleeping with Edith. They both love each other very much. Jack has slowly grown cold concerning his wife Terry. She is lazy and boring and not the woman he thought he knew. Edith on the other hand is spontaneous and young and she showers him with affection. Edith's husband Hank is an adulterous man who doesn't love her and has betrayed her before, leaving her adultery to come easy. Hank in fact has fallen in love with Terry who still loves her husband deeply but has grown depressed and hungry for attention, attention that Hank is willing to provide. Told with such brilliant dialog and heart breaking realism, the reader can truly find a place within this all too real story.

In `Adultery' we get a better look into the eyes of Edith and her relationship with husband Hank. We see that they have both come to a mutual understanding and carry on in their individual affairs, but while Hank seems to stay stifled in his way of thinking Edith grows from her relationship with dying ex-priest Joe. Edith becomes much more alive here and becomes endearing to the reader. I fell in love with her and sobbed along with her in the end. You can see that much of her character's persona in the film adaptation of the first novella is a direct derivative of the life Dubus breathes into her here.

It's in `Finding a Girl in America' though that my heart was truly touched. There's a passage in the first few pages where Hank, now separated with Edith and falling in love with nineteen year old Lori, dreams of his unborn child, the one he never knew almost was, and it brought me to tears. Now maybe this has to do with the fact that my wife and I are expecting our first, but regardless, the dream and Hanks reaction to the dream is both moving and emotionally connected to the reader. The balance of the story as well shows how this one event in his life helped mature him and push him in a new direction where he craves the stability and normality he once considered unnatural.

Upon closing this book one feels closure because all the lose ends that seemed to unravel within the first novella seem to find themselves by the closing words and make good for all their misspent mistakes. I still feel a sense of solace for Jack and Terry for I fear they may never find happiness, but Edith and Hank are so well fleshed out and discovered that I feel warmth towards them both and am encouraged by their struggle to find themselves and their journey. `We Don't Live Here Anymore' tackles some very controversial yet ultimately familiar subjects and is a collection that will sit well with the reader and remain in their minds for a long time to come.

The three novellas collected here -- We Don't Live Here Anymore, Adultery, and Finding a Girl in America -- all concern an overlapping cast of characters, notably our man Hank, a Dubus doppelganger who can't seem to find the right balance between freedom and devotion, but who is drawn with such empathy that we forgive him even as those he has loved and wronged forgive him in the stories. My favorite of the three is Finding a Girl in America, and it's good enough as a standalone novella, but even better when read against the backdrop of the two that precede it.

My only gripe about this collection is that the publishers removed "The Pretty Girl", which was included in an earlier edition, but it's a choice that makes perfect sense, because "The Pretty Girl" is not linked with the other three novellas.

If you enjoy these stories, consider checking out "Voices from the Moon," Dubus's finest novella, collected in his Selected Stories. Check out "Rosa," too, and, hell, everything he ever committed to print.

I was very interested in the first story in this collection because at the outset it looked like it would take a look beneath the surface of relationships. Instead the story quickly became a silly adolescent soap opera acted out by supposed adults. The four central characters are comprised of two married couples. Each spouse has an affair with his/her friend's spouse. And they all pretend this isn't going on and that they're still all friends. The four characters are among the most unlikeable, narcissistic, immature, non-credible characters I've ever read about. The two male characters teach at a college, but could just as easily be portrayed as accountants, factory workers, or computer programmers. The characters have absolutely no depth. The men in the story clearly suffer from "Peter Pan" syndrome. The author is trying so hard to say something important with these stories, but it's a mystery what that is. In short he seems to think that immature behavior somehow represents honesty. If you want to read about four people who never outgrew high school adolescent behavior this may be the book for you. Apparently Dubus saw something he liked in these characters because he wrote three novellas including them. Unfortunately the movie is just as dismal as the book--even more so actually.