Those who have read Andre Dubus III’s House of Sand and Fog will find themselves in familiar territory with his second novel. Once
again there’s a hard-luck lady, once again a good-hearted
violence-prone schlep, and once again a Middle-Eastern man as the
ripped-from-the-headlines hook. In HoSaF, the Persian-born
Colonel Behrani was a political refugee, struggling to overthrow the
humble circumstances of his exile. In TGoLD, Mansoor Bassam
al-Jizani is a Saudi terrorist, preparing to hijack American Airlines
flight 11. The escalated threat from the first book to the second is
symptomatic of the post-9/11 shift in America: from the conflicted
xenophobia of a nation that glorifies its immigrant past and resents
its immigrant present to a simple-Simon sort that sees the enemy in
every foreign face. Because, finally, jingoism is on the wane,
TGoLD arrives too late to tap so directly into this exhausted
vein of fear, and, consequently, feels a bit dated.
Dubus is a committed practitioner of the
half-novel/half-movie-script hybrid. To the movie-script side,
TGoLD owes its melodrama. April, a stripper, has a chance to
make quick cash in the Champagne Room. Her 3-year-old daughter, Franny,
is poorly babysat in the back of the club. Sex-and-money-hating Bassam
al-Jizani dips his fingers in the fleshpot. To the literary side, the
novel owes its sluggish start, its characters’ extended
self-examination, and its tendency to quote lines from The
Wasteland. Combined, it becomes a morality play with a moral dear
to Bassam al-Jizani’s own heart: capitalism comingles the libidinal
commodity and the commodified libido, and the hellfires of Shaytan
beckon. A tragedy with a happy ending, the novel suggests that God
redeems everyone (except the terrorists) through good old-fashioned
puritanical suffering. It’s as if Dubus hopes to imply that our type of
fundamentalism is better; that when we say a woman must renounce sex,
independence, and ambition in favor of marriage, we do it because we
love her.
Despite its misogyny, TGoLD is a steadily likeable novel.
Like the novel’s Puma Club, Dubus stuffs the room with all types; and
like a professional tease, he withholds the goods. He gives us a
thriller without a climax, a romance without consummation, and a cop
drama without guns. Yet TGoLD has moments of realism fully
developed enough to be affecting rather than affected, and to convince,
I suspect, a broad range of readers that they have learned something
essential about the desires that unite America and her enemies.
JONATHAN
CRIMMINS
Andre Dubus III reads Thurs June 26, Town Hall, 7:30 pm,
$5.