Dirty Love

by Andre Dubus III

“First-rate fiction by a dazzling talent.” — Kirkus Reviews , starred review In this heartbreakingly beautiful audiobook of disillusioned intimacy and persistent yearning, beloved and celebrated author Andre Dubus III explores the bottomless needs and stubborn weaknesses of people seeking gratification in food and sex, work and love. In these linked novellas in which characters walk out the back door of one story and into the next, love is “dirty”—tangled up with need, power, boredom, ego, fear, and fantasy. On the Massachusetts coast north of Boston, a controlling manager, Mark, discovers his wife’s infidelity after twenty-five years of marriage. An overweight young woman, Marla, gains a romantic partner but loses her innocence. A philandering bartender/aspiring poet, Robert, betrays his pregnant wife. And in the stunning title novella, a teenage girl named Devon, fleeing a dirty image of her posted online, seeks respect in the eyes of her widowed great-uncle Francis and of an Iraq vet she’s met surfing the Web. Slivered by happiness and discontent, aging and death, but also persistent hope and forgiveness, these beautifully wrought narratives express extraordinary tenderness toward human beings, our vulnerable hearts and bodies, our fulfilling and unfulfilling lives alone and with others.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Book Club, Literature, Adult Fiction

MP3 CD

First published October 7, 2013

About the author

Andre Dubus III is the author of The Garden of Last Days, House of Sand and Fog (a #1 New York Times bestseller, Oprah’s Book Club pick, and finalist for the National Book Award) and Townie, winner of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His writing has received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Magazine Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. He lives with his family north of Boston.

Reviews

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

****4.5 Stars rounded up****I rarely read short stories but one of my favorite novels was House of Sand and Fog by this author. The stories in this series of novellas are both haunting and movingly told. Most characters grapple with themes of love, betrayal, secrets and lies. If you find novels that lack a conclusion frustrating then they probably won’t work for you. The novellas mostly just end…some of the characters simply walked away from their problems and hoped for the best. It’s not a happily ever after kind of story; but, ultimately well-written in sparse, penetrating and often raw, emotional prose.

"Dirty Love" is the longest of the series and most heartrending for me. Devon is a teenage girl victimized by a pornographic image of her posted online by so-called boyfriends. It was a painful tale of betrayal and rang so true for me.

Andre Dubus III allows the reader to delve into their own understanding of the story and his characters. All of these felt authentic even if often sad. Highly recommended.

[Andrew Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I dusted off my copy of a book I read a few years ago - a book I promised myself I'd read again. And I did. And I loved it just as much as I did when I read it for the first time.

I sometimes get phases when I'm obsessed by a particular writer, and I'm in full Andre Dubus III mode at the moment. I've one more book to return to, The Garden of Last Days, which I think I'll save for another day.

He's addictive, is Andre, but I've had my fix for now - time to reluctantly move on. But I'll be back...

--------------------------------------------
This book has received mixed reviews, mainly based on the fact that:

1) it's depressing - well, it is… a bit

2) it's made up of short stories that have no conclusion, no tidy ending - again true, but (in my opinion) so what!

When I started reading this, I hadn't read the blurb, so I didn't realise this wasn't a novel. So it came as a shock when I worked this out, and for a while, I did wish he'd take me back to the first story and tell me what happened next. But I got past this and just started to enjoy the brilliance, the trueness of the prose. It felt honest. It felt right.

So ok, this book has faults, but I can forgive it these as it's simply a brilliant piece of writing. And a rare thing, it's a book I'll read again someday.

[Campbell Andrews · Rating 2 out of 5]

Astutely observed, devastating, and almost completely worthless to me. The prose thunders with the certainty of This Is How People Live, and yet I have to ask, Is it? Really? My life is hardly whitewashed, but the tawdry philandering on display here is nowhere to be found within my pages... all I'd ask is just a little levity, a little glimpse of something other than the disappointment that we all end up being to ourselves. I believe there's more to life than that, and if there's not I certainly don't need to dwell on it for 300+ pages at a time.

[N · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Dirty Love" is a sad and heartrending collection of novellas about interlinked love, longing, and desperation through sex and other vices, such as food or even work. The first story, "Listen Carefully as our options have Changed" is about workaholic Mark, bitter and middle-aged, cursing the day that his wife Laura cheated on him with Frank Harrison; constantly torturing himself with a sex video that his private investigator had given him of their infidelities. But Mark refuses to acknowledge it his workaholic tendencies and ignorance that has led his wife to leaving him.

"Dirty Love", the title novella is the story of Devon, a girl whose sex act was posted on social media, has now been branded as a "slut" by her peers, and her hypocritical father Charlie. In her desperation to get away from her messed up home, she moves in with her elderly Uncle Francis, a retired teacher in an attempt to piece her life together again, also infatuated with the hope of meeting Sick, a man she has met on Skype. Spending her nights in chatrooms and chatting with strangers, Devon uses social media and sex as a form of escapism that leads to disaster. But ever resourceful, and underestimated by those who know her, she trudges on.

"The Bartender" is about the self absorbed Robert, who cheats on his faithful wife Althea with a the head cocktail waitress of a coastal bar, named Jackie. Robert is eventually caught by his wife, who is pregnant and winds up having to give birth two months early. As Althea's life struggles during childbirth, Robert wonders whether or not if he should leave and start selfishly anew.

"Marla" is the most beautiful story- and reminiscent of Mr. Dubus III's father, Andre Dubus II's masterful "Fat Girl". Marla is lonely, never experienced love, and cannot compete in conversing with her friends who are either married, or have families of their own. She prepares to live her life as a lonely banker watching old movies with her cat, until a lonely engineer and customer named Dennis enters her life- suddenly full of interest and love towards her. Or is it? Marla is now confused and even irritated by this sudden change in her life. But is she willing to remain lonely alone, or lonely with a companion in plain sight?

Reminiscent of his father's works- the comparison is unavoidable; and that of those masters of marital angst- such as Richard Yates, and Richard Ford- this is one collection that is nearly perfect in its delivery.

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hello there! Oh, you say you are easily offended and close minded? The only genre you live and breathe is chick-lit? You get book recommendations from your uterus?

I suggest you read something else.

Luckily I was prepared to deal with the way my buddy, Andre, would probably leave me feeling. Honestly, I kind of like heartbreak with no happy ending. And I guess while I am being honest, Andre and I are not actually buddies (although I wouldn't kick him out of bed for eating crackers if you know what I mean - eh? eh?).



Oh. Where were we? That's right - reviewing a book.

I actually read this last November. I'm not sure why I didn't get around to reviewing it until now; it certainly has nothing to do with how I felt about it. I do, however, remember quite a bit of it, which is downright astonishing with the way my memory has been slipping more and more. That says something for what this man('s writing) does to me.

There are four separate (yet a bit connected) stories.
1. Listen Carefully As Our Options Have Changed
Husband (Mark) and wife (Laura). Affairs. Detachment. There is this sad sense of when things have gone beyond repair, which is usually when the other party finally understands. While not identical situations, this one really struck me with parallels to the divorce of my parents well over a decade ago.

2. Marla
Marla is our MC (obviously?). Dennis is a man she begins a relationship with. Marla is (if I recall) in her late twenties, overweight, lonely and afraid of "missing the train." You know...becoming the crazy cat lady. The idea that "someone" is better than "no one." Settling.

3. The Bartender
Robert the bartender/aspiring poet. Althea the bartender's (pregnant-Greek-image of fertility and virtue) wife. Jackie the "other woman" because even sweet, strong, beautiful Althea can't keep Casanova faithful.

4. Dirty Love
Devon (young adult). Francis (Devon's uncle). Rumors. Perceptions. Alcohol. Sex versus love.

Each is entwined not in a "fate" way but a "hey, I know that name!" way. There are characters who play a very small role (co-worker, husband of co-worker, etc.) in another story. What was really interesting about this was that you were provided glimpses of what others thought. For example, Robert (the bartender) sees himself as an attractive and desirable aspiring poet that has a way with women. Devon (the young woman in the last story) is eighteen and sees him as a creep who can't stop looking at her ass.

Other common threads include alcohol, betrayals (emotional and physical), and skewed perceptions (of others and of ourselves). There is so much to think about. What we put up with. What we resent. Good moments vs bad - will one outweigh the other?

I called my sister several times while reading this. She has/had a habit of nagging at her fiance, and I felt it very important to call her and tell her about the reoccurring idea of nagging in this book. Mark to Laura. Dennis to Marla. Beth to Francis. Does the one doing the nagging know the damage being done? Sure, they probably feel a little guilty, but it isn't enough to cause a huge blowup. Instead, it is this very slow chipping away that may not be noticed until that moment of "Shit. Too late."

Oh!

Hello there person I was talking to at the beginning of this review. Thinking that this doesn't sound too bad and that surely there are silver linings there? I don't want to mislead you with my simplistic story summaries. If you trust anything I say at all, just trust that your heart will feel damaged and there will be no soothing words that follow to repair it.

5 stars for all the wonderful stabbing pain you have caused me.

----------------------------------------
New book by Andre Dubus number 3?

YA-ESSSS!



I have to be upbeat now because I just know that once I read this, he's going to rip my heart out and then whip it right at my face.

[LW · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dirty Love

L'amore sporco del titolo è l'amore disilluso
l'amore tradito ,sporcato dalle bugie e dai sotterfugi e dalla mania di controllo nel primo racconto - il mio preferito- Andre Dubus fa un paio di affondi notevoli nella psicologia maschile e mette a nudo in una maniera inaspettata certi sentimenti (le ultime righe mi si sono appannate davanti :) )
è l'amore tanto atteso e idealizzato da Marla, "sporcato" dalle incombenze quotidiane di una convivenza e da scelte non condivise e da poco confronto , l'amore fedifrago del barman-poeta,nel terzo racconto ,con il tasso di testosterone che sballa (!)
è l'amore ai tempi dell'I-tutto, nell'ultimo racconto,
con la diciottenne Devon e la sua "macchia" , a causa di un video hot rubato ,che gira in rete...
Una buona raccolta, bravo anche Andre Dubus figlio :)
Mi è piaciuta la sua capacità di descrivere personaggi reali , credibili,nelle loro emozioni più nascoste,maschi che conosciamo fin troppo bene, relazioni familiari e affettive dei giorni nostri, tra insicurezze adolescenziali e rabbia,
il lato dirty delle nostre esistenze frenetiche ,e iper(s)connesse .

3/4 stelle

[Scott Campbell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, the title is half right. It's "dirty" -- dirty as in there's a lot of sex, and dirty in that it's all complicated and messy. As for the title's other half, there's some "love," sure, but it's also complicated and messy.

Dubus is a fine writer, of this there can be no doubt. But while the prose is strong and his insight is spot on, this indictment of modern relationships in 4 parts is difficult to read, because the characters are simply unlikable. Their shallowness, their self-centeredness, their callow sex lives are on display in naked truth. There is no airbrushing here; this ain't Playboy.

It is important to note that this is not a novel -- it's really 4 short stories, lightly linked. So if you happen to develop some sympathy (or god forbid, empathy) for one of these screw-ups, you may be disappointed as they disappear from one narrative to the next.

All in all, Dirty Love a work that is well written and worthy, but also depressing and disconcerting.

Oh by the way, as a native New Englander, I did rather enjoy the strong sense of place Dubus creates here. Hampton Beach is particularly well captured.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of four loosely connected stories is an outstanding read. I devoured it during two lengthy plane rides from JFK NYC to San Juan PR and back. Dubus writes brilliantly about people and understands that within everyone there are good and bad qualities that are frequently walking down the road at the same time. Dubus wrote a great memoir Townie, which among other things was a very thoughtful appraisal of his father a great writer with many bad habits but still captured his Dubus senior's vital essence.
Each one of these four stories is great but in Dirty Love which is well over 100 pages he really does something special.his depiction of teenage Devon and her great uncle Francis gives us two great characters. Both with numerous flaws who are too me deeply humane people trying to struggle with adulthood and impending death. You care about the characters and the unrelenting tension as the story moves to its honest conclusion kept me enthralled. Anyone who likes serious fiction needs to reach this book.

[Brenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, my friends, represents what we call the "human condition". Four stories follow the lives of people who have to contend with the uglier parts of life and love. There's a continuing theme in all of them, and I think it's fairly obvious. The main character of each story has to do some soul searching in order to define what it is that makes them feel the way they do.

In the first story, the man must decide how he will ultimately deal with his wife's infidelity, and whether he will take any blame for her actions. In the second, we have a fat woman who must decide whether she wants to take the gamble of being alone for the rest of her life or if she will settle for being unhappy in her first and only relationship. In the third, a bartender must ultimately face that he may just be all talk and no action. In the last, an older family member must choose how he will juggle the people in his life, while his niece must decide how she will handle the fallout of a terrible situation.

We're presented with very real people. They all have their faults, and they all may or may not have their virtues, but they all felt very real and tangible. Marla absolutely seemed like someone I'd make an acquaintance of every time I go to the bank. Robert struck me as the kind of guy I'd stay away from in a bar because I wouldn't want to deal with wandering eyes. Yet they all had their reasons for the way they acted, and it made sense. A "bad guy" isn't going to know he's a bad guy, and he's not going to accept it. Robert didn't see himself as a bad guy originally, although his actions could definitely be seen as such. Same with Mark's wife. Same with Charlie.

And the "good guy" wasn't always so good, either, and I loved that. Devon was forced to deal with extreme humiliation from her peers, but would she have had to endure it had she made different choices? Would Mark have driven his wife to infidelity if he had lightened up? Would Marla feel so trapped had she not been so judgmental of everyone else before she began her relationship?

I liked these questions. It forced me to think of the characters as real people. Because really, whose actions are all black and white? Many books strive to paint their characters as basically all good and all bad. The reality is that just isn't true. And Dirty Love did a great job of bringing this to light.

(I received this in a First Reads giveaway.)

[Ron Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title of this new book by Andre Dubus III, “Dirty Love,” is a bit of a tease. But whatever it takes to get you into his fantastic collection of novellas is fair game. Besides, there’s plenty of grungy sex between these covers, if that’s what you’re looking for; it’s just that Dubus is so starkly honest about our flailing attempts for connection that he drains away any eroticism and leaves only painful longing and regret.

Millions know Dubus from his 1999 novel, “House of Sand and Fog,” a National Book Award finalist that was also chosen for Oprah’s Book Club and made into a movie starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. “Dirty Love” is a quieter book, in which people’s desires are smothered in frustration, their anger left to sputter in loneliness rather than erupt in acts of violence. Sullied by their own sense of failure, these characters ask: “How can anyone ever be clean with family? Blood is too dirty, dirty with love that can so easily turn to hate.”

The four lightly connected stories take place north of Boston in a small coastal town like the one Dubus described in his recent memoir, “Townie.” It seems always chilly and overcast in these tales, an expression perhaps of the inability of anyone to feel the warmth they need. Each story features someone looking for love — and carelessly mishandling it. There’s an echo of Richard Russo’s work here, though these are tougher, more calloused situations. One of Dubus’s great talents is his ability to shift our allegiances, to inspire our affection for obnoxious men, turn us against them and then finally bring us back with enlarged sympathies.

Spiked with grim comedy, “Listen Carefully as Our Options Have Changed” is a sharp story about the way work culture has infected our lives. Mark Welch is a 56-year-old project manager at a software company, a man trained to identify, isolate and solve problems — like, say, his wife’s chronic unhappiness and subsequent adultery. “He began to see this as an opportunity and not a threat,” Dubus writes, “a positive risk that must be managed and monitored and controlled.” Unfortunately, Laura is not a project; she’s his spouse of more than 20 years. But Mark is so filled with self-righteous anger that he can’t quite comprehend that his long marriage is over — has been over for a long time. Reviewing a surveillance tape of his wife having sex with another man, he imagines that this perverse piece of evidence will somehow shame her into repentance rather than make her flee in horror.

The real pain of this story is that Mark isn’t completely clueless about his destructive behavior; it’s just that he’s defined himself for so long as a blunt solver of problems that he doesn’t know any other way to act. Confronting his wife, “Mark recognized the tone of his voice,” Dubus writes. “It was the same he used when ordering a poorly motivated team member to do one thing or another. And so he was ordering his wife — for she was, by definition, a member of his team, wasn’t she? — to stay home.” By the time he gets a full sense that he’s “a grasping failure of a man,” it’s awfully late, but what choice does he have other than to throw himself toward the possibility of redemption and reconciliation?

It’s that just-out-of-reach desire that creates such poignancy in each of these stories, including one about a philandering bartender named Robert, who likes to pretend he’s a poet. He’s not, but Dubus is. He’s got a transparent, easy style that’s never self-consciously lyrical but constantly delivers phrases of insight and gentle wit that lay open these characters without scalding them with irony, as we’ve come to expect from so many clever novelists. Like Mark in the first story, Robert feels that “suffocating awareness of his own worthlessness,” but the literary marketplace is flooded with cheap despair like that. What makes these stories so valuable is the way Dubus follows the strains of his characters’ muted hope.

The first three pieces succeed entirely on their own terms, but they also serve as powerful preparation for the final novella, called “Dirty Love.” In this, the best and by far the longest story, at 127 pages, Dubus moves out of the well-trod path of marital unhappiness to focus on a teenage girl named Devon and her octogenarian great-uncle. On this broader canvas, we can see the full effect of Dubus’s sophisticated structure, his movement between characters and time periods handled so fluidly that it never distracts or calls attention to itself. Hardly anything actually happens in this story, and yet it feels packed with action, freighted with these characters’ recurring memories and anxieties.

Devon has been humiliated by a sex clip posted online by someone she thought was a friend. Unable to live with her feckless mother and angry father, she has moved in with her great-uncle, a retired high school teacher. The story’s power comes from its bracing emotional honesty, its ability to follow Devon’s faltering desire for love down several doomed avenues. This is a girl who has learned — and keeps learning — that many young men will use and abuse her need for closeness however they can.

Dubus has a particularly good eye for the way pop culture and new forms of technology have infected our lives, promising ever more human connection while walling us into our private sound chambers of rage and chat-roulette booths of synthetic intimacy. Devon and her high school friends wade through an era of graphic sexuality blasting from the radio and gushing from the Web. When one of the many creepy men she meets online asks, “Are you alone?” Devon replies with hard-won wisdom, “We’re all alone.”

While her raw, adolescent pain dominates the foreground of this story, in the background we can always hear the melancholy sigh of her great-uncle, still haunted by his experiences in the Korean War and his efforts to drink those memories away. He’s not sure what Devon did wrong, and he doesn’t entirely approve of the way she lives, but decades of marriage to a sharp-tongued woman taught him that whatever we need, it’s not more criticism. In the twilight years of his life, he appreciates what all these characters need to understand: just how reflexively we poison one another every day with our relentless judgments, our acidic opinions.

The affection that he and Devon share — the unconditional love that admits no impediments — is the pure heart of this book. Dubus isn’t naive enough to tell us for sure that it will save anyone, but he knows it’s the only chance we’ve got.

[Larry H · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd rate this 4.5 stars.

Andre Dubus III's House of Sand and Fog was truly one of the most moving and affecting books I've read in the last 15 years, and the film adaptation was powerful and well-acted. Dubus so perfectly told the story of flawed people trying to get what they wanted and felt they were entitled to, with disastrous consequences.

He brings that same literary power (without utter tragedy) to Dirty Love, his collection of tangentially linked novellas about people who want to be happy in love, but the pitfalls of love—infidelity, low self-esteem, foolish mistakes, alcoholism—get in their way. Again, Dubus' characters are far from perfect and their actions don't always make you feel sympathy for them, but their stories are far too common in real life, and they make you feel as you shake your head.

In "Listen Carefully as Our Options Have Changed," Mark, a middle-aged technology project manager, discovers his wife of more than 25 years, has been cheating on him. For a man who spends his days controlling situations, losing control is quite unsettling, and he tries to figure out what his next steps are—kicking her out of the house, begging for a reconciliation, beating the crap out of her lover—or all of the above.

In "Marla," an overweight woman with low self-esteem has always wondered what it would be like to have a boyfriend and envies the ease by which her female colleagues enter relationships. But when she finally finds a man who shows romantic interest in her, she questions whether what she imagined love would be is a fantasy or should be the reality to aspire to.

The main character in "The Bartender" has always dreamed of being a poet but can never pull his poems together to be more than a tool to seduce women. When he finally meets a woman he cares enough about to marry, he dreams of becoming a different person, but even the impending arrival of a baby can't stop his philandering ways.

And in the title novella, a teenage girl named Devon has fled to her elderly great-uncle's home to escape her father's infidelity and the aftereffects of her sexual escapades being posted online. As her great-uncle struggles with his own memories, Devon dreams of starting over, and wonders if an Iraqi vet she's met online might be the answer.

All four of these novellas are tremendously compelling, although knowing Dubus' writing, I kept expecting the protagonists to do something irreparable, so I felt as if I were reading with my hands metaphorically over my eyes. And while these characters are flawed, happily, they don't veer into House of Sand and Fog territory. Dubus is such a terrific storyteller, and he really could expand all four of these into full-length novels. They're not exactly happy stories, but they're definitely realistic, and I can't stop thinking about them.

[Susan Oleksiw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andre Dubus III has the rare ability to take what seems an empty life and grace it with depth and wonder and suffering, making us stop to look at strangers with greater awareness and compassion. In this collection of four stories/novellas, Dubus examines the life of men and women in the worn-out towns in southern New Hampshire that people drive through. This is where life has passed people by, and the locals feel it.

The stories are linked by setting and characters. A minor character in one emerges as the main figure in another, forcing us to see their lives more fully. In the first story, “Marla,” a young woman in her late twenties is acutely aware of her life on the fringes, until a man enters and draws her toward the center. In “Listen Carefully as Our Options Have Changed, a man is stunned to find that his wife, whom he has selfishly neglected for years, is having an affair. All of a sudden, he is not the man he thought he was. We watch him move through various stages of odious behavior until he emerges with insight and the strength to accept it.

In “The Bartender,” Robert believes himself a poet, and marries a woman because she too believes in him. But it isn’t long before he is in danger of seeing himself as he really is and he turns to another to confirm his illusions about himself. He too faces the challenge of knowing what love requires of him.

The last story is in some ways the most powerful and the saddest. Devon in “Dirty Love” is a young woman who has dropped out of high school and is now working in a hotel/restaurant. Unable to tolerate her parents’ constant fighting, she moves in with her great uncle, who has recently lost his wife. While Devon is struggling to cope with discoveries about her father (his stack of dirty magazines) and the boys she has known, her uncle Francis has his own nightmares from the Korean War that will not fade. Devon is the confused child of the new century, when sex is meaningless unless it can be used to injure, lives are thrown away for a joke, and hope is invested in a shadowy computer screen. In this story, Dubus’s depiction of Devon and her struggles to be respected and loved is pitch perfect.

I received a free copy from Audible.com

[David Carr · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the first compelling fiction pursuits I undertook was to read all of John Updike. This began early in the sixties when he had just written a handful of books. I later dropped the pursuit -- though I did keep up with most things Updike -- but it gave me a steady theme of delight and anticipation as a reader when I had none in my life. The Pennsylvania stories, the Maple stories, the Rabbit novels, the sex novels all were pointed and direct, and close to the classes and behaviors of people I could identify and imagine amid the ways of living. I thought of Updike when I read these four long stories, but with a clear sense that Dubus had far surpassed him: what I had once loved in Updike as a young man now came more brilliantly to me as an old one. Andre Dubus III is an American writer of the highest quality and deepest vision.

Great adult fiction does justice to lives of error and misconception, of bad moral judgments and failures to look within. Bad mistakes, cheap thrills, compromised hopes, thoughtless sex, failures to attend to others, to be generous. The inability to be kind. Lives in fiction are sacrificed for these crimes, just like lives outside of fiction. Dubus has created four slightly linked instances of people unable to alter or comprehend awful moral judgments, allowing their tensions to become brutally enormous, destructive forces. While the stories are about the slow crises of lives, those crises cannot be resolved by these actors because they require actions made impossible by the blindnesses that have created the crisis.

In each story a person looks at the consequences of a life gone off toward something unanticipated, without the prospect of self-rescue. They make unknowing choices, as we all do, and find themselves overlooking a precipice with no choice but to drop off, graceless, wingless and fated. A bank teller gives up her gentle but empty private life for the vague promise of having a boyfriend whose shallowness and dominance are inescapable. A feckless bartender betrays the authentic woman who has given him the possibility of a horizon. A project manager is cuckolded by the wife he has treated like an employee; it is not in his manfully asserted plan. All of the tales share a fittingly rocky setting on the Northeast American shoreline.

The title story of Dirty Love, is peerless. Shared by a young woman and her great-uncle, its shuttered interior spaces and privacies are rendered in ways I cannot even attempt to describe: the details, the disappointments, the separations -- beyond their brilliant telling -- cannot be described. It is worth more words and stars than I have to give them.

[Donna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-written and depressing, Dirty Love is just as described in the synopsis. A group of four novellas, lightly bound together by characters from each that make cameo appearances in one story or another, this book made me glad all over again that I'm divorced, not in a relationship, and that my children grew up before the internet became such a dark and dangerous place. They barely missed it, and I shudder when I think of what teenagers deal with today when everything is so often bared (yes, pun intended) online. I thought the events in each chapter were probably quite relatable to some people who might read them, and foreign to others who have never experienced the drama depicted here, or who live in denial of what's really happening in their lives. The title of the book makes it sound somewhat like erotica; it's not that, but it does deal heavily with sexual situations and relationships and how each impacts the other. A good book, but I was very glad to finish it.

[Ann · Rating 1 out of 5]

Loosely connected characters from one short story to the next? Hardly. I kept waiting and waiting for something to bring this all together, to show how their lives are all interconnected, but it never happened. The last story is just worthless, droning on and on. I don't mind depressing, but at least finish one of the stories.

I really enjoyed House of Sand and Fog, so this was an incredible disappointment.

[Mark Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interviewed on the Bookworm podcast, Andre Dubus III said he has this "secret belief" or "not-so-secret belief" that most of us are just "winging our lives."

Dubus added: "We are doing the best we know how to do and we are still kind of stunned that we are where we are....Man, I just think it’s hard to live a good, noble loving life but we do our best every day.”

Dubus' enormous empathy for these lives and these plights give “Dirty Love” raw power.

In “Listen Carefully as Our Options Have Changed,” Mark is a project manager who understands risk but is surprised to discover his wife’s long-running affair. “You must identify it, analyze it, then develop a response to it. You must monitor and control it.” The new predicament presents many options for how to proceed; he struggles mightily.

Bank teller “Marla” is dealing with the peculiarities of a new—her first—boyfriend and discovering what a relationship is—and isn’t. Challenges ahead. Of her new boyfriend, Marla thinks: “He seemed to be done with the real conversation, but it had cleared a cold dead path through her head; it was the first time he’d ever told her he loved her, but hearing him talk this way about what she had always viewed as the highest gift God could give, his paw resting too heavily on her thigh, the sickening smell of vanilla air freshener in his car, another Sunday afternoon wasted at a movie where men shot or impaled or blew up each other, she began to suspect she was nothing more than an easy addition to his life, one he could penetrate half-asleep or go out with on the weekend, but that’s it—no one to start a family with, nothing like that.”

Robert is “The Bartender.” And a poet. He thinks he is called “once again to great and important things—namely his poetry, becoming a published poet.” But he’d just as soon party. He likes “bourbon-floating moments.” He wants a reprieve from “husbandhood and fatherhood and all of their weight.” He cheats on his wife in the dreary motel room where the workers live near a restaurant, The Whaler, on Boston’s north shore.

Devon works in the same restaurant and in “Dirty Love,” she can’t wear headphones or her nose stud when she works the floor so she had to “work those nights with her insides never matching her outsides so there was never a sliding forward on a current you made yourself.” Devon is struggling to establish a new reputation after a scandalous video of her is posted online. She’s living with an uncle, Francis, who is a teacher who wonders how to best dole out advice to his troubled niece (“Dirty Love” is the only story in among these four that switches points of view).

Thinks Francis: “With the hard cases, it was always a walk along a high wire. Call them to task and then risk having them close themselves off more than they already were; ignore this opportunity to teach Devon something important—about consideration, for example, or someone else’s water bill—and abdicate his responsibility to her entirely.” Though many decades older, Francis has his own issues and understands reputations and the power of self-esteem.

Andre Dubus crawls up inside the head of his characters and sees real people with real struggles. They are keenly aware of the choices in front of them and equally aware of their own most fundamental desires.

Amid the relative gloom of all four stories and darkness that follows all four (five) main characters, there are slivers of hope.

“Dirty Love” sheds bright light on the struggle between optimism and pessimism, between resilience and doom.

These characters are simultaneously winging it and also, down deep, trying to do their best, in whatever form that takes.

[Dylan Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reread: September 2023

Reread: March 2021

Reread: May 2018
When Andre Dubus III is at the top of his game, his stories stick with you. Reading my original review would lead you to think I was somewhat tempered toward this book, but the truth is, it hasn't left me since I read it almost a year and a half ago. His work stands up so well to rereading. I picked up more of the subtler connections between the novellas this time around. The first and last stories are still my favorites, and despite the flaws of the two stories in the middle (I think they suffer because we don't spend as much time with the characters) I'm bumping this up to a 5 star and on to my favorites shelf.

Original Review
I'd heard a few people/reviewers I trust say this was their least favorite of Andre Dubus III's work. That it didn't click for them. And while I see their points, I can say I enjoyed (most) of this book.

In Dirty Love, we are given four loosely-connected novellas all surrounding the ideas of love and how we cope with it once it's gone, or squander and throw away what we have, or even finding it for the first time. The first and last were my favorite of the bunch, one a slow reveal of a person's true character, and the other a tough tale of someone trying to move on from a questionable past and an abusive father.

What Dubus does best is characters. The people that inhabit his stories feel as real as any man, woman, or child I've met in real life; he stands up there with Stephen King in terms of character. Even in the two stories I didn't love, there were still fully-fleshed out characters at the heart of them.

My only broad criticism is that I wish the stories had a little more connectivity between one another. When we hear about a character from the third story in the last and what they really think of them, I wanted more. But the connections are few and what ones are there are surface at best.

I don't know where this falls in his bibliography for me. It's not the worst. The Cage Keeper still holds that (bottom?) spot. But it doesn't top either Townie or House of Sand and Fog. It's neck-and-neck with Garden of Last Days for third, though it's too soon for me to know if it's better or worse than that book, and now I only have one Andre Dubus III novel left before I'm caught up.

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

A collection of four short novellas by the author of The House of Sand and Fog this book, Dirty Love centers on four different relationships and or the aftermath of such. The stories with characters all centered around the beach area of New Hampshire in the summer introduce us to broken marriages, cheating wives, cheating husbands, lonely old men, women who settle, and in the title story a young woman who is trying to outrun a mistake that in the age of cell phone video will never go away.

These characters are all flawed. The stories are well conceived and very well written but there is nothing in them to haunt. By writing about relationship problems we have all seen such as the workplace affair Dubus does little that leaves a mark.

I read the stories, I thought about the stories, but in a week they will be nothing to remember. One can see he wants to write with a gritty realism and perhaps he does but for me this book and moreover the stories in it is are like a routine traffic accident. Nothing unique to see here folks, keep moving along.

[Karine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Regret, disappointment, compassion, and hope come alive in these four stories, two of which are long. Dubus lets you into the thoughts, emotions, and memories of lonely people struggling to accept themselves at difficult times in their life. The writing is excellent, and the way their thoughts jump from the present to the past is incredibly realistic.

[Anna Maria · Rating 2 out of 5]

2,5 ⭐️
Raccolta di quattro racconti brevi ambientanti nella provincia americana. Ogni storia è a se stante anche se alcuni personaggi e alcune situazioni si sfiorano.
Sono tutte storie di amori rovinati: dal tradimento (della moglie, del marito, degli amici), dall’incompatibilità, da segreti inconfessabili.
Le storie hanno tutte un finale aperto, ma senza speranza.
La quarta storia, che da' il titolo al libro, poteva essere la migliore o almeno la più completa, ma finisce per essere confusionaria.
L’autore rappresenta bene gli stati d’animo dei personaggi e i loro tormenti.

[Yvonne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, Andre Dubus takes us into the minds, lives and loves of people who resemble ourselves. What is it to love? What makes love endure? Why does it die? Why do we hurt the people we say we love?

We know in the heady, early stages when we are consumed with our love for a person that even their faults are endearing, they are everything to us. Those of us who have known this intensity are fortunate.

But as time goes on, and lusty love cools to the temperature of possibly becoming enduring love the prickly edges start to show. We ask ourselves, "when did the way Joe cuts his food become so annoying, I never noticed how poor his table manners are till now."
"Why is Joan letting herself go? She used to care enough to wear lipstick when we went to the mall. No wonder I look at other women."

Do lovers pick the wrong things to argue about and ignore the big untouchable subjects out of habit, fear of loss, fear of hurting the other? We immerse ourselves in our lives and we tell ourselves we can broach the subject of feeling neglected by our spouse another day. If we don't have an ongoing dialogue, a communication line already established, broaching subjects that might require change are difficult. They feel risky. We tell ourselves lies to get through.

We yell at our kids and forget that without life experience the world is small to them, even though they think they know more than us. But our kids are having life experiences we don't know about, they feel love and they experience love in ways we never did or can't remember.

Why do we fall in love with the person we do? Does it depend on how lonely we are at the time?
or do we see the qualities in someone else that will compliment us and take us through our journey. That's the hope and that's what it feels like at first.

These stories cover the needs inside all of us - loneliness, the need to be accepted, mistaking sex for love, marrying for the wrong reasons, never feeling good enough, not seeing the end of your marriage until it's too late. Being hurt by the person you love, and being buoyed by the impact and acceptance of their love.

Life is complicated, at least we make it so. So many themes are explored in Dirty Love, and one in particular which is so relevant today. The differences between young men and women, and the impact of social media to connect people, or in some cases destroy them. This current generation talks to anyone anywhere, which is a lifesaver for those who feel disconnected in their own physical world, but as we learn everyday in the news, a life destroyer when used as a weapon to hurt and ridicule.

From the title story Dirty Love, we learn of teenage girls giving blow jobs to teenage boys as a way to satisfy the boy without having intercourse when the girl isn't ready. This is a real strategy for many young women, to keep the guy happy but get him 'off her back' so to speak. The girls in the story don't view giving a guy a blow job as sex. Sex is fucking. And the boys view demanding a blow job as their right, which isn't anything new.

Andre Dubus gives us much to contemplate in the stories told in Dirty Love. And he tells those stories poetically and urgently.
Here is an excerpt for you:
"Sweetheart. It was a word she'd never used for Mark and there were pages of this, and it was very little of what he'd expected; he had hard evidence of a sexual affair, but of all he'd read the night before, there was just one hint of this and it was from his wife: No one's ever made me feel that before......But what Mark felt instead was small. Inadequate. An insensitive and domineering brute. A lousy lover. That's the picture his dear Laura had painted of him. That's the shadow man this Harrison knew. Mark was almost disappointed he'd found little of the lewd, for this was far worse: keeping it unspoken, even between themselves, revealed that they were lovers, that they truly loved one another."

[Kevin Catalano · Rating 4 out of 5]

You don't need me to tell you that Dubus is an incredible writer, and I mostly agree with James Lee Burke that he "may be the best writer in America." As a writer myself, the way Dubus articulates emotion is humbling; I'm almost embarrassed that I try to write at all given how well he does it.

I'd have given Dirty Love five stars but for two reasons. One is that I was disappointed by the dust-jacket's description that these novellas are linked, that the characters "walk out the back door of one story and into the next." This is only the case with "The Bartender" and "Dirty Love," where the main characters from the former appear in the latter, and even then it seems done only to attempt to create a link. Otherwise, these are standalone stories. Good ones, but hardly linked.

The second reason is that I'm ambivalent about the title story, "Dirty Love." Dubus writes convincingly about 80-year-old Francis; however, his attempt at writing from the POV of an angst-ridden teenager (Devon) seems forced. In her sections, he piles on details about her wearing her Dr. Dre headphones, her use of Fuckbook and Facebook and Skype, and he very unfortunately creates the term "iEverything" in place of iPhone. (Every time I saw that word, I cringed.) I read these attempts at trying too hard to convince the reader that a fifty-something male author could relate to a foreign generation. Ironically, he was most convincing when he relied on expressing Devon's anger and uncertainty without the pop-cultural props.

[eb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dubus writes beautiful sentences, and he knows how to keep your eyes locked on the page. I admire him a lot for creating a fictional world in which technology actually exists, and for trying to capture how our smartphones change the way we have sex and exist (although I WISH he'd stuck with actual devices, instead of inventing the iEverything—it's such an embarrassing dad move). Still, it's tough to start afresh with each new set of characters, and most of these short stories/novellas felt unfinished. Maybe that's because their basic structure was so unvarying: we meet a character and gradually learn the backstory that landed him/her in this fix; at the end of the story, we're not sure what will happen, but we feel either vaguely hopeful or vaguely pessimistic. In all, a pleasurable but unsatisfying reading experience.

[Christy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nothing like cracking open an ostensibly good novel and discovering that it's nothing but the most banal and tiresome aspects of real life gilded in clever prose and stuck on a pedestal. The third section would work as a novella -- it actually has something to teach us about the experience of a generation whose digitally-mediated heartbreaks and self-sabotage we don't yet understand. The other two inspire no insights beyond the same vaguely depressed feeling that's easily obtainable by reading the human interest/gossip articles in any major celebrity magazine.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't give very many books five stars. A book has to really wow me. "Dirty Love" by Andre Dubus III did. He has an uncanny ability to get inside the heads of his characters and bring the reader along for the ride as well. The work includes 4 novellas all centered around the complications and complexities of love. All unique stories, but related as well. Simple fantastic writing!

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

This started strong; I thought the first of the four stories was great. The next one was interesting but a clear "male trying to write a female" situation. The third was meh and the fourth was basically unreadable. Average out that mess and I give it a 2.5.

[Melody · Rating 3 out of 5]

I listened to the audiobook. I was thoroughly enjoying the novellas. . . but they just got more obscene as the book went on. By disc 7, I wasn't sure I would finish. I would give it higher marks for the first half though.

[Alia S · Rating 1 out of 5]

Abandoned this partway through the first chapter. I was ... actually shocked at how tacky it was, given the author's credentials and the book's gushing reviews ("STAGGERINGLY GOOD!" squeals The New York Times). It's not that the story was implausible—far from that, it's banal—but the telling was so stagey and breathless and relentlessly, deliberately sordid that every time I made a good-faith effort to get into a scene it took on the soundtrack of a Lifetime special. Listen:

"There is no dust, no empty cans or glasses, though his mouth is salt and ash and a familiar ache grips his head. He closes his eyes, but there's the video again ... "

Possibly the other stories are better, but the first at least is incredibly heavy-handed. For example: to demonstrate that his provider-man protagonist lacks emotional literacy, Dubus gives him a job title and describes his inner turmoil like this:

But what's a senior project manager to do if not to anticipate threats and opportunities, to manage risk, to deliver the finished project on time?

Get it? Get it? He is trying to PROJECT-MANAGE his failing marriage but his wife wants SO MUCH MORE? Get it? Jesus.

(It's especially disheartening to compare reviews of "Dirty Love" to those of "This is How You Lose Her"—a book with an identical premise published a year earlier. To my taste the Diaz is hundred times more artfully executed, but even the approving professionals can't seem to get over the occasional Spanish—practically an act of aggression," says the NYT, whereas Dubus's prose is "sturdy and transparent." I'm baffled.)

[Cateline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III

Dubus brings us four novellas, Listen Carefully As Our Options Have Changed, Marla, The Bartender and the last, namesake of the group, Dirty Love. Each a snapshot of a segment of a person's life, a pivotal change of their lives. This is Life on the ground floor, told in a beautiful, stylized prose that keeps the reader enthralled, despite the ordinariness of the actual tale. Ordinary in the sense that it is at least part of what we all, as humans, go through in some manner in our lives. Choices, the path taken.....instead of, what? It sounds trite to say a door closes, a window opens, but that is the exact truth.

These novellas tell of the doors that have closed on the protagonists, and the windows they escaped through. They tell of second chances, changed lives and even some true love.

Dubus has a way of weaving a story. He tells pieces of reality at a time, goes back and forth in time, till we finally see the whole cloth of the story. And understand the choices that are made, sometimes applauding, and occasionally gritting our teeth at other choices. We certainly feel their pain, cringe at some episodes, wish we could take them by the scruff of the neck and force them to face themselves. But, there is a finality of the choices, and just maybe another window at the end of the tunnel.

Exceptional. Heart-breaking. Real. Highly recommended.

[Sunny Shore · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the 5 represents, this is an amazing book. 4 novellas loosely stringed together by town and characters. But so much more. Dubus examines love at its most base and yet most complicated level. In the first, a husband finds out his wife has committed adultery; in the second, a 30 year old virgin learns about love, but learns some lessons along the way; a bartender/poet cheats on his loving, pregnant wife and in the fourth titled Dirty Love, we learn about Devon, an 18 year old HS dropout who is now living with her great uncle and trying to get her life together. I found the character of the great uncle particularly interesting. Dubus writes with a flair that most writers can't even begin to grasp. It is ours for the taking, but it is cerebral and poised. I look forward to reading more by this great writer whose House of Sand and Fog I absolutely devoured and loved. I feel my next book might be a disappointment because this one was such a "high" for me. A book like this is very personal and not everyone will like it. But for me, it was exactly the kind of book I would love to read every time.