Finding a Girl in America

Andre Dubus’s third book of stories (now included in his Collected Short Stories & Novellas ) includes the novella, Finding a Girl in America which continues the life of Hank Allison, a man haunted by his failures as a husband, his concern for his daughter, and his need for a new marriage that can survive his obsessive writer’s absorption with himself. Other stories including Killings , a swift and wholly successful tale of revenge; Townies , about a young man whose affair with an undergraduate girl ends in deadly fury; At Saint Croix, the story of a man and woman, both divorced, whose Caribbean spring vacation fails to exorcise his ghosts; The Pitcher , where a baseball player can manage his arm but not his wife; and The Winter Father , a story of overwhelming tenderness dealing with a divorced father and his weekend attempts to re-establish contact with his two children. Subtle and haunting, Dubus concentrates his Chekhovian attention on the residual anguish and momentary elation of deep attachments. Nothing in current American writing seems more genuine than this writer’s fictions.