Dirty Love (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
This is arguably the best book of many outstanding books I read in 2013. In each of the four stories that comprise this book, the characters struggle with joy and disappointment, temptation, expectation, guilt and shame; they want to believe in love but are just as eager to sabotage it and escape its complications to live a more predictable and controlled solitary life.
Dubus is a consummate master of prose and I recorded pages of passages that are short gems which speak volumes about the characters.
What I liked best though, is that the characters who are only mentioned in passing in one story become the central focus of another story. They seem marginal and uninteresting until Dubus tells their tales. The lesson that everyone has a story to tell, that everyone deals with love and loss and guilt and shame, that the world is a better place if we each remember that and treat one another with kindness and respect, is one we all should embrace. This book reinforced that lesson as few other books have done for me; I loved this book.
— From Jeanne's PicksIn this heartbreakingly beautiful book 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.
— April L. Judge - Library Journal